Author of "Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories" (2008 Lambda Literary Finalist); "Skin Deep Magic" (2014 Lambda Literary Finalist); "Bereft" (2013 Bronze Moonbeam Award and 2014 Independent Publishers' Award) "The Nectar of Nightmares" (Dim Shores Chapbook) and A Spectral Hue (2019)
Fellow college alum Michael Dorfman pointed me to this fascinating 2010 article written by Joe Hagan about the mercurial Nina Simone. The article, entitled I Wish I Knew How To Be Free, uses Simone’s secret diary entries to cast light upon this talented but troubled woman.
Struggles with her identity, her marriage, her career and her sexuality are all revealed. It’s heart-breaking and illuminating.
Coalrose, one of my stories in my forthcoming collection is about a character loosely based on Simone. Zoe Coalrose is a kind of dark muse to the marginalized in magical realist/historical piece.
Yesterday, I went to the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art, and was entranced by the one piece in their collection by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. I immediately went home to research her, and I was astounded.Her work mixes paint and collage and she has a darkly whimsical aesthetic. Myth and the grotesque mingle in fantastic ways in her work, that examines Race and Gender.
The good folks at Rebel Satori Press have accepted my as-yet untitled collection of dark fantasy/weird fiction. No firm dates yet, but it will be out sometime in 2014. This is a themed collection; all of the stories have black/African-descended protagonists. Some of the pieces are “in conversation” with art, literature and social issues. Inspirations include the art work of Kara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems, the film Looking for Langston by Isaac Julien, among other influences.
The official return of fall–my favorite season–is not until next week. But the cooler weather crept back last night. For some reason, Bel Canto’s song Picnic on the Moon reminds me of this time of year.
Rickie Lee Jones is, in her own, as bizarre an artist as Bjork. She is uncategorizable. Is she a jazz chanteuse, adding her own spin to the American Songbook? Is she a confessional singer-songwriter like Laura Nyro? She has been a neo-beat ingenue, the female answer to Tom Waits. Her music spans from jazzy, bluesy folk-rock to big band to R&B. Her albums have been all covers and at one point, trip-hop. She is an intrepid musical experimenter who willfully ignores genre classifications.
The Weird Beast
My favorite songs of her, though, are esoteric and hermetic. Her masterpiece, Pirates, closes with two weird songs, “Traces of the Western Slope” and “The Returns.” “Traces…” is a long, dark trip through an urban hell peopled with jailbait girls, gangs, junkies and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe that seems to be a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice. The music is spooky jazz-tinged funk and has no real formal song structure. “The Returns” is an icy ballad as terrifying as anything on Nico’s The Marble Index. On the next album,The Magazine, “Deep Space: An Equestrienne in the Circus of the Falling Star” is a Satie-esque piano ballad full of metaphysical imagery (“the Lord’s face is an all-night cafe”). That album ends with a triptych of songs collectively called Rorschachs. The songs include an instrumental (an Italian classical guitar piece called “Theme for the Pope”); a spoken word piece about childhood memories (“The Unsigned Painting”) and disturbing song about being haunted by an living Id/Demon—(“The Weird Beast”).
Craig Laurance Gidney 
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