Chris Howard loves to create, primarily with words. As an army brat, he grew up all over: Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Indiana, Presidio of San Francisco, France, Germany, and Japan. He’s now settled in coastal New Hampshire with his wife and two wonderful kids. He’s a writer who also paints, working in pen and ink, watercolor, and digital formats. Chris has blogged steadily since 2004, mostly on writing, art, Aristotle and technology. Seaborn is his first novel.

In 2006, as my friend Vylar Kaftan was planning her wedding, she kept having horrible visions. What if there was a storm? Or lightning struck the groom? Or she suffered spontaneous human combustion?

That summer, Vylar and I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, a fundraiser for the workshop. Writers take pledges for marathon writing, much the same way that people take pledges for walk-a-thons. During the write-a-thon, Vylar organized an exchange in which several writers contributed first lines to stories they didn’t intend to write. I submitted “The trouble with claiming to be a shapeshifter is someone eventually expects you to prove it.” In exchange, I received the line Vylar had written: “The wedding went well until the bride caught fire.”

“The Holy Spirit’s ‘endless speaking’ seemed to me an apt metaphor for the patriarchal/phallocentric discourse in which Western culture is so embedded. It informs the basic assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman…“ Over the next few weeks we’re rolling out some new features at Fantasy Magazine. One that we’re [...]

I’m not so much into labeling things and dividing things neatly and slotting them in here and there and trying to align them as though they are pieces of something purchased from Ikea, but acknowledge that people are pretty reductive, as are marketing gurus, so it’s something pretty inevitable. Stephanie Campisi, author of Painting Walls [...]

I don’t seem to be able to write anything that isn’t intensely personal. I can’t detach myself that far. …in all my longer fiction I find the characters reach a point where they mutiny, take over, and sail off with the story, while I’m keelhauled in its wake. Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of The Promise, was [...]

I miss the quick jaggedness of my beloved Ithaca, NY. I miss snow and sleet and sliding off the road into ditches and waiting for the tow truck while my nose freezes off. I miss old hippie ladies with long gray braids standing on street corners with sandwich boards proclaiming love. Rebecca Epstein, author of [...]