What's with All the Birds?

         I am not what you would call a serious birder: I don’t travel to spot rare species for my life list, nor buy fancy equipment to maximize my ability to find them; I don’t participate in birding tours or hang out in blinds or have a membership in the Audubon Society or partake of any of the other activities in which serious birders feed their obsession.  And yet nevertheless, I apparently have a bit of a bird obsession!  How do I know?  How about the fact that so many of my block prints feature birds?  At my rough count I’ve done at least 30 block prints with birds as the main subject, plus another 10+ featuring mythical or fantasy birds, plus another 5+ in which birds appear as part of a larger scene.  Or how about the fact that so many of my poems feature birds?  At a rough count I have about 15 published poems that mention birds (some more centrally than others), and of my poems that are currently in rotation being sent out on submission, I count 9 out of about 16.  So what’s with all the birds?

        For me birds just seem utterly magical.  There are the beautiful, intricate, colorful feathers, sometimes sleek, sometimes fluffy, sometimes iridescent, always amazing.  There are the diverse songs and calls, ranging from beautiful liquid musical passages, to cheerful twitterings, to haunting evocative cries, to the ability to mimic every other sort of sound from creaky hinges to human speech, always amazing.  There are the nests and the eggs, always amazing; the behaviors that combine familiarity with otherness, always amazing.  And then, of course, there’s flight, which seems like a metaphor or embodiment of joy, always amazing.  I’ve written a little more about this in my prior post F is for Forgotten How to Fly (featuring a poem that I didn’t even include in my count above, because even though it’s about flight, it never actually mentions birds).

        I’m far from the only person to be fascinated with birds and especially with the magic of their flight.  From Daedalus to daVinci and beyond, people have dreamed of the ability to fly like birds.  (A poem about Daedalus is one of those currently out on submission - also not actually counted among my bird poems, because it’s people flying, not birds, however bird-inspired.)  Plenty of other artists and authors have also taken inspiration from birds.  Back in May I wrote my monthly Poet Laureate column about bird poems.  Here’s what I shared:

        "A robin is nesting on an arbor in my yard this year, and although I don’t want to spend too much time snooping lest I disturb her, it gives me joy to know she’s there.  What is it about poets and birds?  Perhaps we feel a particular kinship with birds: their song, their flight, their beauty, their strangeness… They seem like metaphors for everything from Hope (Emily Dickinson) to Despair (Edgar Allan Poe).  Poems about birds keep coming up: one of three poems shared at last year’s Juneteenth commemoration was all about a bird, three of the four winter gift poems given out at the library in December featured birds, and I keep finding birds in my own poems.  (In 2020 another robin nested right outside my door, and the poem inspired by that appears in my book Bittersweetness & Light.  Or you can read another of my poems with a bird theme here.)

        Just to get you started on bird poems, “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats is one of the most famous, although its style is not very accessible nowadays.  In “The Windhover” Gerard Manley Hopkins lets raw emotion overwhelm mere grammar.  Wallace Stevens finds “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” while Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle” is as simple as a thunderbolt.  Mary Oliver comes back to birds over and over, and Bashō wrote this famous haiku (as translated by Daniel C. Buchanan):

     Hark to that cuckoo,

     Singing, singing while flying,

     How very busy!

        Do you know any poems about birds?  Or perhaps you could try writing a bird-inspired poem yourself.  What is it that strikes you the most about the many birds that share the world with us?  From wild turkeys to chickadees, hawks, geese, and of course those robins, how about hatching a little bit of poetry this spring?"

        Of course it’s not spring any more, but I stick with my encouragement above to try writing a poem inspired by birds – or of course if visual art is more your thing, that’s excellent, too!

[Pictures:  Birds of a Feather, rubber block print with watercolor by AEGNydam, 2023 (originals sold out);

Chickadee, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Nectar, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (one left, see it at NydamPrints.com);

Carolina Wren, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Tufted Titmouse, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2006 (originals sold out);

Pelican, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2023 (at NydamPrints.com).]

Hometown Block Prints

         This year I’ve turned to local points of interest and done two block prints depicting scenes from the town where I’ve now lived for the past 27 years.  The first is the cupolas from three of our important public buildings: the library, Town Hall, and the high school.  All three buildings began life with a Colonial Revival style, although all three have also acquired modern additions.  These cupolas, however,  are part of the original, beloved landmarks, and all three of these institutions have used their cupolas in their own logos.

        I just finished a second local landmark piece, and this one depicts Echo Bridge over the Charles River.  This majestic bridge was built to carry an aqueduct over the river, and it also carries a pedestrian trail along the top.  When it was built in 1876 its main arch was the second longest masonry arch in the USA and was apparently quite famous.  It was something of a tourist attraction because there’s a small platform at the base of the arch where one can stand to listen to the impressive echo that gives it its name.

        My depiction of Echo Bridge uses some artistic license.  For one thing, the bridge actually has seven arches and I wanted to give some suggestion of those arches even though they are not actually very visible in the summer.  On the other hand, I don’t go walking by the bridge very often in the winter when the leaves are down and the structure of the bridge shows better, so I’ve fudged my view a bit to place my scene in summer but still show multiple arches.  I’ve also used artistic license to clear away some shrubbery in the foreground in order to give a better view.  In fact it would be hard to get exactly this view these days, with lots of small trees and bushes sprouting up on the outcroppings where you’d have to be standing.  In any case, though, even if Echo Bridge is no longer a famous tourist attraction, it’s still a wonderful local spot and I wanted to capture its beauty for anyone who holds affection for it.

        On the down side, I didn’t capture quite the sense of lofty scale that’s part of what makes Echo Bridge so special, but on the other hand, I’m especially pleased with how all the trees turned out.  I experimented with quite a few different patterns and textures, and I studied the trees in blocks by a number of other artists I’ve shared here before (especially Charles William Taylor) to try to pick up some tips.  On the whole I think it was pretty successful.  I especially like the branches above the bridge at the top left!

        I recently heard of a call for art depicting the Charles River, and I was excited to submit this piece because it sounds like a very cool show that’s being put together and I’d love to be part of it.  But then I read the fine print and discovered that there’s a submission fee, so I will not be submitting after all.  I’ll take a little tangent right now to explain why I refuse on principle to submit to anything - art or writing - that requires a submission fee.

        1. Yes, I’m stingy and I dislike throwing money away.  I know that lots of people would consider this part of their publicity budget, but I don’t want to spend money that probably gets me nothing in return.  Short story and poetry submission fees are usually fairly low, in the $5 range, and one could certainly submit to a few of those things without breaking the bank, but art shows are much more expensive, regularly charging $20-50 per piece just to submit.  That adds up fast.

        2. It’s basically gambling, and I could just as well spend that money on a lottery ticket (another thing I don’t do, because I don’t want to spend money that probably gets me nothing in return.)  The call for artists or authors may be framed as if it’s not random like a lottery ticket, but in fact having my work selected is really pretty much a matter of chance.  Sure, there’s an element of basic intrinsic quality which, if you don’t have it you’ll definitely not be accepted, but it largely comes down to a matter of the judges’ taste.  I could be the most towering genius the world has yet known, but if the juror happens to have a taste only for pop art, or color photography, or edgy political art, or abstract mark-making, then my work is not going to be selected.  Moreover, most of these contests receive a lot more excellent work than they can accept, so even if the judge does really like my piece, they’ll be balancing it against everything else they want to accept.  Was there another black and white block print?  Was there another view of Echo Bridge?  All factors over which I have absolutely no control, so yes, I could just as well be buying a lottery ticket.

        3. To me, charging for submission is the mark of a scam.  Yes, I know that it’s pretty standard in the art world, and in the literary world there are a number of very prestigious, highly regarded, supposedly legitimate journals that charge submission fees.  (And contests pretty much always charge.)  But I don’t care how prestigious you are; if you fleece desperate artists and authors with no intention or expectation of giving anything in return, that’s a scam.

        4. Yes, I do understand that most arts and literary organizations aren’t rolling in cash, either.  If they’re going to pay editors or guest jurors, the money needs to come from somewhere, and maybe it sounds perfectly logical to charge the artists who want to be chosen.  But everything in me rebels at the injustice of taking money from the poorer, less successful, most desperate artists who will never benefit, in order to subsidize the successful, famous ones who are the darlings of the art world.  See point 3 above.  This is why we need public arts funding, private patrons, grants, and fund-raisers, and indeed an entire overhaul of the arts economy.  (Add the tsunami of AI “art” to the mix, however, and it’s pretty clear that things are going to get a lot worse for artists and authors before they get better.)

        Well, as I said, that rant was just a tangent, and the real focus of this post was meant to be sharing my two new prints!  Do you have any favorite local landmarks you’ve commemorated in art (whether that’s photography, watercolor, poetry, or whatever your medium may be)?

[Pictures: Points of Needham (Library, Town Hall, High School), rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2026 (Image from NydamPrints.com);

Echo Bridge, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2026 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]

Fun with Spears

         Ethel Spears (USA, 1903-1974) was primarily known for her whimsical paintings and murals usually featuring lots of people doing lots of activities.  But she also made quite a few linoleum block prints, and these too tend to have a gently humorous charm.  I’ve picked three to share today that have a little bit of range of subject matter and style.  First up is one that’s a little more in keeping with the paintings that made her famous: an urban or suburban scene of people busy about their daily lives, in this case walking along the sidewalk in front of a tall house.  The people don’t have a lot of detail, but they’ve got personality, and the house has all kinds of little textural details.  One thing I find interesting is that while the borders across the top and bottom have a tidy geometric pattern, the borders on the sides seem to be almost as rough and random as the texture carving out the background.  I can’t help wondering whether this is one of those instances where Spears made an error in what she intended to carve, and had to make a virtue of necessity and change her design.  If so, it goes to show what I always tell students, which is that it can still end up fine even if it’s not

what you originally intended, and most people won’t even notice that it was a “mistake.”  But there is another definite mistake in this piece: the address is backwards above the front door!  I especially love the tree and the tall front steps.

        These delightful fish are a lot of fun, with their bold outlines, geometric textures, and funky forms.  I love the surprise of the starbursts in the background, and the curly organic form in front of the lower fish.  Given that the title indicates Spears saw these fish in the Field Museum, Chicago’s natural history museum, I wonder whether she was making sketches during a visit, or whether this was based on memory.

        And finally we have an interior scene, once again characterized by bold outlines, strong forms, and lots of rough patterns.  The small credenza has lots of knick-knacks, as well as a vase of flowers and a bowl of fruit, and it looks like there are venetian blinds in the background.  It feels like a cozy and comfortable home.  Wouldn’t it be fun if it were inside the house in the first piece?  But it was made 14 years later, so there’s no reason to think there’s any connection at all.  I especially like the big insect on the top shelf.  Is it a praying mantis?

        Spears is one of those artists whose style is so different from mine, much rougher and more stylized, and I admire how natural it obviously is for her.  What she and I seem to have in common is a delight in the world around us.  I enjoy these very much.

[Pictures: 654 N. Michigan, linocut by Ethel Spears, 1947;

Field Museum Fish, linocut by Spears, 1959;

Interior, linocut by Spears, 1961 (all images from Foltz Fine Art).]

The Odyssey

         Between a number of recent new translations and the new blockbuster movie, “The Odyssey” has been having a high-profile moment, and of course as a fantasy poem it fits right into the purview of this blog.  So today I’m going to write a bit about the Odyssey - but first I’m going to confess that I have neither read any of the new translations nor seen the new movie!  So I will not be offering any opinions on these specific versions.

        What I do want to think about is how the Odyssey functions as a foundational bit of fantasy, why it seems to have such staying power, and what are some interesting things that have been done with it. First, though, I have to point out that, like all ancient texts, our definitions of “fantasy” don’t quite apply.  It’s impossible to know to what extent people at the time thought the events in this epic were what we now think of as literal historical truth, vs what we now consider speculative or mythic.  Not that “people at the time” has an exact meaning, either, since these stories were shared by thousands of people over thousands of years, and it’s not like they all interpreted the narrative the same way.  (Interested in epic poems more generally?  Here’s a recent short article I wrote about some history and characteristics of epic poems. Scroll all the way down to the bottom to find my bit.)  Nevertheless, the Odyssey has come down to the present day as fantasy, i.e. using non-scientific events to evoke wonder, to entertain, and to illustrate enduring truths about the human condition.

        That brings us to the question of why the Homeric epics have stuck around so long and been embraced so widely.  1. Humans love stories about flawed heroes.  (Admittedly, I don’t actually consider most of the characters in the Iliad to be heroes at all.  I find such a festering pit of toxic masculinity so idiotic as to be simultaneously pathetic, appalling, and eye-rollingly boring.  But obviously most of the humans calling the shots for most of human history have admired this sort of idiocy a lot more than I do.  Sigh.  Feel free to read my prior post on Heroic Heroes for my minority opinion.)  But the Odyssey is more interesting than the Iliad, and it includes a wide array of survival strategies, including brute strength, fighting skill, high intelligence, low cunning, quick opportunism, and careful planning.  All of these traits inspire us, or at least each of these traits inspires some of us.

        2. Humans suffer a constant conflict between desire for exploration pulling us away and the love of home pulling us back.  The Odyssey appeals to both by giving us a series of adventures and the arc of finding one’s way home.

        3. Humans love tales of how we mortals live in a world when we’re so often at the mercy of greater powers.  The Iliad and Odyssey explore questions of what it means to be mortal, what it means to be human, and what it means to be civilized.  It also explores questions of faithfulness.  What is faithfulness, what are its limits, and to whom do we owe it: our buddies, our rulers, our families, our spouses, our gods?  And what do we do when those loyalties directly conflict?

        4. Humans always love soap operas of love and lust, treachery and faithfulness, and whatever over-the-top scandal or adventure we’ll see in the next episode.  This also includes all those fantastical wonders that we now call speculative fiction.

        Because the Odyssey has been so famous for so long, it’s wielded a huge influence on our fantasy landscape.  From beautiful, seductive witches who will enchant you with their evil sexy wiles, to adventurers slaying one monster after another, and from the use of women purely as props for men, to the “hero’s journey” of self-discovery, the tropes of these ancient epics continue to riddle our modern stories, for good or ill.  There are hundreds if not thousands of adaptations and stories that borrow from the Odyssey, from the Arabic adventures of Sinbad the Sailor to the basic concept of Star Trek: Voyager.  Here are just a few.

     • Dante Alighieri, who wrote his own epic poem Divine Comedy in 1320, was deeply influenced by Homer, even though he knew of the Odyssey only through the Roman writers who referred to it.  He included Ulysses (the Latin version of the name Odysseus) in the eighth circle of his Inferno, condemned for perpetrating the fraud of the Trojan Horse, plus committing plenty of atrocities, as well as for being pagan.  The gods who could shield him in Homer’s work, one god protecting him against another no matter what crimes he committed, cannot shield him when there is only one god and only one moral law.

     • James Joyce’s Ulysses is, of course, heavily inspired by the Odyssey, set in Dublin in 1904.  However, it removes the fantasy and maps the episodes of the epic onto an “ordinary” man on an “ordinary” day.

     • The 2000 movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou” is a loose reimagining of the Odyssey set in 1930s Mississippi.

     • Robert McCloskey’s 1943 short stories for children about Homer Price include many Odyssey references, beginning, of course, with our hero’s name.  (He also has uncles named Ulysses and Telemachus.)  In one story a clever woman with multiple suitors wins the day with a ruse involving the unravelling of her knitting.  In another story the children of Centerburg use the inspiration of Odysseus to stuff their ears with cotton so as not to be enchanted by magically-alluring music.

     • As for me, of course my new collection of short stories, poetry, and art inspired by traditional stories and myths had to have something based on the Odyssey.  I’ve got a poem about the end of the sirens in the modern world, a flash story in which the siren explains her own side of the story, and, just for silliness, a toddler cyclops.  You can find those pieces in Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns.  And now I’m currently working on a strange story inspired by the Trojan Horse.  (This weird idea has been rattling around for a while, but it wasn’t written in time to include in the book.  I guess it had to come in its own time.)

     • Finally, here are a few previous posts with connections to the Odyssey:

The Lure of Sirens

Words of the Month - Words of the Future

Magical Botany M

[Pictures: linoleum block prints (I think), illustrations by Joanna Lisowiec from Homer’s Odyssey retold by Barry B Powell, 2026 (Images from Joanna Lisowiec Illustration).]

Words of the Month - Parasites and Other People

         Since a particular parasite has unfortunately been much in the news lately, it seems a good time to look at the bright side of parasite, which is the word’s interesting etymology.  English acquired the word in the 1530s from Greek.  The roots mean literally “beside+bread/food,” and the word referred in Greek antiquity to a person who’s always eating at someone else’s table, living at someone else’s expense, and especially mooching off a rich person by kissing up to them without providing any actual benefit.  This is the same meaning parasite first had in English, too: “hanger-on, toady,” and not for another two centuries did it come to refer scientifically to a plant or animal that lives at the expense of another, like our current too-close companion cyclospora.  This is really interesting to me, because I always assumed that the animals living on unwilling hosts were the first parasites, and that it was metaphorical to call a human sponger a parasite.  In fact, it’s the reverse – and parasite may not be the only word with a history in which human descriptors were applied metaphorically to animals.

        The word shrimp first appeared in English in the fourteenth century, and it’s not entirely clear which came first in English: the tasty marine crustacean or the puny person.  Either way, though, it comes from Old Norse or Middle German words for “a skinny, shriveled person,” so it described humans first, and was applied to the little critter by extension.

        Shark is another word that’s got murky origins.  We don’t know which definition came first, but in the late sixteenth century we get both “large, fierce fish” and “cheat, person who preys on others.”  It may come from a German word for “villain, scoundrel,” in which case it was a person first.  (But if ocean sharks weren’t called “villains” until the late sixteenth century, what were they called before that?  Small sharks were called houndfish (or dogfish), and there was also haye, which is cognate with the other Germanic languages.)

        A mutt was not a “mongrel, non-purebred canine” until about 1910, although before that it was simply a stupid dog – or a stupid person.  It is thought to be a shortening of muttonhead, which was an insult indicating “a stupid person” by 1803.

        On the other hand, sometimes etymologies that go the other way surprise me, too.  The word chubby meaning “plump,” dates back to around 1610 and apparently actually derives from a particular kind of river fish which is rather stocky.  The word chub appears in English as the name of the fish in the mid-fifteenth century, and its origin is unknown.  It was then used metaphorically of plump people (and earlier also meaning “lazy person,”) before the adjective form was developed.

        What I find really fun about these unexpected developments in meaning, is that they demonstrate how versatile we are about constantly coming up with fresh new metaphorical ways to describe the things around us.

[Pictures: Prawn, linoprint by Jane Evans (Image from Jane Evans Gyotaku);

Chub, woodcut from The Treasury of Natural History by Samuel Maunder, 1852 (Image from University of California Libraries).]

Sekka's Mythical Beings

         Kamisaka Sekka (Japan, 1866-1942) was an artist who spanned the movement of Japanese art toward modernism.  The Japanese government sent him to Glasgow to study western arts, where he was much influenced by the Art Nouveau movement.  His work is more simplified and stylized than the styles of Japanese art that came before.  His masterpiece was the three volumes of Momoyogusa, which is sometimes translated A World of Things, and sometimes Flowers of a Hundred Worlds.  The latter is more poetic, but I’m guessing the former is more accurate a translation, and is certainly a more accurate description.  The 60 pieces depict some flowers, but also other plants and animals, views of nature and of daily life, objects, people, scenes from literature, and even a few mythical characters.  These last are what I have for you today.

        We have to start with the dragon, of course!  This is very dramatic, showing only the head and one taloned foot looming out of inky grey cloud.  The eyes and claws are gilded for extra punch, but it’s hardly necessary.

        Next up is another stormy character: Raijin, god of thunder.  He’s following his standard iconography by beating on his drums, while his hair flies wildly.  Again, you can see that this is relatively simple with large areas of flat color compared with traditional Japanese woodblock prints - but it’s still quite complicated compared with anything that uses a single block and a single color of ink.  (I mentioned Raijin’s companion thunder beast the raiju here.)

        And finally we have the hakuhō, translated as “white phoenix,” although I can’t find any information about what, if anything, this bird’s mythical powers might be.  Lots of fantastic birds seem to be translated as “phoenixes” without necessarily having anything in common with the phoenix proper, so I’d love to find out more about this one.  At the very least it’s certainly very beautiful.  I like the faint pattern of the wood grain in the background, and the delicate fluff of the bird’s tail feathers.

        If you want to see one of Sekka’s non-fantasy pieces, I featured his “Seven Herbs of Early Spring” in a previous post (or follow the link to the Cleveland Museum of Art in the credits to see lots of pieces.)

[Pictures: Ryū (Dragon), color woodcut by Kamisaka Sekka, 1909-10;

Raijin (God of Thunder), color woodcut by Kamisaka Sekka, 1909-10;

Hakuho (White Phoenix), color woodcut by Kamisaka Sekka, 1909-10 (All images from Cleveland Museum of Art).]

C.W. Taylor’s Textures

         I did a previous post on wood engravings by Charles William Taylor (U.K., 1878-1960) nine years ago, but today I saw a few more, and this time what really struck me about them was how everything in the image is built out of patterns of texture.  As I’m currently working on a landscape piece myself, I’m really studying how Taylor uses detailed patterns of strokes to make his layers of multiple trees, his water, his ground…

        First, however, is a small view of Colchester, and the light in this piece blows me away!  There's a contrast between dark shadows and light so brilliant that it washes out St. Nicholas’s spire in a sparkling shower.  And it’s all done with the texture of lines and crosshatching.  Look at the variety of patterns across the sky to see how Taylor has made a gradient of light, plus another pattern on the church, and contrasted with the yet different pattern on the building beside it.  (By the way, this lovely church was apparently demolished in 1955.)

        Somewhat more typical of Taylor’s work are the two pastoral landscapes, but this view of deer in Epping Forest also has amazing light.  Look how the deep shadow of the huge tree is an absence of grass and leaf litter, and how the light glints across the water and illuminates the outlines of the deer.  Look at all the different patterns of strokes - vertical, horizontal, diagonal, short, long, curved, straight - and how they define plants and differentiate the areas.  Instead of outlines around areas, these textures create the entire scene.

        The final piece looks like dusk is falling, and again Taylor’s mastery of light and shadow gives us everything we need to interpret the scene.  In my previous post I praised the sense of spaciousness Taylor brought to his landscapes, but with these examples the light brings a sense of intimacy, and a feeling that we have been offered a portal into a singular, enchanted time and place where the light happened to fall in just this extraordinary way, which Taylor has managed to capture in black ink on white paper.

[Pictures: Colchester, wood engraving by Charles William Taylor, (Image from Art UK);

March in Essex or Epping Forest (title given differently in two places), wood engraving by Taylor, 1920s-30s (Image from National Gallery of Art);

Wickford, wood engraving by Taylor, (Image from Art UK).]

Ghosts and Other News

         I’m excited to announce that my flash story “Hoarding Ghosts” was published today in MetaStellar.  Please head straight on over there and read it, and of course when you finish my story, check out all the other amazing pieces they’ve published.  (One funny note: if you notice a couple of words in square brackets, they’re an accidental relic of my own editing process that I apparently failed to clean up before submission, and they failed to clean up before publishing.  So you get just a little glimpse under the hood with that!)

        In other news, I’m off to Readercon Conference on Imaginative Literature tomorrow, and here’s my schedule.  You can see that with a solo reading, a solo kaffeeklatsch, and a solo lecture, I’ve been given more opportunities than usual to sit by myself in an empty room feeling foolish!  Ha!  But of course I’m actually very excited about all of this, so here’s the usual guide to related posts…

Alice in Wonderland

        Words of the Month - O Frabjous Words - featuring words invented by Lewis Carroll

        Reading Alice Aloud - and why my children didn’t appreciate Alice as much as I do.

        Words of the Month - Presupposition Triggers - including a famous example from Alice in Wonderland

        Alice, Irene, and Dorothy - comparing a few girls from classic early childrens’ fantasy

The Fantastic Bestiary

        A to Z 2019 - an entire alphabet of creatures, excerpts, snippets, and behind-the-scenes tidbits from On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination

        To learn about All the Creatures, try the label “mythical creatures” in the sidebar (230 posts and counting)

        Guess that Medieval Beast - the game that challenges you to think like a medieval illuminator (plus my Birds of a Feather game, just because it comes up with the same tag; but you can scroll past that one if you want!)

        See all the main creatures in my own bestiary here.

Speculative Pets

        Animal Companions - in which I lay out all you need to know about pets in spec fic

        Words of the Month - Petting Our Pets - etymology of pet-related words in English

        Seller of Cupids - in case you wish to acquire an unconventional pet

        Pokémon Go - the ultimate in catching all the fantasy pets

        In other news of publication, I’ve just had a poem accepted, but it won’t come out until fall 2027.  I’ve got stories coming in two anthologies that also won’t be out until 2027.  Of course I’m very pleased about having my work selected, but people, I have to tell you, I do not have the patience for this!  At least I don’t have to wait so long for gratification with my art: my piece “Robin’s Nest” is up now at a new Art Walk in Dedham, MA.

[Pictures: MetaStellar cover art by Oscar Ramirez (Image from MetaStellar);

photos by AEGNydam, 2026.]