fuonlyknew

The first Bible writer drafts a deal with the Devil.

Attila the Hun learns his punishment’s just begun.

Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein make a monstrous
mistake.

Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp get their unjust deserts.

Hell’s Undertaker goes on holiday.

The Damned Poets Society slams away.

A nameless soul shows Dorothy Parker that fame is a bitch.

 In the underworlds,
injustice always reigns:

Join us and our damnedest poets for the crookedest poetry
festival in perdition where language comes to die and no rhyme goes unpunished.

Stories inside:

Words – Chris Morris

Seven Against Hell – Janet Morris and Chris Morris

Reunion – Nancy Asire

Hell-hounds – Bruce Durham

The Kid with No Name
– Jack William Finley

All Hell to Pay – Deborah Koren

Poetic Injustice – Larry Atchley, Jr.

When You Gaze Into an
Abyss – Matthew Kirshenblatt

Pride and Penance – Tom Barczak

Grand Slam – pdmac

Undertaker’s Holiday
– Joe Bonadonna and Shebat Legion

Red Tail’s Corner – Yelle Hughes

Faust III – Richard Groller

Tapestry of Sorrows
and Sighs – Bill Snider

Haiku d’État – Beth W. Patterson

A Mother’s Heart – Bill Barnhill

We the Furious – Joe Bonadonna

Damned Poets Society
– Michael H. Hanson

All We Need of Hell –
Michael A. Armstrong

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Words by Chris Morris

In the beginning was the Logos, the Word. In the beginning come always the words. Words are the mortar of the mind.

“Look, you!” J the Yahwist, first author of the Old Testament, exhorted empty air, waving her hands about her on a blasted heath encircled by dark and cold.

As in ancient times, this command brings light out of darkness, souls out of nowhere. All the heath fills with them, the detritus of the damned, singing and keening and rhyming aloud at the top of their lungs, each trying to outshout the other: the prolix, the wordy damned of perdition. Here are the teeming illiterati, the poor poets of pride and ignorance, angry and bleating like sheep at the altar, romancers of death, hoping for slaughter, dreaming of surcease.

J would give them peace if she could, but she couldn’t: peace was oblivion, oblivion was escape, and escape was unattainable in hell. Death could be had, and cheap, but never lasted long: no sinning soul could win its way to heaven’s grace.

J’s god reigned as a jealous god, tempestuous; unfair, equivocal. As her skin glowed caramel, neither white nor yellow, brown or black, so her eyes were inconclusively hazel, flecking every color in creation. Like her god on high, set up from eternity before the earth was made, she belonged nowhere in damnation, not to this New Hell nor any other. She was only visiting here. Or so she thought; so she hoped.

“Look, you,” J called a second time aloud, and a thousand heads turned her way; a thousand mouths clamped shut as she began to tell her tale to their minds’ eyes.

Invariably, these words are her signal to infernity that she is ready to begin. Inevitably, those words summon not only story, but the Deceiver, a lord of hell himself.

Sensing joy, incensed by pleasure, now comes Satan, white- winged and glorious, amid his host of fallen angels, circling to land, streaming intolerance and wrath on all the fools below, who howl the more.

At times like these, J misses Solomon. That wise warrior-king (her fellow writer of words worth hearing) would enjoin even such rabble as this to vie with the lords of hell themselves, if she’d but ask him.

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What is something unique/quirky about you?

Together we breed Morgan horses. We consult with Morgan breeders to help them choose crosses to their stock to achieve a desired result.

We are also musicians; Janet plays bass guitar, Chris sings and plays guitar. We have an album on MCA records. Look for Christopher Crosby Morris on Soundcloud or N1M.com

Can you, for those who don’t know you already, tell something about yourself and how you became an author?

Janet wrote her first novel, High Couch of Silistra in 1975; a friend sent it to an agent who chose to represent her; she had already written the second book in the Silistra Quartet and her agent told her not to disclose that until they finalized the contract for the first one. When the publisher learned of the others, Bantam Books bought the succeeding three. When the fourth book was published, the series already had four million copies in print. Suddenly Janet was a novelist specializing in environmental, gender, historical and political subjects. In the process, Chris started as her editor and ultimately a co-writer. Since then, she and Chris have co-authored many books.

Who is your hero and why?

Heraclitus of Ephesus, a pre-socratic philosopher, whose Cosmic Fragments foreshadow our knowledge of reality and how to perceive it. Among his precepts is the statement that change alone is unchanging. We’ve worked Heraclitus’ fragments in here and there throughout our books.

Which of your novels can you imagine being made into a movie?

All of them. We write cinematically, our books are vivid adventures we undertake without knowing the destination.  I, the Sun, The Sacred Band, and Outpassage are particularly suited to film. The Threshold Series is a feast of opportunities for today’s special effects creators.

What inspired you, to create Poets in Hell?

If you are watching the news these days, it’s hard to tell the difference between what we thought of as normal and something a lot worse. Hellish, you might say. We even think of the Hell series as comic relief from our troubled world. We hope you agree.

Advice to writers?

As for advice to writers, here is all we know: write the story you want to read. Start at the beginning, go to the end, and stop. Seriously. From start to finish you must inhabit the construct in a manner that makes the reader choose to continue; if we as writers can’t feel what it’s like being there, our readers can’t either. Close your eyes, look at your feet where they are standing on the story’s ground; tell us what you see. Tell us what you hear. Ask at the end of each paragraph ‘what happens next?’. If you lose touch with it wait until you’re back inside it. Tell the story that comes to you, and from you, to us.

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Christopher Crosby
Morris (born 1946) is an American author of fiction and non-fiction, as
well as a lyricist, musical composer, and singer-songwriter. He is married to
author Janet Morris. He is a defense policy and strategy analyst and a
principal in M2 Technologies, Inc. He writes primarily as Chris Morris, but
occasionally uses pseudonyms.

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