One of my Clarion classmates, Lucy Snyder, won the 2009 Stoker Award for her poetry collection Chimeric Machines. I ran into Lucy at World Fantasy 2010, where she told me that one of the poems in this collection was inspired by my short story Opening the Eye in Horror Library volume 2. (For those of you with a calendar, Lucy saw this story well before it appeared in HLv2.)
I haven’t read poetry since I seriously overdosed in university, but I had to check out CM. I expected only a tangential similarity, but no… the poem Trepanation clearly included echoes of my story without being in any way derivative. And the rest of the book is creepy as hell.
My work is not merely inspirational; it inspires people to win awards. Yes, my inspiration was a tiny tiny sliver of the inspiration in Chimeric Machines, but it’s the closest brush I’ve had with Literary Fame. I’m tickled blue.
So, if you have any flicker of interest in poetry, read Chimeric Machines. You can get a free sample at Lucy’s CM page. The sample covers the section “Technica,” wherein she illuminates the appalling aspects of technology. By happy coincidence, this section includes Trepanation, but I think Tech Support will resonate with a lot of you. Heck, just read the whole thing, and buy the book.
(PS: I have at least one blog reader who cannot tolerate horror. You know who you are. And you’re not permitted to click on ANY of the links in this post. Thank you.)