A Sonnet Called "The Family Curse"

     The latest issue of Space & Time magazine, #145, has a sonnet by me lurking within its pages. I wrote it, I'm afraid, mostly to be ornery.

     I swear, the history of art in general would have a lot fewer pages if it weren't for artists who, being told something shouldn't be done, set out to do it anyway just to show 'em. I mean, really, the only reason I've been doing my two webcomics for all these years is 'cause I can't draw. If I could scratch out a picture of a squirrel that actually looked like a squirrel, I can't imagine I'd have stuck with the picture-drawing thing for as long as I have. It's just sheer cussedness on my part that keeps me going, a bone-deep desire to yell at the world, "Yeah, I can't draw, but here's some pictures anyway! So there!"

     It's also why I write talking animal stories after being told that editors aren't interested in such juvenile material, and why I write formal poetry after being told that editors aren't interested in the old rhyming and rhythmic stuff. I'm apparently a very "thumb in your eye" kinda person.

     In this case, I enrolled in a poetry-writing workshop over the summer organized by Angela Yuriko Smith, the editor of Space & Time, and she, along with the other three instructors, engaged now and then in some good-natured ribbing at the expense of sonnets. Their point—and the whole reason I was taking the workshop—had to do with the way that poetry is more than counting syllables and straining a sentence's grammar to push the rhyming word to the end the line. And I actually wrote a couple pieces during the workshop that I would call poetry even though they didn't rhyme or scan.

     More about that, I hope, before the end of the year...

     But it also got my dander up and made me determined to sell Ms. Smith a sonnet for her magazine. And now I have!

                                                  Mike