Kaiju Death Spiral: A Class Poetry eBook

Kaiju Death Spiral: A Class Poetry eBook

Happy National Poetry Month once again! This year, I'm sharing the work of students in my current undergraduate world literature course in Global Horror, where we're currently wrapping up the term at Seton Hill University. In that class, we studied everything from current folk horror novels to Serbian folk vampires. One week, we practiced Japanese poetic forms, inspired by our study of the Godzilla kaiju films, Junji Ito's classic horror manga, Uzumaki, and Jisei death poems. The results were so good, I compiled them into a fun and morbidly twisted ebook, called Kaiju Death Spiral, featuring a fantastic piece of…

AWP14 Seattle

Last weekend, I attended the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (aka AWP14) at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. The AWP website boasts that with over 12,000 attendees and 650 exhibits it is "now the largest literary conference in North America" -- and it certainly was the largest I've been to in my life, with a shopping-mall sized number of tables (featuring colleges, writing programs, presses and publishers) at the bookfair and plenty of superhuman writers as guests (Sherman Alexie and Ursula LeGuin gave readings, for example). Seton Hill University had a table for our MFA…

Photos from June 2013 SHU Residency in Writing Popular Fiction

Throughout last week, Seton Hill U hosted both our usual MFA writer's residency and a very successful alumni workshop/gathering called "In Your Write Mind," which featured a mass book signing and even a "Princess Bride" costume ball. Raw Dog Screaming Press attended, with pre-release copies of my novel Play Dead and plenty of Fridge of the Damned poetry magnets for sale. On top of all the academics, these folks really know how to have a good time. Here are some images I gathered during the experience. Along with my usual courses, the alumni group also invited me to give a…

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…

Poster for My Horror Writing Class at SHU in Spring

I love my day job, teaching terror. This class in "Horror and Suspense Writing" meets the requirements for our new undergraduate "Certificate in Genre Writing" at Seton Hill University. [Got a BA and looking to write a novel? Then check out our MFA in Writing Popular Fiction!] Recognize the image? That's "The Dark Librarian" from my flickr gallery.