[caption id="attachment_7245" align="aligncenter" width="612"]Originally posted on Notegraphy Originally posted on Notegraphy[/caption] The message above was my overwrought response to a question posed on the Science Fiction Poetry Association's mailing list, that asked: "Is horror a genre or an attribute of literature?" It's heavy-handed, but that's kind of why I like it, so I turned it into a notegraphy post. [I've been using Notegraphy with students in my flash fiction writing course this summer. Here's my profile and I think you can see (though you may have to be a member first) some of my students work here ] Postscript, 7/31: Thanks to Diane Severson Mori for referencing this post in her recent review of Chad Hensley's latest poetry book at Amazing Stories.

The Nature of Horror: Horror is a Church…
Posted inSnippets of the Strange

My Monstrous Lecture on the Horror Genre: “Horror is the Removal of Masks”

I'm presently wrapping up a full semester of teaching Horror Writing to undergrads at Seton Hill University, and we've been having a blast doing all sorts of multimedia work -- especially work using SoundCloud for audio critiques. Along the way, I've been been playing with the site, too, uploading lecture excerpts and strange sound prompts and other weird things. I even recently gave a little presentation about the class experiments for a conference we held on campus called the iTeach gallery. During the term, I discovered the above excerpt (from my article in the wonderful book for dark authors, WRITER'S…
April 27, 2013Posted inSnippets of the Strange
Posted inSnippets of the Strange

Put this under your child’s pillow when they lose a baby tooth…

Don't put money under your child's pillow if they put their lost tooth there before bedtime. Put something like this under there, waiting for them to awaken in the morning... money better spent! Berkeley dollmaker Kerry Kate is doing some wonderfully macabre artwork with her collectable handmade doll series at October Effigies. Above is her Tooth Fairy Stuffed Print Doll from May 2010; I also found her "Wormbelly" doll quite disturbing. Visit her blog for the latest.
November 30, 2011Posted inSnippets of the Strange
Posted inSnippets of the Strange

Vampires of the Wild Kingdom

The Vampire Squid: "Like many deep-sea cephalopods, Vampire Squid lack ink sacs. If threatened, instead of ink, a sticky cloud of bioluminescent mucus containing innumerable orbs of blue light is ejected from the arm tips. This luminous barrage, which may last nearly 10 minutes, is presumably meant to daze would-be predators and allow the Vampire Squid to disappear into the blackness without the need to swim far." -- wikipedia entry on Vampire Squid from Hell The Vampire Bat: "...The furry, bean-shaped bat with its rodent-like face resembles a rat with wings, but bats are actually more closely related in evolution…
November 29, 2011Posted inSnippets of the Strange