Happy New Year 2011!

As I work on the next issue of The Goreletter, I thought I'd post a little New Year's round up of recent activity and news of some exciting things to spill soon out of the cracks in the Arnzen brainbox. Earlier today, I uploaded scans of a few rare broadsides from days of yore to the new "Arnzen Manuscripts and Rarities" collection on Scribd.com. I thought fans of my book, Proverbs for Monsters, might like to get a peek at the history behind some of the stories. (Dark Regions Press is selling Proverbs for Monsters at a nice discount right…

New Website Launched for MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT

One of my big nonfiction projects this past year was co-editing a huge, 130,000 word collection of instructional articles for writers, called MANY GENRES, ONE CRAFT: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, with writer Heidi Ruby Miller. It's early, but the website for the book has launched, and many insightful features are planned for it in the months leading up to the book's release this coming Spring: http://manygenres.blogspot.com If you write or teach writing, no matter what genre, this book is for you. Horror readers will likely be familiar with some of the names in the book. Gary Braunbeck launches the…

Winter Chills: Arnzen Interview with Non-Horror Reader Survey

Like reading, but don't really like horror fiction? WD Prescott, is running an interesting website bluntly called The Non-Horror Reader Survey that is studying what today's readers think about the modern horror genre. It features interviews with various readers, writers, and scholars, along with a research questionnaire you can fill out, if you want to participate. It's an interesting idea and you should chime in and get the discussion going. Prescott interviewed me this week. See "Winter Chills with Mike Arnzen". I talk about The Popular Uncanny, teaching horror in college, horror's relationship with humor and poetry, and all sorts…

Graveyard Studies

I have been posting a series of digital experiments with cemetery photographs at my flickr account, like "Revenant" above.  Drop by my gallery on flickr and check out the "Graveyard Studies" set.  I'll keep posting new things there as they develop.  Please feel free to comment here or on the gallery itself.

Food Folks and Fun with Zombies at the Morgantown Poets

The Morgantown Poets society has posted video excerpts from my Halloween season poetry reading in Morgantown, West Virginia last month.  It was a goofy gory night of the bizarre, which I titled "Food, Folks and Fun with Zombies." I read three courses of horror:  a batch of gory "food" poems from a variety of sources (including crazy twitter poems and pieces from The Goreletter e-edition), a "folksy" ghost story (from the just-released collection, Legends of the Mountain State IV -- not appearing on the vid), and then I ended with a "fun" batch of zombie poems from my book, Rigormarole. …