A guest post for The Future Fire, March 2025

Once upon a time, fantastical epics were written in poetry: the Epic of Gilgamesh (about four thousand years old), the Iliad (about three thousand years old), the Mahabharata (about two thousand years old), Beowulf (a mere thousand years old). Nowadays, however, we expect our epic fantasy in prose, often as a series of hefty volumes. But in 2013, I started writing a group of poems that grew into my own epic fantasy, The Sign of the Dragon, which tells the story of King Xau, chosen by a dragon to be king.

Read the whole essay.

(A guest post for the Wicked Writing Corner, November 2020.)

I write both poetry and fiction. Viewed as separate activities — wearing either my poetry hat or my fiction hat — I have little to add to the voluminous advice already out there. But I do have thoughts about what happens if you try to jam both hats on your head at once. In particular, I have thoughts about the unwise practice of writing book-length, hard-to-market, epic narrative poetry.

Read the whole essay.

(A guest post for the World Fantasy Convention 2020 blog, April 2020.)

In recent years, there’s been an increasing awareness of the importance of diversity in fiction, including diversity in gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, wealth, and age. Along with this has come a discussion of own voices, and the extent to which it matters whether a story about, for instance, a lesbian unicorn, is written by a lesbian. Alas, I have yet to find a unicorn story written by a unicorn, lesbian or otherwise….

Read the whole essay.

(A guest essay at imaginED, November 2019.)

I read a great deal when I was growing up. I read in my backyard, in bed, at meals, on trains, while walking home from school. I read Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Gaskell, and James Herriott. I read short stories, magazines, poetry, novels. I read widely, voraciously, and acquired a particular taste for science fiction. Probably because of this, when I imagined my future, I dreamed of being an astronaut, or, failing that, a scientist or mathematician….

Read the whole essay.

(An essay for the periodic table issue of C&EN, Volume 97, Issue 31.)

My work appeared in Science for the first time in August 2017, one of the proudest achievements of my life. Yet the published piece wasn’t a scientific article. It was poetry. One hundred nineteen haiku to be specific, one for each of the 118 known elements of the periodic table, plus an extra poem for element 119, ununennium, not yet synthesized….

Read the whole essay.