Pg. 11 — Origin Story
Special thanks to everyone at The Martian Diaries, an award-winning trilogy written by H. E. Wilburson as a sequel to The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The media & marketing director there, Anita Dow, has generously provided this and other of our literary journals with very much appreciated social media attention that has helped us gain some traction in the literary community online and to build our Twitter platform (please follow us @StarshipSloane). As well, the spirit of collegiality is greatly appreciated.
Special thanks to those of you (Schumacher, Brown, Dunphy, Van Camp, Gage, Trade, St. Claire, Grey, Stevenson, and Lebansky) who were with us for the inaugural issue of The Starlight SciFaiku Review and are here with us again for the inaugural issue of The Flying Saucer Poetry Review! Your contributions are very much appreciated.
Special thanks to old friend and the editor of Phantom Drift, Dr. Matt Schumacher, for his invaluable advice and enthusiastic spirit of support in this publishing venture.
Thank you to all contributors to this journal! It is the product of an international collaboration, with work accepted from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The work of these contributors have been nominated for some prestigious awards in poetry, including the Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Awards, Elgin Awards, and the 2020 Australian Shadows Awards (Australian Horror Writers Association); and have received multiple awards, including first prize at the 1997 UCD visual arts society exhibition, 2008 Best Poem of the Year (Preditors & Editors Readers’ Poll), and the 2018 Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award (Haiku Society of America).
As well, thanks to the inclusion of various combinations of this publishing house and its literary journals in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Association’s (SFPA) Speculative Poetry Markets list, in Duotrope, in Authors Publish and most recently, in the Publisher Directory of the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), we have seen a significant increase in submissions. It is an accomplishment to be listed by these organizations and is evidence that this publishing house is beginning to establish itself.
Regarding my search for points in the arc, I find the following to be an interesting connection, involving return contributor John J. Dunphy. John had written a highly controversial article, “A Religion for a New Age,” which appeared in the January-February 1983 issue of the Humanist magazine. Sometime thereafter, the article was quoted from in a speech by a ruffled President Reagan. Later, in 1987, during a wonderfully bizarre moment in his speech before the United Nations, Reagan spoke longingly of the world unity that he believed would occur if aliens were to invade Earth (I see the influence of H. G. Wells at play here). I think that John’s work was destined to appear in the first-ever literary journal devoted exclusively to poetry and art about the UFO phenomenon — further yet, a journal that has been boosted by The Martian Diaries! It’s all a bit convoluted, I know, but I actually think of it as being some form of synchronicity — maybe this is why I routinely get my social membership card revoked — and after all, Jung did state that the tendency to make these connections is a healthy function of one’s mind (unless, of course, it happens within the context of psychosis).
