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Publishing History of “Vox Humana”
Ted Morrissey
For a detailed discussion of the origins of the short story and how it was written, see “Earliest Drafts of the Story.”
“Vox Humana” was first published by the online journal Blue Lake Review June 1, 2018. It was then reprinted when I released Delta of Cassiopeia: Collected Stories and Sonnets in hardcover January 27, 2023; as a Kindle book February 4; and in paperback September 14. All three editions were published by my Twelve Winters Press. The story is also included in How It Works: The Uniqueness of the Short Story, an anthology published by Lee and Penn Publishing in association with the17th International Conference on the Short Story in English (Killarney, Ireland, 2025).
In all editions of Delta of Cassiopeia, “Vox Humana” is the opening story, appearing first among the pieces in the “Crowsong Stories” section, pp. 29-50 in both the hardcover and paperback editions.
There are minor variations in the texts. For example, the version in Blue Lake Review uses letters from the Korean alphabet as markers between sections, which was in keeping with the submitted manuscript. Using the Korean letters was less workable when formatting the story for inclusion in Delta of Cassiopeia. Meanwhile, there are some formatting issues in the BLR version. Some of the italicized text appears in an extremely reduced point size, which was not my intention. The version of “Vox Humana” reprinted in the How It Works anthology (pp. 277-87) includes the Korean alphabet as section markers.
Of the three versions of “Vox Humana” currently available in print (as of June 2025), the most accurate and truest to my intentions is the How It Works version (edited by Maurice A. Lee and Aaron Penn), followed by the Delta of Cassiopeia version, and then the original Blue Lake Review version (the only version online). I very much appreciate that the Blue Lake editor Mitchell Waldman published the longish experimental piece, and that the journal has kept its link live over the years.
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