Today I have the privilege of interviewing Wendy Van Camp, who happens to be one of my personal favorite sci-fi poets, and one of today’s great masters of scifiku.
Ken: So Wendy, what is scifaiku, and how did you get started writing scifaiku poetry?
Wendy: One Friday afternoon, I was at a local science fiction convention. I had planned to remain for an event before heading home, but I had two hours to wait before it started. I happened to be sitting next to a placard with panel listings for the room behind me. There, scratched in at the last minute, was a workshop about writing Scifaiku. I had no idea what the word meant, but there was ice water in the room, so I decided to duck inside to cool off.
There was a small group of people chatting and I assumed that they were there for the workshop. At the top of the hour, all but one took to the seats and the instructor went to the front of the room. It was then that I learned all those people were not here for the workshop, they were all publishers of poetry magazines who had come to support the instructor. I was the only “student” in the room!
I remember vaguely writing poems in high school, but that had been over twenty years ago. Did I want to write poetry? I was hesitant. Yet, I didn’t want to be rude to the woman and walk out leaving her without a class to teach. I remained and learned methods of brainstorming poems, ideas of how haiku and science fiction could be merged, and the structure to follow when writing scifaiku.
The instructor said, “Now you will write a poem for the class.”
Class? I was the only one in the workshop! Yet, I had the format and the brainstorming techniques before me on the blackboard. I was an author and reader of science fiction and had scifi concepts ingrained within me. How hard could this be? I wrote my first scifaiku poem.
The instructor said. “Now, I would like you to read your poem to the class.”
I stood up. I read my poem. I sat down.
The instructor critiqued my poem. She was fair and I had no expectations. Then, one of the publishers in the audience beside me, leaned over and told me that she liked my poem and wanted to publish it in her magazine. She would pay me. I took her card with shock. “Airless Night” was the first scifaiku poem I wrote and sold, but it would not be the last.
Ken: That’s hilarious and amazing! So you literally got your first poetry publishing contract within a minute of writing your first poem! Now, did you have anything else published at that time? Like other genres?
Wendy: I got into writing stories and novels in my early 40s after a long hiatus due to working in the television and film industry. Although I started out as a novelist as a teen and in early college, the bright lights of Hollywood tempted me from writing and I became a television producer/director instead. Most of my work was corporate or municipal, but I ended up creating hundreds of programs over a time period of fifteen years.
Over time, I became tired of Hollywood and the culture. I wanted to focus more on my creative side and perhaps start a family.
I started a home-based jewelry business, got married, and slowed down. I had a bad case of writer’s block and although I tried to write from time to time, nothing clicked for me.
One day, a character woke up in my mind and demanded that I start writing his story. He was a melancholy assassin who wanted to quit, but the world seemed to conspire to keep him in his profession. He betrayed his friends and left his family, yet these same people are the ones who would be his salvation.
Gradually this book evolved into my “Steampunk Wonderland” series, an epic adventure with an ensemble of characters loosely based off of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland”. The books are still not published at this time, but between projects, I have another go at them. My various beta readers love the story and they keep prodding me to finish it. It will likely be my opus story when all is said and done.
Instead of pushing to finish the novel at that time when I was still a beginning writer, I wrote a few short memoir pieces and science fiction flash and found markets for them. That was where I was when I took the scifaiku workshop. Really, just starting on my writing journey.
Ken: What authors influenced you as a writer?
Wendy: I discovered science fiction at a young age. The first moon landing happened when I was four or five years old and my fascination with space and science began with that event. I loved Heinlein’s juveniles, Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series, Anne McCaffery’s dragonriders, Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea, and then proceeded to read almost the entire library in my small town of any book in the fantasy and science fiction genres. Later in life, in an effort to read more “classics”, I decided to give Jane Austen a try. I fell deeply in love with her work, my favorite being “Persuasion”. This is the reason I have a single Austen Regency series in my work pipeline, even though I’m mainly a science fiction author. I loved her characters too much to let them go.
Ken: It truly is great when you discover a character that you love like that. So who is your favorite of your own main characters? And what is it that makes them special?
Wendy: It is hard to pick from among one’s children. I love them all, the heroes and the villains. My current favorite is the protagonist of a future trilogy of books set in my “Interplanetary Tales” universe. She is a Martian Jewish girl named Varda. She feels a deep connection for her homeworld of Mars and seeks to protect it from being exploited by Earth-based corporations. I have a short story that features her. I hope to publish it sometime this year, but this single story is only the start of a much larger journey.
Ken: OK. Now tell us about your latest book?
Wendy: Some things are born in adversity and certainly my poetry book qualifies. I had not intended to create a volume of poetry at that time, I was planning on writing a science fiction novella as part of a writing challenge with an online community. Four days into the challenge, I took a nasty fall and broke several fingers in my dominant hand. I could not move my fingers to type and my novella came to a crashing halt. A few weeks later, I realized that I could manage writing with a pen. Since I compose poetry via a fountain pen and bound notebook my ability to create poetry was not affected by the accident.
I was already known as a scifaiku poet. My poems are regularly in magazines and on my blog. I had enough poetry to fill a small chapbook. One of the themes I wrote about over the years were the planets of the solar system. Most of the poems highlighted Venus, Mars and Jupiter. I thought it might be fun to write poems about all the planets and use that as a theme for a collection.
I bought a stalogy notebook, picked out a designated fountain pen and set up a schedule to sit at my local coffeehouse at least four times per week. Over the course of that summer, I wrote around 100 poems. Some were scifaiku, others were astropoetry, but all were on theme. “The Planets: a scifaiku poetry collection” was born. Not only did I write the poetry for the book, but I also illustrated it. Each chapter head has a line art sketch of the planet that section highlights.
The book has been doing well. It was nominated for a 2020 Elgin Award. As a poet, having a chapbook or collection gives you a little more street cred at open-mic readings, which has been a blessing to me. While my hand is now healed and I am back to typing, I’m glad that I created the poetry collection and I intend to do more poetry books in the future.
Ken: Right on! Well we will certainly be looking out for them. And thanks for taking the time to chat!
Wendy’s books can be found at https://nowastedink.com/