About

Michael R. Clark was born in Washington, D.C. in 1972, and grew up in suburban Maryland.  He has been writing poems since he was young, hammering out imitations of Shel Silverstein on his mother's manual Smith-Corona typewriter and posting them on the wall of his sixth grade classroom.  He took his first writing workshops in middle school, and has been learning in the workshop setting ever since.  He has taught writing to elementary school students, college upperclassmen, and senior citizens.  His work has appeared in journals like River Styx, Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, and Poet Lore, and in many online publications.

He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland (1997), and a PhD in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi (2000).  He has taught in high school and at the university level since he took his doctorate. 

He was the first editor of the revived Little Patuxent Review, an arts journal in Columbia, Maryland, and edited the biannual issues of the magazine from 2006 until 2010.

In 2008, he and his wife Rebecca took their two young children to Singapore, where they both taught English at the Singapore American School.

In 2021, the family moved to the Czech Republic, where Michael took on the role of Middle and Upper School librarian and innovation teacher at the International School of Prague.

Aftet two years in Prague, the Clarks returned to Singapore and are again teaching English and Language Arts at Singapore American School.

About Vast Cyclopean Vistas: My Monster Blog

"Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters: Cthulhu fhtagn."

—H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

This blog is all about monsters, creatures, critters, imaginary beings, demons, spirits, and phantasms. It is meant to blend the various genres and subcultures that produce and study monsters: literature, role playing games, comics, movies, TV, folklore, cryptozoology...if it's monstrous, it's here.

I want to bring together reviews, essays, lists, images, sounds, videos, links—anything related to an obsession I've had all my life.

It started with dinosaurs when I was very young...then books like Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls, Tales of Magic and Enchantment, and TV shows like Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. Then movies—Godzilla, Ray Harryhausen, King Kong. In 1981 my best friend's older brother got a copy of the Blue Book Basic Dungeons & Dragons. I was hooked then, and since have collected every version of the Monster Manual published, even though I don't play any more. Then I got the Grenadier Box Set "Dwellers Below" and the world of miniature painting opened up to me; now I have thousands of figures. I have a library of dozens of books about monsters, ranging from Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings to Vincent Price's Monsters with so many in between.

And now, as my own kids grow up, they have become fascinated with monsters too. I started this blog to document and archive the amazing world that lives on my bookshelf, in my DVD library, and in my own imagination.

Any copyrighted material appearing in this blog is used for review purposes only. I do not claim copyright of any image, text, or other material.