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It's coming up on one year since we went to China. The news is full of Olympic stories. The biggest one seems to be about the pollution in Beijing. We were in China for 10 days, and only saw blue skies once -- at the Great Wall at Jinshanling. Beijing's skies are silver. In Chengdu the grey skies rained every day.

The athletes should also be worried about the heat and humidity. It will be difficult to perform well in Beijing, I think.

Front row: David Livingstone Clink, Al Moritz, Sam Cheuk, Jessica Taylor
2nd row: Carolyn Clink, Susan Manchester, Lois Lorimer, Jairam Seshadri, Marianna Mastagar
Back row: Robert Price

Wow! To think that it was just a year ago, on July 1st 2007, that I left Mississauga, Ontario for Dawson City, Yukon. I left on July 1st, and met up with Rob in Vancouver that morning. We flew on to Whitehorse, stayed overnight, then flew to Dawson the next morning, July 2nd.

That summer I didn't plant any flowers on my balcony in Mississauga. This year I have pansies in purple and yellow.

That summer I didn't get to go to the Farmer's Market at Square One for fresh produce. I just went there this morning and bought cucumbers, tomatoes and strawberries.

It never got dark in Dawson in July. The sun set around 1am and rose about 4am. Here we've got enough sunshine to satisfy me. ;) I can see the moon and the stars at night in Mississauga. It was so strange not to see those things in Dawson until September.

Wow! It was a year ago already. Sigh. How fast a year goes by.

Well, I did not win the CV2 contest, or the Eye Weekly contest. Oh well.

I did just enter the contest at www.spacewesterns.com. They are having a Space Western Senryu contest. Deadline is July 15 -- you enter online. And they explain and give links to what a senryu is. Which is basically a personal haiku.

I have been writing a bit over the summer. Mostly just jotting down notes... and puns. ;)

I took a table at the Toronto Small Press Book Fair in June. It was an interesting experience! I think I prefer to just go as an attendee, because then you get to see all the other tables. But I did help my brother David (we shared a table) sell some of my chapbook Snapshots. As I offered a free copy of my self-published genre chapbook Much Slower Than Light -- with new, excellent, free, space-art cover courtesy of NASA/Hubble to anyone who bought a copy of Snapshots.

I'm still trying to figure out how to use this web site program. Now I can use html to put in links, but I can't figure out bold and italic. The usual codes are doing nothing.

[Ha! I read the instructions!]

This Sunday, April 13, will be the last meeting of this (academic) year for the Algonquin Square Table.

I'm going to workshop a poem I wrote this past weekend for the CV2 48 hour poem contest. You pay $10, and the journal CV2 emails you 10 words that you have to include in a poem. The words this year were: nervous, buckle, rattle, vessel, sienna, wrench, thorax, filament, article, and proof.

Eye Weekly is having a poetry contest with a deadline of April 30. I'm going to try to enter that one too. At least it's free! :)

I had two poetry magazine deadlines this month that I wanted to meet.

First, Gusts, Canada's tanka magazine, had its deadline on February 15. I managed to email in three tanka the day before -- on Valentine's Day. I went looking through my pictures from China for inspiration.

Second, NoD, a journal from the University of Calgary in Alberta, has its deadline on March 1. I sent in three poems by email tonight. The issue they are reading for is: "viral-themed; send work that is parasitic, replicative, related to computer viruses, sickness or epidemics." I can't say that my poems were exactly on topic. But I never want to second guess an editor.

I've been in Gusts three times before, NoD once. Both are fine journals.

I have two published chapbooks.The most recent is Snapshots, May 2007. Plus I had a chapbook in 2000 called Changing Planes.

Snapshots
Published in May 2007 by believe your own press (Thornhill, Ontario, Canada)

You can see what it looks like & order copies here:
There are also 4 poems from the book on that website. The chapbook is $8 plus postage.

That's me on the cover holding my baby brother David. Needless to say this was mumbly mumbly years ago.

Changing Planes
Published in 2000 by Junction Books (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

This chapbook is out of print at the publisher. The only way to get a copy is to email me: carolyn at sfpoet dot com.
I charge $5 plus postage.

The poetry workshop I belong to, the Algonquin Square Table, started up again in October of 2007. We meet every two weeks or so at Hart House at the University of Toronto. I've made it to most of the meetings so far, and brought some poems written in/inspired by the Yukon.

To play catch-up, Gusts, a Canadian tanka journal, accepted and then published one of my Yukon tanka in issue #6. Then I received an email from Alexis Rotella asking my permission to reprint this tanka in her upcoming Ash Moon Anthology from Modern English Tanka Press (printed by Lulu). It should be out "in early 2008."

Just today, I submitted three China inspired tanka to issue #7 of Gusts. So far I'm batting .500 with Gusts, having appeared in three of the six issues.

In January I submitted a poem to Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, which was accepted. And I submitted a second poem to the special prose-poem issue of Star*Line which was rejected. That's okay. I'm not sure I've got the hang of prose poetry.

Oh, and NYRSF did publish my Chengdu poem! And my interview with David W. Hill seemed to be well received. All credit for which goes to David, who gave great answers to my questions. And since it was conducted by email, I didn't have to retype anything! :)

Tonight, at 7:30pm, was my poetry reading at the Dawson Public Library.

Since I hate reading my poetry aloud for 15 minutes in a row, I asked that this be set up as a round robin reading, and invite all the poets of Dawson.

There were notices posted around town, with my picture on them, inviting people to come out.

Including Rob and me, there were 13 people there. Which was more than I expected! And I knew the names of 4 of the people! Plus the woman who won the poetry prize for the Writers on Eighth was there.

We read poetry to each other for an hour, which was great. Miriam, the new librarian in Dawson, put out wonderful food including a home made fruit salad.

Rob introduced me. He's so good at that!

The circle went around enough times for me to read 4 poems.

At the end, one of the poets, who was new to town, asked if there were any writing groups she could join. The other people said, no, maybe you should start one!

It seems I need to write a poem about ravens. They turned up in a lot of the Dawson poems. And sparked some lively conversation. They like to eat dog food. And it's $125 fine to be in possession of a dead raven. Even if you didn't kill it. It's the territorial bird. (Yukon is a territory, not a province)

If the event ends up in the Klondike Sun, I won't be here to get a copy. We leave town in 2 days. I'll have to catch it on the web.

- Carolyn

Well, it's time to berate myself for not writing enough poetry while up here at Berton House. On the other hand, I usually write no poetry in the summer, and while up here I wrote and submitted 6 poems, one of which was accepted (by the POEtry Anthology).

And just this week I sent off an acrostic poem to the New York Review of Science Fiction. It's about the Chengdu SF Conference we attended at the end of August. And, in theory, it's humorous. We'll see if they take it.

Also, I did an interview with SF short story writer David Wesley Hill and submitted it to the NYRSF. I've never interviewed anyone before, so we'll see if that gets accepted, or sent back for more work.

David Hill was with us in Chengdu -- a really great & interesting guy. He's famous in China, and less well known here. And the story behind that was what the interview was about.

I may backfill some blog entries on China -- I've been writing up my notes, on paper, in a notebook, the old fashioned way ;)

But, as I say, I've got notes for poems, so I'm sure over the course of the winter, I'll be forging those into poems for the Algonquin Square Table Poetry Workshop. Or, as my brother would say, I'll be "pulling a poem out of my ass" on Sunday mornings for the workshop on Sunday afternoons.

- Carolyn