Literary offerings by Tantra Bensko

New book: Equinox Mirror, a Neo-Noir Slipstream illustrated novella from ELJ Publications just out now. Order here. Read about it here. A criminal, occult, dysmorphic landlady with her male alter ego flashing in and out of her mind, travels with her scrying mirror into the future. 

Upcoming: On a panel at &Now Festival of New Writing in March 2015: "a biennial traveling festival/conference that celebrates writing as a contemporary art from: literary art as it is practiced today by authors who consciously treat their work as a process that is aware of its own literary and extra-literary history, that is much more about its form and materials, language, communities, and practice as it is about its subject matter."

Featured reader at Pegasus Books' Lyrics and Dirges series in Berkeley, May 20 2014.

Workshops ongoing through UCLA X Writing Program. Classes have recently ended in Intermediate Short Story Writing and Intro to Fiction -- sign up for Essential Beginnings, and Experimental Fiction.
Course sign up any time: Interstitial Fiction Genres
Course for individuals begin any time: Experimental Fiction at Writers College
Coaching, custom classes, and manuscript editing available

Listen to "Green" (a minute and a half recording.)

WordPress blog Tantra's Genre Fiction, Amazon Author's Page, Tumblr, Insubordinate Books

Newest book Equinox Mirror, an illustrated Slipstream novella, from ELJ Publications

Subscribe to the mailing list to learn about new books.

Chris Moran's review of Tantra's books at HTML GIANT
Interview at Women's Quarterly Conversation
Christopher Higgs interview on Experimental Writing at HTML GIANT
Yuriy Tarnawsky's review at The Collagist
Collapsible Horizon e-book now available

Study Writing or Receive Editing

Read articles, interviews, etc. on the writing throughout the site, and find more information about the classes, coaching, and editing, as well as links to writing suggestions and resources HERE.

Explore the Genre of Experimental Fiction

You can learn about it, enjoy it, puzzle over it, find places to submit, with extensive links to publishers, magazines, grants, contests, articles, and a magazine that explains it with examples. You can also read reviews, articles, interviews, etc. on the topic of Innovative Writing,  HERE.

Genres

Types of stories published in journals, anthologies, and collections: Paranormal, Magical Realist, Slipstream, New Wave Fabulist, Contemporary Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Horror, Strange Tale, Weird, Neo-Noir, Gritty Realist, Literary, Experimental, Quantum, SF, Interstitial, Fabulist, Irreal, Crime. See the Interstitial Genres page for links to several stories divided up among types.

Authors the work is most often compared to: Tom Robbins, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Brautigan, John Barth, Donald Barthleme, Julio Cortezar, Haruki Murakami, Toh Enjoe, Philip K. Dick.

Read or purchase LucidPlay Publishing books

HERE.

Buy Books:

Buy signed print books from author
Collapsible Horizon New literary fiction interwoven short stories 12 dollars plus shipping.
Lucid Membrane (Night Publishing)25 plus shipping for color interior, and 10 plus shipping for B/W.
Equinox Mirror (ELJ Publishing) 18 dollars plus 2 shipping in US, ask about International shipping.
Buy from Amazon:
Collapsible Horizon print
Collapsible Horizon e-book
Equinox Mirror print
Equinox Mirror e-book
Buy Chapbooks:
The Cabinet of What You Don't See ISMs Press
Watching the Windows Sleep Naissance Press
Swinging on the Edge of Day Naissance Press
Buy Some Print Anthologies
Surreal South '09
Women Writing the Weird
Women Writing the Weird II: Dreadful Daughters
Writing Without Walls Subterranea and Naked
North of Wakulla
Redacted
Up, Do Flash Fiction Anthology of Women Writers
Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place
Writing Disorder Anthology II
Looking Back Anthology, Romanian
No Sight for the Saved
Parsec Ink's Triangulation Anthology: Parch
Buy Some Print Magazines:
Cosmopsis
Fabulist
Mystic Signals
Fiction International
Alchemy Review
And/Or (4)
Journal of Experimental Fiction 35
Zymbol

Some of the books and anthologies can be found here: (haven't been keeping it up though)

Membrane: "The analysis revealed objects, shaped like Frisbees or flying carpets, with two spatial dimensions: membranes . . . . The mathematics made clear that all of these entities could vibrate and wiggle, much like strings. . . . For the multiverse story, it is the branes that are central. Using them, researchers have been led by the hand to another variety of parallel universes. . . . In the braneworld scenario, our universe is just one of many that populate the Brane Universe." Brian Green The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

Free Books
E-chapbook of poetry: Liminal, by 10 Pages Press.
Richard Hugo's Use of Sound in Relation to Content in his Poetry A 150 page book of interest to Hugo fans and anyone wanting to learn more about how to make sound amplify meaning in prose or poetry.
Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts Anthology at Paraphilia Press including Kyle Muntz, Marc Lowe, Tom Bradley, Rachel Kendall, J.A. Tyler, and others edited by V. Ulea

The page Interstitial Genres has many links of work online divided into Fabulist styles

Some Stories and Poems in online 
"Lizard Back"
"Frogs" Sein und Werden
"PhotoluminAssence" Poor Mojo's Almanac
"Hairilyzation" Poor Mojo's Almanac sequel to above story
"Mama" In Between Altered States
4 Chapters in Camroc Press Review
"Spring After Rain" Phantasmacore
"Green" in Unlikely Stories
"Projection Theater" in Lorelei Signal will also be in Mystic Signals
"Origami Mafia Story Unfolds" Subtopia
"Ocularity" The Strange and the Curious
Poems Other Voices
"III" in Mad Hatters Review Annual
"Birdie" in Birkensnake
"To Explain the Sasquatch Sitter" in Ten Thousand Monkeys and Southern Hum
"Yard Man" The Cabinet of What You Don't See

Some Novellettes in magazines:
The Inhabitants of Mercy in Retort Magazine
Animals Under the Skin 1 in Bewildering Stories
part 2
part 3
Hairilyzation in Poor Mojo's Amanack
Sleeping with the Clan of Saints in Unlikely Stories
Going Out of Context with the Friends of the New Paradigm in Newtopia A Journal of the New Counterculture

I hope you find something in those links you enjoy. My stories and poems appear in magazines and anthologies thanks also to all the other publications in addition to the links above that have published my work, often multiple times: Carolina Quarterly, Chattahoochie Review, Florida Review, Evergreen Review, NonBinary Review: A Grimm Collection of Modern Fairytales, Camroc Press Review, Medulla Review, The Writing Disorder, Metazen, Birkensnake, Threadcount, Zymbol Magazine, Mississippi Review, Hawaii Review, Axololt,The Strange and the Curious, Zoetic Press's Alice in Wonderland, Cease, Cows, Literary Orphans, Stone Highway Review, Blue Fifth Notebook, Anenome Sidecar, 13 Myna Birds, Egophobia with translation into Romanian) Sun Dog, Innovative Fiction Magazine, Armageddon Buffet, Spittoon, New Dead Families, Counterexample Poetics, Abraxis, California Review, Iowa Review of Literary Studies, MiCrow, Southern Poetry Review, Memphis State Review, Short, Fast, and Deadly, TheNewerYork, Logascene, Pheonix, anthologies from Saturday Night Special and Why There Are Words, Sun Dog, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Lucky Star, Appalachia Quarterly, Florida Review, Colorado State Review, Piedmont Literary Review, Louisville Review, Soma Literary Review, Magaera, Darkness Internal, Rose and Thorn, Newtopia, Cezanne's Carrot, Ten Thousand Monkeys, Mannequin Envy, Rattlesnake Review, Babel, Lit Chaos, Apalachee Quarterly, Spilt Milk, Net Author E2K, Thundersandwich, Dark Romance, Southern Hum, Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts anthology, Emerging Visions, Global Inner Visions, The Angler, Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fiction International, PunkPen, Orion Headless, REM, Dante's Heart, The Fabulist, Samizdat, Evergreen, Mad Hatters Review Magazine, Gone Lawn, A-Minor, WeirdYear, VOX, many Dogcast podcasts, Farther Stars Than These, Ironic Fantastic 1, 2 and 3, Cellar Door III: Hell II anthology, Speculative Fictions, and Red Fez.

Forthcoming:
story in Strange Little Girls anthology Belladonna Publishing
story in Latchkey Tales - Clockwise: The Morning After (Solarwyrm Press)
story in Medusa's Laugh Cadavre Exquis Anthology
story in Ironic Fantastic 4 Anthology (Lewis Carroll tribute)
story in Holdfast Magazine
story in Publishing Genius
story in Imperial Youth Review
a story collection, Yard Man, from Make-Do Publishing

Audio
Listen to exclusive stories at Dog Cast, curated by Dave Migman, of Dog Horn all with my stories in them listed on this page.
"Green" in Unlikely Stories multi-media
"Accidental Voyeur" was in Mad Hatters Review
"Meditation on the Breath" The Change
"Alligator" e-Buffet
"Really" Egophobia
"PhotoluminAssance" Poor Mojo

Video of Recent Readings

Reading Fall Every Way We Can at Writing Without Walls Berkeley
Monastery Dolls Bay Area Generations SF
Drum Naked Writing Without Walls Berkeley
Red Story Come on 7 Chicago
Godhead: Confessional Booth @Now San Diego
Reading at Bernal Literary Series
Samizdat Berkeley

Readings

Upcoming:
On Friends of JEF Books panel at &Now Festival of New Writing March 2015
Lyrics and Dirges, Pegasus, Berkeley, TBA 2015

Featured at these venues recently:
All Hallows Backyard Reading Series, Berkeley
with The Fabulist at Why There Are Words in Sausalito's Studio 333,
at Hotel Rex, SF with Bay Area Generations,
Spice Monkey Cafe for Samizdat, Oakland
n/a gallery, Oakland for Birkensnake,
Bernal Yoga Literary Series, S.F., 
Book Zoo, with Janice Lee and Anna Joy Springer for Dog Horn, Oakland
Writing Without Walls at Subterranean Art House in Berkeley
and Oakland Public Conservatory of Music),
&Now Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever, in San Diego,
Single reader at University Press Books in Berkeley,
Pasaje Rodríguez, with &Now Festival participants, Tijuana
and at the Ballroom of the Chicago Institute of Art in Chicago, AWP, with Lance Olson, Eckard Gerdes, A.D. Jameson, Yuriy Tarnawsky, James R. Hugunin, and Davis Schneiderman.

Honors

Carolina Quarterly -- the Academy of American Poets Award, two awards from Cezanne's Carrot, Punkpen, The Iowa Journal of Literary Studies award, and the Oblongata Award from Medulla Review. Nominated for Pushcart for Redacted, Blue Fifth Review, Rose and Thorn, A-Minor, and Metazen, proudly along with a piece by Richard Thomas. Finalist Flash Mob, short list Glimmertrain, top 100 flashes from Wigleaf for 2013. Bewildering Stories inclusion in Quarterly and Annual Reviews, fiction scholarship offered from IU at South Bend.

Education

Education: During High School, awarded a writing class at a University in Indiana. They offered me a full scholarship based on writing, but the South called instead. University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, then writing classes at Old Dominion in Norfolk, Virginia. BA and MA in English from FSU (Tallahassee, Fl). Later was recruited as "the number one choice" in the MFA program at the University of Iowa Writing Program, earning a living teaching there until graduation.

Teaching

Florida State University 2 years
Memphis State University 2 years
University of Iowa 2 years
UCLA X Writing Program 4 years  -- current-- Intermediate Short Story Writing
Writers College 4 years  -- Experimental Fiction
Alchemy Collective -- beginning monthly classes
Writers.com school upcoming class about Fabulism
Lit Demon class 2014 in New Wave Fabulism
Tantra Bensko's Online Writing Academy 4 years
Birmingham, Alabama school system guest teacher 2011
Kaleidescope program at LeBonneur children's hospital several months