Tamara Kaye Sellman

Tamara Kaye Sellman lives in Kitsap County, that mossy netherland rife with wild mushrooms, pileated woodpeckers, and blackberry brambles situated one ferry ride across the Puget Sound from Seattle. Some days she wonders if she sees Baba Yaga in the woods, or if, in fact, she is Baba Yaga. Hers is a house of imagination where dance, music, independent film, music, writing, and home arts happen as if that’s normal for everybody. She recently retired from work in sleep technology, patient education, healthcare journalism, and community health advocacy to devote her time to such creative pursuits.

Her published works (poetry, fiction, journalism, and essays) have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize or have earned other awards or distinctions. Some places where you can find her work include Crab Creek Review, Gargoyle, Literary Mama, Lowestoft Chronicle, The Nervous Breakdown, NonBinary Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Rosebud, Spoon River Poetry Review, Terrain, and Weber: The Contemporary West. Her work has also been anthologized, most recently in True Stories: The Narrative Project Volume VI (2023). See https://www.rhymeswithcamera.com for a full list.

Her first book, Intention Tremor (MoonPath Press, 2021) collects poetry and prose forms documenting her life following her multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2013. She is currently at work transforming the pieces from this book into experimental films to expand their accessibility to the hearing and vision impaired. (And because it’s fun.)

Aside from traditional creative writing, she pursues other forms of expression now that her nest is empty of her two badass daughters. These include the aforementioned experimental short filmmaking, ten-minute play scripting, photography, devised theater, and digital collage.

She studied Journalism (magazine editing and production) at Columbia College Chicago (’90) and continues to have a love for boutique publishing projects. Between 1998 and 2008, Tamara published the online literary anthology, Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism. Later, in 2018-2019, she ran a limited quarterly anthology, Vitamin ZZZ. Currently, she is preparing to launch MCR Media, which will serve as both a micropress for speculative written works and an independent media space dedicated to quirky poetry films, digital collage (video and print), and whatever other experiments come her way.

She is fond of speculative narratives, from dystopic and post-apocalyptic science fiction to psychological horror, from climate fiction and ecofeminist narratives to magical realism and contemporary fairy tale. She also loves feminist storytelling in all its forms.

Lifelong literary influences include Ray Bradbury, JRR Tolkien, Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Katherine Dunn, Franz Kafka, Sherwood Anderson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Louise Erdrich, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Aimee Bender, Keri Hulme, and the tales of Scheherazade.

She previously organized writing conferences for Field’s End in the mid-2000s and currently serves as a member at large on the programming committee for the Cascade Writers Workshop. She reads manuscripts for Nimrod International and is currently guest editor for Crab Creek Review.

When she’s not telling stories or writing poems, she reads, hikes, kayaks, camps, makes good trouble, and puts up food from her neglected garden, all while trying to crack the Washington State Ferries’ notorious schedule codex, which, if she can do so, might actually prevent the arrival of End Times.

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Watch the trailer for Cul de Sac Stories