Bradbury, the Midwest and ROSEBUD

Further to my recent post about Rosebud magazine, editor and publisher Rod Clarke has told me a bit more about his background and motivations for starting the magazine, now approaching its twentieth year in print. I was aware of his (and Rosebud's) Wisconsin connection, but I had not worked out how this might connect to Bradbury. This is what Rod tells me:

Having grown up in a small village in the American Midwest, I have always identified with Mr. Bradbury’s work, especially the stories with “October themes,” since I am an October baby, having just turned 65 on October 16th, and I have always been enchanted by the wonderful autumn colors of the Midwest. My wife and I live on 20 acres of rural land in southeast Wisconsin in a 140-year-old farmhouse I heat with wood I cut myself.

I worked for August Derleth’s literary publishing house Stanton & Lee in the eighties, but I never met the man. However his influence, and the inspiration he drew from the Wisconsin land have always stuck with me; in particular the wonderful balance he struck in his work between the natural and the supernatural, fact and fantasy. Derleth, as you know, provided publishing outlets for fantasy, sci-fi and horror writers old and young, including many greats of the Weird Tales crowd, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Bloch, and many more. I would like to think that Rosebud follows Derleth and Bradbury’s independent imaginative literary tradition in the American Midwest . 

Rosebud will celebrate its twentieth year of operation as an independent, self-financed literary magazine in the autumn of 2013.

August Derleth, of course, was behind Arkham House, the first publisher to put out a book by Bradbury: the 1947 short story collection Dark Carnival. Some years later, Bradbury let Dark Carnival slip out of print, and he chose to re-write many of its stories for a revised collection called The October Country - and he dedicated this revised collection to August Derleth.