Announcements

The Arctic Circle Residency!

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I just realized I got so excited about starting all the things for the Arctic Circle Residency, I hadn’t posted to my regular site about it yet, whoops!

I was accepted to a very competitive residency for April of 2027 where I will be spending 2 weeks on a sailing ship on the Arctic sea with 30 scientists and artist as we experiment and creator our way around the polar ice cap. It is a dream come true, one I’ve had since I can remember, and it’s also a very expensive dream, though it costs lest than doing this as a tourist, thankfully.

My goal with this residency is to produce a book of photography, watercolor, and words from the trip, highlighting the feral beauty of the harsh landscape. I also plan to embrace the full nosiness of my true nature and interview everyone whether scientist, artist, crew, or guide. I want to know everything about what it’s like to spend so much time in such an isolated place, I want to know what the scientists are investigating, and I want to dive into the way each creative experiences the world. This will provide story kernels for a long time, and I can’t wait.

If you want to follow along my residency journey, I’ve actually started a separate blog to keep things easy for folks to follow at www.creatingelsewhere.com. I’m hoping to turn this into a space not only to talk about creating while traveling, but also to document how I approached applying for residencies and grants so folks get an open door look at that process.

I’m also fundraising like crazy as it costs about $12,000 for this residency including travel and gear at a minimum, so there’s a GoFundMe and I’m looking for corporate sponsors who would like to provide gear or fiscal support in return for acknowledgement and publicity. I’m also booking teaching gigs like crazy, working events both as a tarot teller at Hallowe’en-aissance on Halloween (yay spooky season!) and in my capacity as the new Poet Laureate for ShoreLake Arts doing Instant Poetry (just add ideas!) for their Winter Market on November 21st.

It’s times like this I bemoan the loss of old-school patrons of the arts. I’d happily spend hours doing portraiture of rich d*cks if it got me the money to work on my writing and go on research trips like this regularly. I’ve spent hours combing the internet for foundations and grants and have a handful I can apply for, but there isn’t a ton out there for independent artists that isn’t geographically bound, but at least I’ve found a few to go after. Just means if I ever get rich, I know what I want to do: revive (healthy) patronage. Just like I’m on a mission to revive the 1920’s concept of the salon where fun people get together to talk about cool topics.

Anyway, if you’ve been wondering where I disappeared to, the answer is: working on WorldCon programming for LAcon for this past summer and then diving into fundraising for this trip. Next year is shaping up to be awesome.

Featured on NPR

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Since I became the local expert in Elsie Olmstead, I’ve had a few folks reach out to chat, but this might be the most fun one yet. KUOW reporter Kate Walters contacted me as she was working on a small feature about Elsie for the 90th anniversary of the fall of Prohibition and we had a lovely long conversation. You can listen to the story here on the KUOW site, or on their app!

Elsie posing in front of a 1926 microphone, holding a book of fairy tales. Her hair is in tight waves against her head and she is wearing a drop-waist 1920 flapper dress.

It definitely inspired me to keep working on the projects involving her stories, including a play she features in, a historical fiction novel, and an essay about the facts we can solidly identify about the rumors surrounding her. I hope to have some updates about those soon!

I’m in a new collection!

/ Rebecca Demarest / 1 Comment

Hey all! One of my absolute favorite stories got picked up for a YA Collection called Paradoxical Pets, which features stories about weird and unusual pets, with a definite sci-fi or fantasy setting. My story is Redgie’s origin story, a super smart octopus sidekick in a longer work I’ve been puttering around for a long time. Right now, they’re doing a pre-order of the collection through Kickstarter, and you should totally order your copy now! Don’t worry, the collection gets published whether they reach their goal or not, this just helps defray the cost of the brilliant illustrator they got who put together wonderful images of our pets. I can’t wait to see mine!

And look at this cover! How can you say no to that…

http://kck.st/3ehlLeP

Belated Updates

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Hello all! So sorry I haven’t been communicative the last little bit, but whoo boy have I been dealing with a lot! I’ll make a post following up on these things individually, but here’s the summary:

First, Less Than Charming launched in May, and the party was fabulous. And I went to the National Storytelling Festival to promote it, which was a ton of fun.

Second, Zosozo in Oz, the second of the Ozite Cycle novellas, is done and live! You can get your copy now from the usual sources.

Third, I am now teaching classes at the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a wonderful writing center for grade-school aged kids in Seattle. This October and November I will be teaching a NaNoWriMo bootcamp, and I’ll be posting the course materials and lessons here at the same time to help anyone who wants some pointers for writing 50,000 words in a month.

Fourth, a large part of the reason I’ve not been updating my website much is because I’ve been dealing with a lot of health stuff over the last few years, and it had gotten particularly difficult to keep doing everything, but I finally have a diagnosis! After 5 years of specialist visits and non answers, I have a few diagnoses that explain *gestures to all of me.* I’ll have more details down the way because I think some people might benefit from education on these topics.