In 1993, while still a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, R. David Fulcher founded a literary magazine. As he writes in an article, this is how it all began:
“During my studies I came across the Buddhist concept of samsara, the continuous cycle of suffering and rebirth until one achieves enlightenment. Of course, my twisted college brain immediately thought: “Why wouldn’t that be wonderful! A literary journal based on suffering!”
Well, maybe there was a bit more to it than that. After all, the official theme of the journal is artwork, poetry and fiction centered around suffering and healing, the latter being arguably far more important to us as human beings.
Through the years, the magazine’s reach has expanded (we’ve published writers from Africa, Canada, Mexico, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom), and my wonderful wife Lisa Flach-Fulcher joined the effort as the Managing Editor, vastly improving many of the day-to-day operations of the journal. Despite these changes, Samsara has remained true to form, only accepting works that emphasize the central theme of suffering and healing. Beyond that, the magazine has no genre restrictions, and we’ve been amazed by the variety of ways that artists and writers have incorporated these themes into their submissions over the years.
We expected stories from cancer survivors, those recovering from addiction, and those mourning a lost love. All these themes are critically important to Samsara. But the creative spark will not be denied, and we received pleasantly unexpected new spins on suffering and healing as well. Consider the suffering of an alien race slowly perishing due to a dying sun, or a vampire with dementia. Consider a man plagued by the voice of a subway train that lures him to his death, or a paranoid individual convinced that fish live in his waterbed, giving him incurable insomnia.”
It’s not surprising that when publisher Dianne Pearce thought of writers she’d worked with, that she invited R. David Fulcher to be one of the founding members of the writers working behind the scenes to help support the concept of a press focused on publishing poetry and short form work.
Ten dedicated writer poets comprise the Old Scratch Short Form Collective, with the goal of working with the Devil’s Party Press, a small independent publisher, to bring to fruition the concept of publishing chapbooks of poetry and short form prose under the imprint Old Scratch Press.
This week we are introducing founding member R. David Fulcher
David’s work has appeared in numerous small press publications including Lovecraft’s Mystery Magazine, Black Satellite, The Martian Wave, Burning Sky, Shadowlands, Twilight Showcase, Heliocentric Net, Gateways, Weird Times, Freaky Frights and the anthologies Dimensions and Silken Ropes. Fulcher’s work can also be found in the DPP collection Halloween Party 2019, available at Amazon and at the DPP online store.
Author of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and poetry. Major literary influences include H.P. Lovecraft, Dean Koontz, Edgar Allen Poe, Fritz Lieber, and Stephen King. Fulcher’s first novel, a historical drama set in World War II, Trains to Nowhere, and his second novel, a collection of fantasy and science fiction short stories, Blood Spiders and Dark Moon, are both available from authorhouse.com and Amazon.
In the Fall of 2023, Devil’s Party Press released a new collection of R. David Fulcher’s horror tales called The Pumpkin King: The Collected Horror Stories of R. David Fulcher. While some of these stories have appeared in the past in other collections and anthologies, this will be the first time all of horror stories will be consolidated into two volumes.
The first volume, The Pumpkin King, will focus on his traditional horror stories. The second volume, Asteroid 6 and Other Tales of Cosmic Horror, will focus on his cosmic horror stories.
A writer, with diverse interests and talents, if you’d like to check out one of David’s poems, entitled “Perception” published by Poetry Pacific in May 2020, here’s a link, Enjoy. And don’t forget to sign up to follow this blog, where you’ll get the latest news about the Old Scratch Press writers and ways to stay connected to the poetry and short form prose community. Thank you for reading.
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