gwynnega

Not One of Us #86 / obsessions

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:10:08 GMT

The mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #86, the emptiness issue. It features my anti-fascist incantation "spell," along with poetry by Sonya Taaffe and Jennifer Crow, fiction by Devan Barlow, and much more. I'm delighted, as always, to have my work in this venerable magazine, and, especially, that my poem shares a page with Sonya's. (I'm less delighted that anti-fascist poetry is so damn relevant in 2026.)

The mail also brought a CD of Jane Birkin's final album, the gorgeous and haunting Oh! Pardon tu dormais... (2020) which I heard for the first time a couple of weeks ago and have been obsessed with ever since.

I wish I could buy a DVD of the horror romcom musical Your Monster (2024); I have lost track of how many times I've watched it (six times, maybe?). It's not often that a recent film captures my imagination the way this one has. I'm hoping Criterion will eventually give it the treatment it deserves, and I can't wait to see what director/writer Caroline Lindy does next.

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Rhysling long list nomination

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:33:49 GMT

I'm delighted to announce that my poem "the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force" is nominated for the 2026 Rhysling Award long list!

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poetry sale!

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:20:50 GMT

I'm happy to announce that my poem "dear Semele" will appear in a future issue of Dreams & Nightmares. It is my second poetry sale of the year. It's nice to have things to look forward to, amid The Horrors.

I have been trying to write about Semele for a very long time. One of my first-ever poems (from when I was in college, I think?) was about her, and I wrote another in 2010. (Both are unpublished, which is probably a good thing.) I feel like I finally got it right, this time.

Today poets.org's Poem of the Day is Bryher's "In Exile," which I like a lot. Clearly I need to read more poems by Bryher.

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poetry sale

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:04:31 GMT

I'm happy to announce that my poem "spell" will appear in a future issue of Not One of Us. It was inspired by recent events in Minneapolis (and it has, unfortunately, become even more relevant this weekend). I am, as always, so glad to have my work in this wonderful magazine.

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for obvious reasons

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 04:59:42 GMT

It is David Bowie's birthday, so I've been listening to Bowie today. But since yesterday I haven't been able to stop thinking of Phil Ochs's "I Kill Therefore I Am," especially these lines:

"Farewell to the gangsters
We don't need them anymore
We've got the police force
They're the ones who break the law
He's got a gun and he's a hater
He shoots first, he shoots later

I am the masculine American man
I kill therefore I am"

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poem in Not One of Us

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 20:23:23 GMT

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.

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2025 publications / awards eligibility post

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:06:14 GMT

Probably needless to say, this has been a rough year (for me, for people I know, for the country and the world). Still, I have drawn strength from art and from community. I didn't publish a lot this year, but I'm very proud of what I did publish--especially "the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force."

fiction

"Still Life" in Not One of Us (issue 82)

poetry

"portrait of the artist as a young gorgon" in Penumbric (August 2025, vol. 2, issue 2)

"the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force" in Strange Horizons (15 Sept 2025)

nonfiction

Using Pop Culture as Poetic Inspiration in The SFWA Blog (July 15 2025)

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Christmas at Chandler Elementary

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:34:53 GMT

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.

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Reading Pleasures of 2025

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:27:45 GMT

It's that time again: my reading roundup at the Aqueduct Press blog. I talk about some of the books I enjoyed reading this year, including titles by Charlie Jane Anders, John Wiswell, Nisi Shawl, Amal El-Mohtar, Maggie Nelson, and more.

We're currently awaiting a massive rainstorm in Southern California. Hoping my windows don't leak and the power stays on.

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reading meme: seven deadly sins of reading

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 23:20:52 GMT

(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.

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more about The Doctors

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 23:04:35 GMT

[content warning: marital rape]

Though I've been enjoying my viewing of the 1973 episodes of The Doctors (currently rerunning on RetroTV), there's one storyline I'm finding really hard to take. Young lab technician Toni Ferra (Anna Stuart) has just found out she's pregnant, and she's not happy about it, to put it mildly. Her pill-addict husband Dr. Mike Powers sexually assaulted her while he was high on speed. Soon after, he left town to try and repair the shambles of his life and career. (The show wrote out the actor playing Mike; Mike will return, played by a new actor.) No one knows where Mike is, and he has no idea that his attack on Toni got her pregnant.

Even before Mike's drug addiction, the marriage was on shaky ground due to his immaturity, to the point that when Mike broached the subject of having a child, Toni bluntly retorted, "Why do I need a baby when I already have one?"

Toni has serious reservations about continuing this pregnancy, for obvious reasons. Anna Stuart, at the beginning of an illustrious soap career, gives a heartbreaking performance. Toni's physical discomfort and emotional overwhelm are palpable as she skulks around the hospital. Queasiness and fainting spells are the least of her worries. Everywhere she turns, her in-laws, colleagues, and friends brightly tell her that things might look bad now, but when the baby is born, it'll all be worth it! It's surreal to witness characters who are generally portrayed as the moral center of the show all dismissing her agonized concerns. When Toni reminds her mother-in-law, Dr. Maggie Powers, that Mike raped her (though in 1973, marital rape was considered an oxymoron), Maggie replies that Mike loves her and only assaulted her because of the drugs. Her father-in-law (and chief of staff at the hospital where Toni works), Dr. Matt Powers, actually congratulates her on the pregnancy, before sanctimoniously urging her to carefully consider a decision she might regret for the rest of her life.

So far, no one has used the word abortion in these scenes, although abortion was newly legal in 1973. (Marital rape was also legal at the time.) It's not that abortion has been handled much better on TV in the decades since--but the fact that, so far, not one character on the show has offered Toni unconditional support for whatever choice she might make is downright painful.

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No Kings - Los Feliz (again)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 22:18:44 GMT

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.

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Patrick Horgan (1929-2021)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 21:10:28 GMT

I first became aware of British-American actor Patrick Horgan from his stint on Ryan's Hope. He played grouchy news anchor Thatcher Ross (1978-1979); it wasn't a terribly exciting part, and the show seemed to lose interest in the character fairly quickly.

More recently, I saw his earlier (1970-1974) role on The Doctors (currently rerunning on RetroTV and streaming online), which is a whole other ballgame. As manipulative psychiatrist John Morrison, he's almost gleefully repellent. A silkily charming liar, John succeeds at keeping his wife, the WASPy Dr. Althea Davis (played with fierce intelligence by the luminous Elizabeth Hubbard), from reconciling with her rough-around-the-edges ex, Dr. Nick Bellini (Gerald Gordon). At the point in the storyline currently airing, Althea has finally seen through John's machinations, but no matter how blunt she is about her desire for a divorce, John ignores her wishes and casts himself as the devoted husband in a manner that makes the skin crawl. I can't wait for him to get killed off so he'll stop tormenting Althea, but in the meantime, Horgan makes him a truly enjoyable love-to-hate character.

Yesterday I looked up Horgan online. His other credits include Green Acres, The Thomas Crown Affair, Star Trek and Zelig. He played Sherlock Holmes on stage and did audio recordings not only of the complete Sherlock Holmes, but, astoundingly, the whole of Finnegans Wake. One personal detail that intrigued me was that his second marriage ended over a dispute about voting for Eldridge Cleaver, the Peace and Freedom Party presidential candidate in 1968. (Horgan was the one who voted for him.)

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Scarlet Street

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:25:04 GMT

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.

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poetry review!

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:12:06 GMT

I just discovered that the new issue of Sarah Gailey's Stone Soup digest features a beautiful write-up by Seamus Sullivan of my Strange Horizons poem "the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force." So that is very cool.

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poetry sale!

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 21:08:29 GMT

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.

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poem at Strange Horizons!

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:29:38 GMT

My poem "the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force" is up at Strange Horizons. It isn't the first jacaranda poem I've written, and likely won't be the last. This one (with a nod to Dylan Thomas) was inspired by the confluence of jacaranda season and...everything else happening in Los Angeles and this country. I am so happy it found a home at Strange Horizons.

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a blast from my past

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 21:50:59 GMT

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.)

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Peter Burnell (1942-1987)

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 03:58:26 GMT

I went down a soap-opera rabbit hole today, which happens from time to time. This one turned out to be fascinating but tragic.

RetroTV is currently showing the 1973 episodes from The Doctors. Peter Burnell plays young Dr. Mike Powers, son of the hospital's chief of staff. His portrayal is mercurial, defensive, vulnerable, and quirky. (Several other actors would play the role; they were more traditional leading men, but their versions of the character were flat by comparison.) In the current storyline, near the end of Burnell's run on the series, Mike has become addicted to amphetamine, which rings nasty changes on his personality. It struck me that Burnell was really good, and I looked him up, hoping to see what else he'd done with his career. Sometimes when I do these searches, I discover actors who are still working in film and TV.

Burnell was one of those classically-trained daytime/theater actors I wrote about in my novel Can't Find My Way Home. In 1975 he won the Theater World Award for his Broadway debut as Julie Harris' and Rex Harrison's son in In Praise of Love. He continued to work on and off Broadway, along with other TV and film work. His partner was film historian Gerald Mast. I found this lovely webpage about their home in Provincetown.

Burnell killed himself after being diagnosed with HIV, at the age of forty-four. Mast died of AIDS a year later. Another actor who was on The Doctors at the same time as Burnell, the handsome and urbane David O'Brien, died of AIDS in 1989 at age fifty-one. I felt haunted, today, watching these two actors in the same episode.

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poem up at Penumbric!

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 22:16:13 GMT

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.

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poetry sale!

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 21:11:47 GMT

I'm delighted to announce that my poem "the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force" will be published by Strange Horizons. I wrote it last month, which was a very challenging time for me (and a very challenging time for Los Angeles and this country). Thank god for poetry, and for jacarandas. It always makes me so happy when my work appears in Strange Horizons.

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blog post up at Planetside

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 17:38:49 GMT

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!

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hey baby, it's the Fourth of July

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 22:27:11 GMT

I think this is the first 4th of July that I've gone to a protest. Today's Los Feliz protest was smaller than the No Kings one, but still sizable and raucous. Many motorists honked their support. (At one point there was an "ICE OUT! LET'S GO!" chant to the tune of "Blitzkrieg Bop.") I'm so glad I went. Afterwards I stopped in at Skylight Books, which had a signboard outside reading: "BRING THE HEAT. F*CK ICE."

Now I'm listening to X's See How We Are, as is my 4th of July tradition.

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No Kings - Los Feliz

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 21:54:55 GMT

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.

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thinking about Erica Jong

Sat, 10 May 2025 03:57:45 GMT

I got a Moderna booster this afternoon. Typically this knocks me flat for about half a day (starting in the middle of the night), and I have planned accordingly. The timing is good, because we're having a mini heatwave, and the worst of it will be tomorrow.

Yesterday I learned that Erica Jong has dementia. Her daughter Molly Jong-Fast is publishing a memoir next month, How To Lose Your Mother, and an excerpt appeared in Vanity Fair. Having lost my father to Parkinson's, I really related to Jong-Fast's essay. (My mother had memory issues towards the end of her life, but she was already in her nineties when that happened, so, as hard as it was, everything kind of felt like gravy by that point.)

As a mother, Jong apparently left a lot to be desired. But the revelation that she has dementia hit me like a gut punch, because she was tremendously important to me as a young writer. Growing up, I knew who she was, because she was very famous. I think my copy of Fear of Flying was my dad's, which I took from one of his shelves and never gave back. But the way I got into Jong's work is more mysterious.

One day when I was a senior in high school, just getting into reading and writing poetry--I'd already written a lot of fiction by that point--I found a yellow paperback in my mom's room called The Craft of Poetry (1974). It's a collection of New York Quarterly interviews with poetry heavyweights. What's weird about this is that neither of my parents were readers of poetry, and I have no idea how the book wound up on their shelves. (It didn't occur to me to ask, and now there's no one to ask.) I certainly started reading the book because Anne Sexton was one of the interviewees. I would eventually read the whole book. (I still own it.) But the interview that changed my life was Jong's. Not just because the way she talked about writing poetry was so engaging, but because that interview was like a syllabus to me. It's where I learned about Colette's Earthly Paradise (indeed, I am certain it's where I first heard about Colette), Virginia Woolf's Writer's Diary, the poems of Pablo Neruda and Denise Levertov, the biography of Theodore Roethke, and more.

Jong was, I think, the first living poet whose work I loved. (I also read Adrienne Rich for the first time around this period.) I read and reread Jong's first two poetry books, Fruits and Vegetables and Half-Lives. Her influence on me was so strong that, a couple of years later in a college poetry workshop, the professor handed out copies of Jong's "Arse Poetica" when it was time to discuss one of my poems! I devoured her novels, too; probably her third, Fanny: Being the True Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, is the best (though I haven't read it since the 1980s), a rollicking 18th-century adventure tale told in 18th-century style.

Time went on, and I moved on to other writers and other influences. I couldn't help but notice that Jong's work began to deteriorate. Fame didn't help, I suspect (and possibly substance abuse was at play, too). I find her later novels fairly unreadable, though in 1993 she published The Devil at Large, a very good book about Henry Miller. I can imagine a Jong who didn't hit it big with Fear of Flying and whose work continued to mature. But the fact that she is now no longer the person she was--the writer who inspired me--is hard for me to fathom.

I love this photo of Jong with Eileen Myles, Fran Winant, Joan Larkin, Jean Valentine, Honor Moore, Susan Griffin, Toi Derricotte, and Anne Waldman. Not a celebrity, but a poet among poets.

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