Part of me suspects it has more to do with academic nepotism than anything else, but then another part of me turns around and says, no, look at the deep academic ties and experience many members of the spec-po crowd have. And then I'm back at square one again and I have a headache.
I'm willing to believe it's partially a matter of different academic ties. I'm trying to think of any speculative poets I know that came out of writing programs rather than other branches of academia and I'm not coming up with any; which may be partly my ignorance, but also proves the point that it's not the dominant mode of the community. I never studied creative writing in college or graduate school. There didn't seem to be any reason to: I was selling stories and poems by my sophomore year, not trying to find my voice. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I would have been channeled into an entirely different set of professional circles if I had, however, which may or may not have precluded publication with speculative markets, but certainly wouldn't have overlapped.
Ditto the clockwork, by the way; I was sending work to mainstream markets as soon as I was sending work anywhere. The Pedestal was the closest that succeeded. Eventually I chalked it up to a deep, deep divide in tastes and approaches, like playing a punk song at a jazz club, but then I read something in The New Yorker that could have been published in Strange Horizons or Stone Telling and I wonder again.
no subject
I'm willing to believe it's partially a matter of different academic ties. I'm trying to think of any speculative poets I know that came out of writing programs rather than other branches of academia and I'm not coming up with any; which may be partly my ignorance, but also proves the point that it's not the dominant mode of the community. I never studied creative writing in college or graduate school. There didn't seem to be any reason to: I was selling stories and poems by my sophomore year, not trying to find my voice. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I would have been channeled into an entirely different set of professional circles if I had, however, which may or may not have precluded publication with speculative markets, but certainly wouldn't have overlapped.
Ditto the clockwork, by the way; I was sending work to mainstream markets as soon as I was sending work anywhere. The Pedestal was the closest that succeeded. Eventually I chalked it up to a deep, deep divide in tastes and approaches, like playing a punk song at a jazz club, but then I read something in The New Yorker that could have been published in Strange Horizons or Stone Telling and I wonder again.