Con-Verse: Chatting with Colleen Anderson

Hello, fellow travelers!

As we enter the Hugo Award nomination period, this is your weekly reminder that if you have a membership for this year’s Worldcon, or attended Glasgow Worldcon, you are eligible to nominate your favourite works for the Hugo Awards, including the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem! So far we’ve given you some very easy ways to read speculative poetry and access the heart of their imagery, as well as begun chatting with some absolutely brilliant poets about their work both on the page and in the wider poetry community.

Following up with our wonderful chat with Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master Mary Soon Lee a fortnight ago, today we’re chatting with current SFPA President Colleen Anderson!

Colleen Anderson is a Ladies of Horror Fiction, Canada Council and British Columbia Arts Council grant recipient, and has been published in seven countries. She is an award-winning author with work in venues such as Amazing, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, and the award-winning Shadow Atlas. Her poem “Machine (r)Evolution” won the Rhysling Award. Her fiction and poetry collections include I Dreamed a World, The Lore of Inscrutable Dreams, A Body of Work, Embers Amongst the Fallen, and Weird Worlds, which has made the 2024 Bram Stoker Award preliminary ballot. Her collection, Vellum Leaves and Lettered Skinsi, is coming from Raw Dog Screaming in 2025. Colleen freelances as an editor and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and searches for mermaids.

How did you get into writing speculative poetry?

I grew up on fairy tales and started writing angsty teenage poetry. Then I worked for years in a comic book and SF/F bookshop, called The Comicshop, where my speculative mind hatched and grew.

What about speculative poetry do you enjoy?

The sheer variety of worlds and creatures people come up with. And, while scenarios and feelings are explored, they’re done in otherworldly contexts or in a deeper way. You can also delve into the dark, hard questions of our humanity without pointing fingers directly, but still make people think about possibilities. The horrific and the wondrous captured in small morsels of words, where the words themselves form art on a page. That goes for most poetry, but the aspect of punctuation, line breaks, and enjambment being a directorial script makes poetry such a unique form.

You are currently serving as the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Can you tell us more about what the SFPA does and what value it can provide to poets in the genre?

SFPA is probably the only organization that supports poetry in various forms. There are awards for an individual long or short poem (the Rhysling Award), as well as for dwarf poems (Dwarf Stars) which are 10 lines or shorter. We also recognize chapbooks, books of poetry, and the efforts of individuals that support the speculative genre. SFPA runs a reasonably priced yearly poetry contest in three categories, and has a quarterly publication, Star*Line, as well as the online Eye to the Telescope. There is a Discord, Facebook, an internet list, along with various blog pieces and other social media. It’s a great way to meet others involved in specpo and to be inspired by, encouraged, and participatory in this vast and varied field. We have members from many parts of the world.

As the SFPA is the longest-running space awarding outstanding speculative poetry, the awards space is now opening up a great deal–including the upcoming Special Hugo Award for Best Poem at the Hugo Awards at the Seattle Worldcon. How do you feel about this expansion of poetry’s recognition?

It’s a great thing and I was always offended when SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, which did once honor poetry, chose to be rid of it, although it has now opened to it again. Because poetry is generally shorter than most short stories doesn’t mean it takes less time to execute well. In recent years speculative poetry has gained far more recognition.

What is your favorite poem you’ve read recently?

I’m afraid I must refrain from answering this. I’m reading hundreds of poems to nominate for the SFPA Rhysling Award, as well as reading to vote for the Stoker Awards. There are so many amazing authors and poetry that I think it would be a disservice to name only one. For people wanting to read specpo, look at the lists of nominees for both of these awards, and find their works. A great dose of poetry a day keeps the mind worms at bay.

What are you looking forward to at Seattle Worldcon 2025? (Other than poetry, of course!)

Networking with like-minded souls and encouraging people to write if that’s their love. Sharing in what we’re doing and what we hope to do. If I had never attended conventions, I would not be where I am today with my writing.

You can read Colleen’s 2023 Rhysling Award-winning poem “Machine (r)Evolution” at Radon Journal.

That’s all for this week, but expect yet another outstanding interview coming soon, as well as more discussions about how you can read and dig into speculative poetry.

Hopefully during the last few weeks you’ve already started exploring the world of speculative poetry for yourself. If you’ve been reading 2024 poetry for the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem, hopefully you’re slowly building a big list of poems that definitely deserve a rocket! But here’s a question for those now reading their way into the field: what speculative poem from these first few weeks of 2025 has caught your eye so far? Share them in the comments or in a post sharing this week’s Con-Verse on social media so other people can find out and read it!

Until next time, may tomorrow and your good days always rhyme!