Droids & Dragons Author, Clay Franklin Johnson

Pub 518 welcomes back Clay F. Johnson, author and poet to the Droids and Dragons team. Clay started writing about 11 years ago and never looked back.

"Attempting to describe the year that inspired me to start writing would be akin to the trials of Atlas and call back to my mind miserable memories that I’d much rather forget.  Without going into too much detail, I truly began writing properly during the first week of January 2015 while riding the Metro into DC toward a soulless career that specialized in bureaucracy and sycophantic deference — I won’t deny that the train’s arrival each morning came with momentary ideas of Kareninian despair.  It was an incredibly difficult time in my life, and, while experiencing the strangely inspiring effects of a half-depressed, half-asleep delirium on my early morning train rides, writing poems (bloody awful sonnets, to be sure) became my daily ritual.  A year later I had my first publication, and I’ve been writing obsessively ever since.  Below is a biographical note that includes some of my publication history as well as my website and social media channels."

Clay is a well-published poet with his first book, A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (Gothic Keats Press, 2021), an illustrated collection of poetry inspired by his incurable passion for Romanticism, all things Gothic, folklore, and place and landscape.  "I was honored to have several poems within the collection first appear in 518 Publishing’s Influence of the Moon (2019), including “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey”, a poem that still holds a special place in my heart.  My first novel is forthcoming in 2027/28."

In December 2024, Clay’s poem “The Faery Wood” won the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for the Brian Nisbet Poetry Award in Huntly, Scotland.  His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, Elgin Award, received Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year, and has appeared in publications such as Nightingale & Sparrow, The Fairy Tale Magazine, Ghost Orchid Press, Eternal Haunted Summer, Abyss & Apex, Gramarye, and the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), among others.  Some of his writing recently appeared in Fairies: A Companion (2025), published by Peter Lang Oxford, and his poem “Reflections by the Sea”, partly inspired by Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, was shortlisted for the Artemesia Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in their anthology in 2026. 

The title of Clay's piece for 518 Publishing’s Droids & Dragons anthology is “A Relic of Dragonalia: A Conversation Poem”. "It is terribly difficult for me to write about, or even contemplate, but the poem was inspired by, written for, and dedicated to Ali (1974-2025), someone beloved to me who tragically died in December 2025.  We hadn’t spoken in years, but in September 2025, after a series of unfortunate events that occurred in my life in rather quick succession, I decided to write her a long letter telling her how happy I was for her that she was successful, seemingly happy, had a beautiful family, and that in all these years of silence I had never once forgotten her.  Less than three months later she was gone and gone forever.  I will never know if she read my letter."

The poem’s freer form and somewhat prose-like style is unusual for Clay.  "I tend to write poetry in a more traditional, formalized structure, paying close attention to metrical schemes and stanzaic form — one of my favorites to use is a variation of the Spenserian stanza.  However, as I began writing the piece, brooding on Ali and the manner of her death, I found that composing it in my normal style and method was simply impossible; I just couldn’t do it.  Although I wrote the majority of my poem rather quickly in an almost single breath of thought, I took much inspiration from the “conversation poems” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), especially “The Eolian Harp” and “Frost at Midnight”.

Lastly, the “relic” in the poem actually did exist.  I based it on a little dragon figurine that Ali had bought me as a gift at the Maryland Renaissance Festival (also called the Renn Fest).  It was made of either glass or crystal and it was a most curious shade of green, a favorite color of mine — although that beautiful shimmer of green did not magically change with the seasons as I described in my poem, it did indeed appear different when held beneath certain light.  I kept the little dragon for many years, packed away in some unknown box in some unknown location.  Unfortunately, after a difficult move two years ago, I found the box and discovered the dragon within a small velvet bag, broken in two."

Here is a beautiful snippet from 'A Relic of Dragonalia: A Conversation Poem' that will sink into your heart.

I never told you (O how could I?), and now I never can,

but I saw your Tolkienian fire-Drake years ago,

the graphite-pen watercolor scorched on Bristol board of bone-white

titled “Dragon for Lulu”, — one day she’ll treasure it, don’t worry —

redolent of those wingèd Germanic fire-breathers, serpent-birds

of Hell’s paradise who bejeweled the Northumbrian night skies,

comet-like they set the still night on fire, dripped dragon-sickness

of hoarded gold and glistening-wet jewels.

O how I’ve treasured this gift, either gemstone or dragon-bone,

this curious creation of so many shades of green: velvet-soft jade

in the spring, and musical just before Beltane the way fairy-flower

bluebells sing; emerald-dark in the autumn as the shadows lengthen for Samhain,

and almost black as bloodstone in December with flakes of red;

in the sunshine it sparkled like a chrome-green opal or pearl;

in the cold moonlight it glowed a ghostly pale green, otherworldly,

and in the night’s silence it seemed to whisper

of voices unheard, of shapes unseen.

We asked Clay what his favorite book was and like most, couldn't name just one. "It is impossible for me to choose only one book.  Instead, I will list two books that I’ve read thus far in 2026 that have particularly inspired me — both of these books I’ve read before."

"Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë — "I first read Emily’s Gothic masterpiece many years ago in my youth, but I was far too young and inexperienced at the time to fully appreciate the literary brilliance of the story, which is interesting considering Emily was only in her late twenties when she wrote it.  I began rereading Wuthering Heights this year in the dark month of January, made unbearably darker by the tragedy of December.  I’m not one for spoilers so I won’t be specific, but certain parts of the novel were heartbreakingly similar to what had just occurred in my life (even details of the past and a particular number of years were accurate), all of which made this one of the most emotionally difficult books I’ve ever read.  Although the novel spoke to me in ways few novels have (or probably ever will), Emily Brontë, for me, above all else, has always been and always will be the writer of beautifully Gothic, melancholic poetry, and, as someone who’s been writing poetry obsessively these past ten years (much of it tinctured with Gothic themes of death, decay, haunting regret, obsessive brooding, madness, and all things uncanny and phantasmal), I recognized almost immediately that Wuthering Heights was written by the brilliant mind of a writer who considered herself a poet first.  Coincidently, shortly after finishing the novel, I came across a recently published essay by Dr. Claire O’Callaghan titled “How Wuthering Heights was shaped by Emily Brontë’s gothic poetry”.  It’s a rare treat indeed for me to read essays about my beloved writers and poets in which the author’s ideas and conclusions perfectly fit my own, but Dr. O’Callaghan did just that, writing that Emily’s novel “stands apart from other Victorian novels precisely because it was crafted by a poet who never ceased thinking in verse. Its windswept moors, restless spirits, and love that defies death were first imagined in poetry, where snow falls endlessly over the cold earth and love endures beyond the grave.”

To find out more about Clay, check out his website, www.clayfjohnson.com, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

'A Relic of Dragonalia: A Conversation Poem' is a loving and heartbreaking poem, and you can find it in the 2026 anthology, Droids & Dragons. It's now available on Amazon and other platforms.