Interview: Graduate Michael J. DeLuca

Michael J. DeLuca is a 2005 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate who lives in the rapidly suburbifying post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with wife, kid, cats, perennials, worms and microbes. He is the publisher of Reckoning, a new journal of creative writing on environmental justice. His short fiction has appeared most recently in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Strangelet and Middle Planet. You can find him online at @michaeljdeluca or mossyskull.com.

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You attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005. What made you decide to attend the workshop? 

I’d written a very long fantasy novel that didn’t sell and decided it would be a much wiser course not to pour a bunch of time into another novel but work on improving my writing via short fiction instead. So I joined my first-ever Milford method critique group, WriteShop, in Columbus, Ohio, which happened to include Charles Coleman Finlay—who at the time was writing smart, fun, noirish SF for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and now is the editor. Charlie’s a great, perceptive critiquer and teacher, and I think he caught on quickly to the fact that I wanted to get better and didn’t mind working at it. He encouraged me to apply to a six-week workshop. I picked Odyssey, barely knowing the work of any of that year’s guest authors and never having heard of Odyssey Director Jeanne Cavelos before, based almost entirely on liking what I read about the curriculum—and also that New Hampshire was pretty much my favorite place in the world.

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Interview: Guest Lecturer Nisi Shawl

Award-winning author Nisi Shawl will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Writing Workshop. She wrote the 2016 Nebula finalist and Tiptree Honor novel Everfair, and the 2008 Tiptree Award-winning collection Filter House. In 2005 she co-wrote Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, a standard text on inclusive representation in the imaginative genres. Her short stories have appeared in Analog and Asimov’s magazines, and many other publications. Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a Clarion West board member.

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As a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop, you’ll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

Listen to your inner bell. That’s a maddeningly vague tip, I know, but it’s the closest I can come to describing what it’s like to understand when something just is not working, or when something needs a little tweak to make it work smashingly well, or when you’re laboring over something that is not going to ever work, no matter how you tweak and nudge and sweat and polish it. I’m an aural writer, so I think of it in terms of sound; others may metaphorize the idea differently, but most of you will recognize it. For me, it’s “clunk” versus “bonggg.”

Interview: Graduate Scott T. Barnes

Scott T. Barnes is the winner of the Writers of the Future Award and a graduate of Odyssey. His short fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the anthologies Gaia: Shadow and Breath Vol. 3, History and Horror, Oh My! and Kevin J. Anderson’s Pulse Pounders II. He is also the author of Rancho San Felipe: A Story of California One Hundred Years Ago, an illustrated fourth-grade reader. He edits the online magazine NewMyths.com. His complete bibliography can be found at www.scotttbarnes.com.

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You attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2008. What made you decide to attend Odyssey? You also took two of the online Odyssey Workshop courses. What made you decide to take them?

Well, I didn’t get into Odyssey the first time that I applied in 2007, and so I applied a second time…

Interview: Douglas Cohen

Douglas Cohen is a 2000 graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing Workshop.  He is the former editor of Realms of Fantasy, where he worked for six and a half years.  In the magazine’s final year, they published their 100^th issue, won a Nebula Award, and were nominated for a second one.  Along with John Joseph Adams, he is the co-editor of Oz Reimagined, whose contributors include Seanan McGuire, Tad Williams and Jane Yolen, among many more.  His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such venues as Space & Time, Fantastic Stories, Weird Tales, and Interzone.  He is currently putting another layer of polish on his novel.

Find Douglas Cohen on Twitter: @Douglas_Cohen.

Keep up with Oz Reimagined news at:  http://www.johnjosephadams.com/oz-reimagined/.

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Congratulations on the launch of Oz Reimagined!  What first brought this idea to light?

Interview: Author Patricia Bray

Author Patricia Bray will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Writing Workshop. She has written a dozen novels, including Devlin’s Luck, which won the 2003 Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the field of science fiction or fantasy.  A multi-genre author whose career spans both epic fantasy and Regency romance, her books have been translated into Russian, German, Portuguese and Hebrew.  She’s also spent time on the editorial side of the business, as the co-editor of After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar (DAW, March 2011) and The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity (DAW, March 2012).

Patricia lives in a New England college town, where she combines her writing with a full-time career as a Systems Analyst, ensuring that she is never more than a few feet away from a keyboard.  Visit her website and blog at http://www.patriciabray.com.

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You are a multi-genre author: how do you find the writing techniques for epic fantasy and Regency romance compare?