Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was an Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by a lyre. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess".  The word Lesbian in Sappho’s poetry is a reference to the inhabitants of the island of Lesbos, not having anything to do with any sexual predilection.

John Myers O'Hara (1870–1944) was an American poet. Born in Iowa into a wealthy family from Chicago, he studied at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Chicago for twelve years. In his thirties he moved permanently to New York, where he worked as a broker on Wall Street and also wrote poetry. In the 1929 stock market crash, O'Hara and his whole family lost their fortunes, but he continued to work in a brokerage house. and write and publish poetry.

Besides his own poems, O'Hara also produced rather creative translations of Greek, Roman and French authors, such as the critically successful Poems of Sappho (1907).

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I find the writing of Ernest Hemingway to be fascinating. It feels like authentic artifact. His was a daring new style in 1921. It was a break away from the more stylized prose that had written in the past. In this podcast we discuss how Hemingway became a symbol of masculinity. We also share some of his advice to creative writers. If you want to support this Podcast, please consider buying this episode as an NFT on the Opensea NFT marketplace.

These two short stories, A Carnival Jangle and Anarchy Alley, by African American writer Alice Dunbar Nelson were written in the 1890’s. They deliver a fascinating glimpse of the culture of New Orleans at this time, a wildly diverse city full of creativity and free thought. This is the New Orleans just before the explosion of Jazz music and the musical innovations of Buddy Bolden. Dunbar Nelson has been recognized for her exploration of something that came to be called the ‘Creole Condition’ - the experience of mixed race people in the era after the civil war.

English author Walker Zupp talks about his new book “Martha”, published by Montag Press. Born in Bermuda in 1996, walker talks about his feelings of alienation from English society, saying that technically he’s a foreigner in British society, even though he isn’t because Bermuda is part of the British Empire. He is of the opinion that people find art deeply repulsive. He is currently writing a book about a white family in Bermuda - which he says will be like the Bermudan Sound and Fury. I look forward to reading that book in the future. Click here to get his novel ‘Martha’ from amazon.

In this episode we look at two very different 19th century American writers. Civil war veteran and short story writer Ambrose Bierce, as well as African American writer and activist Alice Dunbar Nelson.

In this day and age of political division, the politics of these two individuals still have reverberations in modern America. Bierce, his commitment to the Federalist cause clearly demonstrated in his story “The Horsman in the Sky”.

Alice Dunbar Nelson, writing for The Monthly Review, a piece about flowers and death, a story of deadly heart break, is a voice that would not exist without the victory of the union north. The voice of a woman, one of African American heritage, is one that we are grateful to hear, in spite of the oppressions of racism and sexism.

I admit it’s a loose connection, but I find it compelling. Listening to the poetic language from long ago, we get a glimpse of different time and place, authentic voices of the past sharing what is their truth.

The story 'The Vampyre' - written in 1816 is the product of the 'year without summer'. In that year summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest that they had ever been between the years 1766 and the year 2000. One night that summer at the villa Diodati in Lake Geneva Switzerland the writer George Gordon Noel Byron, also know as Lord Byron, suggested that those present should each write a ghost story. There were at least two writers there who's writing would go down in history. One was Mary Shelly, who two years later would published the book Frankenstein, the other was Byron's physician, John Polidori, who wrote the short story 'The Vampyre', which is the first appearance in fantasy fiction of a vampire. The previous summer to 1816 - Mount Tamboro in Indonesia had erupted sending volcanic ash into the upper atmosphere. People in Europe had no way of knowing why summer didn't come in 1816. Low temperatures and torrential rain caused disastrous crop failures in Europe, North America and Asia. Mary Shelly wrote in her travel journal 'Never was a scene more awfully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye.'

Lord Byron wrote a poem that summer called Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,

The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,

And men were gather'd round their blazing homes

To look once more into each other's face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye

Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:

A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes

Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd

And twin'd themselves among the multitude,

Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again: a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

All earth was but one thought—and that was death

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails—men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,

Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,

And he was faithful to a corse, and kept

The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,

Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead

Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,

But with a piteous and perpetual moan,

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand

Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,

And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;

The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

Mike’s novels The Wraith of Skrellman, The Apocalypse of Lloyd, and I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore are available from Montag Press. His forthcoming book "The Many Fentanyl Addicted Wraiths of Sault Sainte Marie" is coming out in the fall from Tailwinds Press.

Mike grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, which is small a city in Ontario, Canada. It's on the St. Marys River, north of the U.S. border, near 3 of the Great Lakes. He currently lives in Toronto Canada, having graduated from Ryerson University with a degree in journalism. Mike works as a stenographer for the deaf at York University, a job which he says is perfect for a writer. He discusses how leaving the home of his youth was a source of sadness because both the time and the place are now gone, and the trilogy explores the theme of missing a place that you can’t go back to. His heritage is Franco-Ontarian, however Mike says he has been affectively anglicized.

He has described his writing as post-modern. His admiration of the writer Donald Barthelme, who was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction, has been an influence. Mike says reading Barthelme has allowed him to be as maximalist and zany as he wants to be.

In 1829 Edgar Allan Poe was discharged from the American army after two years of service, attaining the rank of Sergeant Major for artillery, which was the highest rank available to him.

He left the army to pursue an appointment at the US Military Academy at West Point. In the interim period between leaving the army and attending West Point, Poe revisited Baltimore. During his stay there, Poe, acting as an agent for his aunt Maria Clemm, sold a 21 year old slave named Edwin, to a man named Henry Ridgeway for $40. The bill of sale for this transaction is in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, it states, in summary…’Know all men by these presents that I, Edgar Allan Poe...sell unto Henry Ridgway...a negro man named Edwin.’

Poe, who was orphaned at an early age, and who had by this time accumulated massive gambling debts at the University of Virginia, was trying to find his own place in his society. Having left the University of Virginia without graduating, was on his way to West Point, to see if he would succeed there. He was court-martialed and formally dismissed from the academy one year later on March 6, 1831.

I can’t think of a more soul destroying task then to sell another human being into slavery. Poe is writing during the period in American history known as the Antebellum, a Latin word meaning before the war and in American history it refers to the period between the war of 1812 and the civil war. Poe was no abolitionist and never really directly addresses the issue of slavery in his writing, however the fact that he facilitated the sale of Edwin to Henry Ridgway is enough for us to confidently ascertain that he was willing to participate in what was a common place feature of the America he lived in. It is however horrible. It is nightmarish. One can imagine the scene, the black haired, wiry Edgar Allan collecting the lonely and broken Edwin, there would have been one or more moments where their eyes would have met. One wonders if Poe ever contemplated what he saw in that eye. What else could he have done? He could have refused to participate. Abolitionists did exist. At the time of Edwin’s sale, it would still be three years before the British Empire would abolish slavery. Horror is a human reaction to this society. It has been argued by some critics that Poe does address race in his writings, but only by metaphor, not directly.

Poe was a man who needed to rise. He had alienated himself from his step father, and he had to hustle in any way he could. I get a sense when reading his writing that his heightened language invites his readers to enter into his erudite world, to feel as if you are some kind of intellectual elite, only to be confronted with the darkness of a soul that is in total damnation. Poe wanted his readers to be pulled into a place where they couldn’t understand the nightmare. Poe lived in a world that was a nightmare. A cold hearted society where being accepted was a matter of life and death. An America that would need to convulse into a bloody and vicious civil war where 620 000 people would die not only from slaughter but off the battlefield from disease and festering wounds. His society was damned and his genre of horror was the product of a person who was an authentic tortured soul.

Paul Miller talks about his new book ‘Albrecht Drue, Ghostpuncher'. Originally from Texas, author Paul Miller discusses the archetype of the cowboy and how it was one of the sources of inspiration for his novel. This is a work inspired by the likes of William Burroughs and Marvel comics. As Paul says, it is the literary version of someone kicking in your door, smashing up your furniture and pissing on your walls. The lead character encounters the ghost of a jive turkey seventies pimp and realizes that he can punch the ghost in the head. This is the first in a series of five books that Paul is releasing. You can get a copy of the book here.

Professor Angus Fletcher of Ohio State University department of English, author of ‘Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature.’ This is a book that looks at literary invention as unique technical breakthroughs that can be viewed as both narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Professor Fletcher will be talking about literature and storytelling as technologies, how to innovate literature and story and the reasons that computer AI cannot innovate literature but humans can.