gwynnega

I'm starting 2026 with my first publication of the year! My poem about the death of David Bowie, "heroes," is in Not of One Us #85 (the outsider issue). (Coincidentally, this month is the 10th anniversary of Bowie's death.) The issue also includes work by Sonya Taaffe, Jennifer Crow, Devan Barlow, and more. The magazine somehow winged its way to me across the country in record time. I'm always so pleased to have my work in this wonderful publication.

Today I've been remembering Christmas songs we sang in my elementary school auditorium, long ago. "Nuttin' for Christmas" was a favorite, largely because the line "Climbed a tree and tore my pants" always made the kids laugh.

We did a full-on musical production of A Christmas Carol when I was maybe eight years old. I played a ragamuffin and learned a dance routine for it, but then got the flu and missed the evening performance. (I ended up giving my actress heroine Joanna Bergman this experience in Can't Find My Way Home.) I still remember some of the lyrics and melody for one of our Christmas Carol songs, but I can't find it anywhere online--and in the age of AI, it's even more difficult than the last time I looked. The lyric I remember is: "Bless the goose, poor bird, his day is done / Bless the cheery warmth of our old hearth (Oh Merry Christmas) / God bless us everyone." (We pronounced "hearth" to rhyme with "earth," and no one corrected us.) I did find a Christmas Carol song online called "God Bless Us Everyone," but it's not the song I remember.

(Via sovay and asakiyume.)

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

I'm pretty sure I originally picked up Little Women (an abridged edition) when I was eight years old because of the cover. (It's this edition.) This sparked an Alcott obsession.

2. Pride, challenging books I finished.

Ulysses, maybe? (I read it via dailylit.com, in small email installments every day.)

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I don't do that as much these days as when I was younger, but sometimes I'll listen to an audiobook that I've previously read in print. I've done that recently with Rosemary's Baby (read by Mia Farrow) and Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej. Back in the day, I reread Marge Piercy's Vida and Braided Lives, and some of Marilyn Hacker's poetry books, among others. (ETA: I reread Dracula via Dracula Daily a couple of years back, long after my first read of the novel. I'm currently rereading Frankenstein. Also, it occurs to me that I've reread some novels for panel discussions. Joanna Russ's The Female Man springs to mind.)

4. Sloth, books that have been longest on my to-read list.

I don't have a to-read list, but I have owned quite a few books for decades without reading them. Sometimes I eventually get rid of them, but others I keep if I still think I'll want to read them. That category includes: The Madness of a Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer (I hauled that book from Los Angeles to the UK and back again) and (more recently) The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Diane di Prima's Loba, Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, Judy Grahn's The Highest Apple, and Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God. (The editions differ in terms of what material they include.)

6. Wrath, books I despised.

An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson. A dark-academia Carmilla set in the 1960s should have been a lot of fun. I know some people really liked this book, but I couldn't get past the raging anachronisms. I suspect the book was originally set in the '90s or '00s, but then the author added some miniskirts and no one bothered to check the references--for example, mentions of Anais Nin books that hadn't come out yet, and a reference to Sylvia Plath "first editions" (when her books were new). Also, it somehow never occurred to anyone involved that no one talking about a telephone before the age of cellphones would call it a landline.

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I suppose when I was a kid, I would have liked to hang out with the March sisters or Sherlock Holmes? But the prospect of living in the 19th century stopped being appealing at some point.

The No Kings protest in Los Feliz was well-attended and joyous. For the first time at a protest this year, I actually saw people I knew (old friends I hadn't seen in years). There were many wonderful signs, and many motorists enthusiastically honking. People wore dinosaur suits, chicken suits, an American eagle suit, and a kitty suit. I saw one cop car, but only for about a minute.

I was going to wear my Patti Smith "People Have the Power" t-shirt, but the organizers wanted people to wear yellow, so I wore my Bride of Frankenstein shirt, the only item of apparel I own with any yellow on it. (Next time I'll wear the Patti shirt.)

I stayed for a couple of hours, mostly in the shade, until I got too tired of being on my feet. I'm more wiped out today than I was expecting, but I'm glad I went.

Back in 2021, when I was writing my poem "the ending" about my late father and his film I Bury the Living, I had a lot of questions I wished I could ask him (including how he got the idea for the movie and whether it bothered him that he had to rewrite the ending). I did some research online, but many questions remained.

The following year, my mother died, and in the midst of packing up her house with the people from the bank in charge of this undertaking, I discovered an issue of Scarlet Street: The Magazine of Mystery and Horror in the office. Someone had left it out in plain sight, maybe thinking it would be of interest. The issue was from 1993. I saw Bela Lugosi and Carroll Borland on the cover and grabbed it, though I had no idea what it was doing there. I didn't give it much thought, though, overwhelmed by grief and the million tasks before me.

Over three years went by, and although I kept the magazine where it wouldn't get lost, I didn't have the heart to peruse it. I may have briefly paged through it at some point; I think I had some idea that it contained something about one of my dad's movies. Finally on Sunday, I was ready to look through it. It features a lot of interesting articles (Carroll Borland! Curtis Harrington! Elizabeth Russell!). And it contains a lengthy appreciation of I Bury the Living, featuring lengthy quotes from my dad and a lovely photo of my parents on their honeymoon(!).

Reading through the story felt almost like a dream, there was so much information about my dad's life and career I didn't know, told in his own voice. He tells how he came up with the idea for I Bury the Living, and indeed, how much it bothered him to have to rewrite the ending. In 1993, my dad was already pretty incapacitated from Parkinson's, but his mind was still sharp enough that it was possible for him to recount all this information in a coherent, engaging fashion. A year later, even, this probably wouldn't have been possible, so it feels like even more of a gift that the writer of the piece got to him in time, so I could, eventually, read it.

The issue is available online, along with the other issues of Scarlet Street.

I'm happy to announce that my poem "heroes" will appear in a future issue of Not One of Us. The title is a Bowie reference. I'm always delighted to have my work in this wonderful magazine.

Los Angeles managed a semblance of fall weather the last couple of days, though it's going to warm up a bit. (Considering we often have hellish blasts of heat until around Halloween, I am pleased.)

Soon it will be October, my favorite month, and I will once again become Gwynne Ghoulfinkle on Bluesky.

Some of my earliest publications (mostly poetry) were in feminist magazines that I subscribed to in the 1980s-'90s and read cover to cover every month--for example, Sojourner, off our backs, and Bridges. It was always a thrill to be included in these journals.

Another magazine I submitted to at that time was Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics. It was a wonderful journal; I still have some back issues. I sent them a short fiction piece called "Women's Studies" for their Education issue; an excerpt from an unpublished novel, it was inspired by a life-changing women's studies class I took in my senior year of high school. I had a vague recollection that they had accepted it but for some reason didn't end up publishing it. To my surprise, last night I stumbled upon this page from Rutgers University; they hold Heresies' archives, which includes my unpublished story! The Scope and Contents note reads: "Fiction, 'Women's Studies.' Three versions of the manuscript, tracking sheet, and correspondence. The story was accepted for publication, but did not appear in the final issue." I'm weirdly delighted. (This reminds me that at some point I really should try and find a library to archive my papers.)

My poem "portrait of the artist as a young gorgon" is up at Penumbric! It started out as a short story, loosely inspired by the Hammer film The Gorgon. Then it turned into a poem. Maybe one of these days I'll try to finish the story.

This week on Planetside, I write about a subject close to my writerly heart, "Using Pop Culture as Poetic Inspiration," in which I discuss work by Brandon O'Brien, Sonya Taaffe, Dorothea Lasky, and more!

So glad I went to the No Kings protest in Los Feliz (a couple of blocks away from Skylight Books). I'd gone to Glendale for the April protest and had seen photos of that Los Feliz protest, which looked fairly sedate. Today it was huge, festive and joyous. Friends of mine were there, but it was too massive to spot any of them. Lots of great signs, lots of "ICE GO HOME!" chanting. L.A. at its best.

I stayed about an hour, and would have liked to stay until the end, but I was getting too much sun. It did me a world of good to be there.