About John B. Rosenman



Me,  Myself, and I: A Personal Profile john4.jpg
John B. Rosenman

In 1952, when I was eleven, I sat in a theater watching “The War of the Worlds”. When the scene came in which three men
were left alone with a smoldering meteor that started to unscrew, I got scared to death. What was in that meteor? What would it look like and do? It took all my courage to stay in my seat and not run. Originally I wanted (implausibly) to be an opera star, but I think that movie, plus others like “Them!” and “The Thing,” influenced me to follow a more gruesome path. Also, I became addicted to horror comics such as “Tales From The Crypt”. Around this time, a friend introduced me to Bradbury and Matheson, and I quickly devoured”The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man,” “I Am Legend,” and “The Shrinking Man.” These books lived inside me, fired my imagination. I’ll never forget the episode in “Chronicles” in which Earthmen discover a town on Mars with all their dead loved ones WAITING FOR THEM.

Besides enjoying such movies, comics, and books, I received Poe’s collected works from a family friend. Even better, was a birthday gift–a year’s subscription to “Amazing”! Looking back, I find it’s not easy to determine just when my psychic twig received its first weird bent. Much earlier, when I was seven, I loved to turn the lights out, go to bed early, and listen to “The Shadow” and other programs on the radio.  In the dark, my imagination swept me along in ways that even later TV shows like “Thriller” couldn’t match. Who knows, perhaps my original ‘warping’ took place listening to such eerie tales, or even earlier–in the womb!

Oddly, while I liked creepy books, I went through stages when I read primarily other genres. First it was mysteries, especially those by Ellery Queen. Then in my early teens, I read enough westerns to die of lead poisoning. It’s not always easy to look back and trace a clear path to the present, perhaps because there isn’t one.

But one thing I always did like to do was write. As a little kid, I scribbled stories and drew cartoon panels in crayon rather than go out to play. Later, I crafted a never-ending novel with a fistfight every ten pages. Nope, “The Twisted Years” wasn’t about a psychopath but a gunslinger with a tough childhood. I still remember that masterful first sentence: “Jeff Stancher didn’t pay any attention to the Abilene stage as it bumped and rattled into town.”

In 1982 I was hired by Norfolk State University and moved to Virginia with my wife Jane and two kids. And here, my life changed forever, for I discovered SPWAO and the small press. For two decades I’d collected umpteen rejection slips by submitting stuff to blueblood magazines like The New Yorker and The Sewanee Review. Now I learned there were other, spikier magazines whose editors actually gave you feedback. If you were unendingly persistent (and I was!), you could serve an apprenticeship and polish your craft. I’ve since sold H/SF/F fiction (and a little poetry) to over 150 magazines.

I’ve served as the editor of Norfolk State’s litmag, The Rhetorician, as well as a contributing editor/reviewer of horror poetry for John Betancourt’s horror newsmagazine. I was also the editor of Horror Magazine, and an editor for Dark Regions. My pet project, an anthology of virtual-reality fiction, was published by Dark Regions Press. In 1992 I finally bought a PC and later got online (my internet address is jroseman@cox.net.) I’ve sold electronically to Through The Corridor, Radius, Gothic.Net, Bedlam: Memoirs From Padded Cells, Chiaroscuro, At The Brink of Madness, Peridot Books, Winedark Sea, Alexandria Digital Literature, Outside, and elsewhere. Getting a computer, incidently, has completely changed the way I write. I no longer do it on a yellow legal pad while lying in bed, but type directly onto my monitor. Partly as a result of joining the computer generation, I became an active member of HWA and SFWA, and have been a guest at both Sci-Con and Balticon. For two years (1998-1999), I was Chairman of the Board of HWA (Horror Writers Association).