In December 2020, my poem “A World in Seven Flames,” was published in the anthology Twilight Worlds: Best of New Myths Volume II. It’s been a long road to get here, particularly because 2020 held up the publication process. But I am so excited to finally get to share this poem with you. And here is the story behind this poem.
In April 2016, my short story “Dissonance” was published by Abyss and Apex. “Dissonance” takes place in a fantasy world where each person has a magical connection with a specific instrument, and the music they create with their instrument, called their Harmony, gives the Phoenix who carries their world the strengthen to carry them through another year.
By the time “Dissonance” was published, I had already written four more stories set in this world and was planning more. In these stories I was diving deeper into this world, figuring out what was real and what was myth and prejudice and writing stories around that. But by the summer of 2016, just before I started law school, I wanted to delve much deeper into the world and particularly the mythos of the Phoenix.
So “A World in Seven Flames” started as a worldbuilding exercise. I wanted to write that could be almost a piece of a religious text within the world, not just a poem about the world. I started with the idea in “Dissonance” that the old Phoenix had died and a new Phoenix had risen after a hundred days of darkness. So the Phoenix in “Dissonance” and the other stories I was working on was not the first Phoenix.
From there, I devised the idea of seven Phoenixes and the higher deities of Mother Flame and Father Song. I wrote the poem starting from the third Phoenix, which is when I decided “Dissonance” took place. I then worked backward to the Phoenix before, which I knew a little about from “Dissonance” and the history I’d included before that. I then went back to the first Phoenix, and only then did I go forward to the rest of the Phoenixes. Only at the end of the poem did I have the idea to center the poem as taking place at the end of the third Phoenix’s life, both looking back and looking ahead. This was partly because while I was writing this poem I was also planning a number of other short stories in this world that I was able to use to situate the poem.
I used to write a lot of poetry. I would say my poetry writing peak was my summer at the Kenyon Review Young Writer’s Workshop my sophomore year of college. I wrote a lot of poems I really liked, but after that I didn’t write any more poetry. The poetry I was reading in high school and college just seemed so sophisticated compared to the beautiful nature poems I liked writing. So I stopped. I’d never considered trying to get any of my poetry published, and I had never tried my hand at speculative poetry before this poem. When I wrote “A World In Seven Flames,” I expected it to be something for me, some fun background I could include in the short stories I was working on. But I wound up so proud of the final product I had to try to publish it, and here we are.
I hope you enjoyed “A World in Seven Flames” and the rest of the Twilight Worlds anthology. I’m so glad New Myths decided to include it in their anthology. And I hope I have more Phoenix stories to share with you soon.
One more fun fact: There are fourteen stanzas in “A World in Seven Flames,” and each stanza has either fourteen or seven lines, because I was having fun making everything a multiple of seven in the structure of this poem.