Tag: Theodora Goss

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft.

Launch Your Imagination: Speculative Poetry in the Artemis Age

Published on by Beatriz F.Leave a comment

(Image Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber)

This year’s National poetry month began with the successful liftoff of NASA’s Orion spacecraft as part of the Artemis mission, a forward step in manned spaceflight to the Moon—so it’s a perfect month to open a discussion about the future of Speculative poetry!

Speculative poetry is having a moment…

Speculative poetry, or SpecPo as it is also known, is coming into its own, especially in the last few years.  Long overshadowed by science fiction literature, speculative poetry has finally been accepted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) as valid publications to become a member and even has its own Nebula Award category as of 2025, with perhaps a permanent Hugo award category in the works as well.

These are the 2025 Nebula Award finalists for best poem. (You can read most of them online by clicking on the title.)

Of course, the SFPA-the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association—established in 1978–has long awarded speculative poetry in all its many incarnations: the Dwarf Stars award, the Rhysling, the Elgin, and Grand Master and Lifetime Service awards. It also bears noting that the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association has been awarding an Aurora Award for “best poem/song” since 2011.

But with the addition of the Nebula and possibly Hugo awards, the momentum for speculative poetry is increasing.

What is Speculative poetry?

Speculative poetry generally refers to a poem with hard science-fiction or high fantasy elements, the latter which can include horror, mythology, fairy tales, folklore, so you can argue that it has been around forever.  But it has evolved over time to be more futuristic and diverse in nature, a situation which I think will continue to gather speed as we race for the Moon and Mars via future space missions.

The SFPA’s founder addresses some of the difficulties in defining Speculative poetry in this essay:

About Science Fiction Poetry, by Suzette Haden Elgin

Like many writers interested in science fiction, I started out writing poetry and then attempted to write science fiction short stories, never pausing to consider speculative poetry as a natural next step instead.  When my sallies into short science fiction failed to match my vision, I began to explore poetry more deeply, especially narrative poetry, but again, never considered speculative poetry specifically.  The truth is, I was not encountering much speculative poetry in my reading.  In the science fiction magazines I read, poems seemed to appear as filler while the stories and novellas were the main attractions.  The pieces tended to be very short and from a limited number of authors. This was my perception at the time, though I’m sure it was not unique. There were and have been many magazines publishing speculative poetry all along, but they did not come across my radar as a fledgling writer.

After many years of writing and publishing poetry, I began to explore short fiction again.  I wrote an opening scene for what I first envisioned as a story, but it just didn’t materialize further.  I was excited about the scene, though, and the vision would not leave me.  Finally, the light bulb came on and I realized that this scene would work just as well, maybe better, as a poem!  That reworked scene became a poem that was later accepted by Star*Line.

Speculative Poetry from Past to Present

To read some poems from speculative poetry’s past, peruse Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre a list curated by Theodora Goss, a professional fantasy writer, poet, and Victorian literature scholar who teaches Fantasy literature.

There’s a lot of excitement surrounding Speculative Poetry and in my research I ran across several articles that express that:

Locus Magazine has a feature on Speculative poetry this month: The Great Shapeshifter: Speculative Poetry

Reactor Magazine‘s article Weird as Hell: Falling in Love with Speculative Poetry by Diane Callahan. She explains how speculative poetry can serve as a gateway into poetry for people who don’t normally read it or embrace the label.

What you can do to support Speculative poetry right now

Join the Speculative poetry initiative to make the Hugo Award for Poetry a permanent category. It is a process that takes two years and must be ratified by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) (TheHugoAwards.org) who administer the award.

Submit your work and read magazines that publish speculative poetry:

The SFPA publishes a market list of paying and non-paying speculative poetry magazines.

Attend or participate in one of Speculative Poetry’s Speculative Sunday reading series

Read a book from Speculative Poetry’s Speculative Poetry Book Collections.

The Future and Speculative Poetry

The future of Speculative poetry looks bright–it is a form exceptionally adaptable to our changing world and open to the increasingly diverse visions of reality and the future of humankind. It’s accessible and welcoming to the exploration of social, political and multicultural issues.

And as the SFWA states in their Introduction to Speculative Poetry,

“Speculative poetry is not only for science fiction and fantasy fans. It is for any human with a heart and a desire to declare that their dreams should be heard.”

Thank you for reading!

Beatriz F. Fernandez is a Miami area poet and University Reference librarian. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the most recent of which is Simultaneous States  (2025) by Bainbridge Island Press.  In 2025, she became a member of the Old Scratch Press writing collective.

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Our current theme for submissions is Al Dente. For more information click here.

AL DENTE In cooking, pasta or risotto al dente (/ælˈdɛnteɪ/, Italian: [al ˈdɛnte]; lit. ’to the tooth’) is cooked to be firm to the bite, requiring a brief cooking time. The term also extends to firmly-cooked vegetables. In contemporary Italian cooking, it is considered to be the ideal consistency for pasta.

What does al dente mean to you? To your neighborhood vampire it probably means something different. How about to the prospector mining gold?

Send us something that you haven’t overcooked!

Submissions close on July 5, 2026; the issue publishes SEPTEMBER 1, 2026.

OSP members are featured in an issue of MiniMAG!–curated and compiled by OSP founding member Anthony Doyle.

The Art of Storytelling: New Perspectives on Old Fairy Tales

Published on by Nadja MarilLeave a comment

By Nadja Maril

Perhaps it was the illustrations that captivated me when I’d pour through the fairytale books, the dragons and the princesses with long gowns and tresses, but of all the picture books in my room when I was a young child, I liked the fairytales the best.

I can still remember many of those books, the way they looked with their ornate borders and their detailed portraits of the handsome Puss N’ Boots or the angry face of Rumpelstiltskin as he stamps hard enough to crash through a floor and into oblivion. Styles evolve and change, and the animated images of the Walt Disney studios who’ve popularized many fairy tales by converting them into cartoon movies, don’t have the same depth of detail as those old illustrations. I love the old woodcut and color plate illustrations, but many contemporary artists add new magic and perspective to an old story.  When you read a fairytale or any story for that matter, the possibilities for elaboration are endless.

“Happily Ever After” isn’t always the case in some of the Hans Christian Anderson Tales, such as “The Red Shoes” and “The Little Mermaid.”  But as fairy tales have been told and retold so many times, multiple versions circulate. Children today probably have no idea that the original “Little Mermaid” is a tragic story of desire and loss. The little mermaid was unable to permanently become a human. Her attempts at transformation cause her to lose her life as a mermaid. What remains, is her hope that one day she’ll become part of the eternal universe.

In the hands of the Disney writing team, however, “The Little Mermaid,” became a story about family conflict, friendship, love, and fulfillment. The result is a story with a happy ending.

What story would you like to write?

But that’s okay, because fairy tales are part of our oral tradition and why not use the familiar tropes from our childhood as building blocks to create new stories or retell old ones. I think it is important to remember and learn from what went before. However, the stories of our lives keep evolving. So, what story would you like to tell?

To get you started, I’m sharing the work of several writers who were and still are inspired by fairy tales.

Many poetry enthusiasts will probably be familiar with the poem “Goblin Market “by Victorian era British poet Christina Rossetti(1830-1894). It utilizes the folklore of goblins to set the scene with lines like these:

"Pricking up her golden head:
"We must not look at goblin men
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen."

To read the entire poem and learn more about Christina Rossetti, click here.

Another writer, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) took fairy tales as a launching point to reimagine social norms.

American poet Anne Sexton is considered a pivotal figure in the confessional poetry movement that emerged in the mid-20th century. Her work holds nothing back as it shares her personal struggles. Themes she explores include: mental illness, sexuality, and the complexities of womanhood. Her poetry collection Transformations contains seventeen poems inspired by Grimm Fairy Tales, that include Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and CInderella, that challenged the prevailing norms of her times. I highly recommend adding this volume of poetry, the contents of which are unavailable online, to your library.

“The Cinder Girl Burns Brightly” by Theodora Goss is a different take on the Cinderella fairytale, told in poetry. Hungarian American author Theodora Goss (1968–) is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poetry and essays, and more of her work can be accessed at this link.

And finally I share a short story by American writer Michael Cunningham, famous for his novel The Hours, this little story, Wild Swan is inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale “The Wild Swans.” Brilliantly he takes the premise of the original story and creates an alternate re-telling set in modern times that focuses on one of the enchanted princes.

Need a writing prompt? Just read a favorite fairytale and think about how you’d like to retell it differently or take just one character or element and spin it into a poem or story.

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Nadja Maril is an award winning writer and poet who has been published in dozens of online and print literary journals and anthologies including: Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, Invisible City Literary Review, Instant Noodles and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is the author of Recipes From My Garden, published by Old Scratch Press (September 2024), a Midwest Review California Book Watch Reviewer's Choice. An Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at USM.