Seek Giacometti’s “The Palace at 4 a.m.” Go back two hours. See towers and curtain walls of matchsticks, marble, marbles, light, cloud at stasis. Walk in. The beggar queen is dreaming on her throne of words…You have arrived at the web home of Marly Youmans, maker of novels, poetry collections, and stories, as well as the occasional fantasy for younger readers.
Pages
- Home
- Seren of the Wildwood 2023
- Charis in the World of Wonders 2020
- The Book of the Red King 2019
- Maze of Blood 2015
- Glimmerglass 2014
- Thaliad 2012
- The Foliate Head 2012
- A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage 2012
- The Throne of Psyche 2011
- Val/Orson 2009
- Ingledove 2005
- Claire 2003
- The Curse of the Raven Mocker 2003
- The Wolf Pit 2001
- Catherwood 1996
- Little Jordan 1995
- Short stories and poems
- Honors, praise, etc.
- Events
SAFARI seems to no longer work
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The Halloween Palace
Walk in.
Gallery of pumpkins—thought my family had invented several of these, but I suppose not. I’ll have to try the flaming toilet paper pumpkins. (Kindred spirits, after all: hair on fire.) How to make your own trashcan costume and send the neighborhood kids into paroxysms, advice on what power tools not to use, and more. Credit: The wonderful Oct-o-pus picture is from www.extremepumpkins.com.
Willing and unwilling cats in costume. Unwilling is rather more entertaining.
Unholy pumpkin-cutting laziness on All Soul’s? Try this.
Not quite as lazy as the above but still pretty lazy? Alternative pumpkins here: bell pepper lantern, spam-o-lantern, horny melon lantern, and the ever-popular raw beef lantern.
And a few mummies to rattle your cage.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Palace aphorisms (poetry) nos. 61-65, etc.
The aim of poetry and story is to cast a spell that has no purpose.
aphorism no. 64
When the poem is a mirror, the face reflected is fully known but made strange.
aphorism no. 63
In a poem, the tension between the irregular and the straight is strength.
aphorism no. 62
A poet is one who must un-know.
aphorism no. 61
Let the sea into your poems—the pulse like blood beating in your ears and the far pull of the moon.
*******
Yesterday I wrote a pantoum, revised some fiction, and then read stories and novellas and saw a movie. (I also cleaned up my run-amuck house, did laundry, did ferrying, herded children, etc.)
Thoughts along the way, or
What I do not like:
1. an air of tedious fascination
2. any novella approaching the experience of watching a Jack Smith movie for 5 hours, something that I did at 19 but wouldn’t do again
3. any story that has for its prime interest one’s ability to apply some other issue to it: as, this story about a cave man is really about the 21st century collision between bureaucracy and human loyalty or about war in a place where tribal loyalties collide with bureaucracy, etc.
4. stories lacking in feeling
5. stories where the sappiness and soap opera nature of events is controlled by deadpan, flat, and chilly narration
6. misuse of adverbs
7. an utter lack of beauty.
Just felt like getting that off my little pea brain.
I also read some wonderful stories.
Trala.
Credit: The photograph of a moonrise over Mt. Diablo is courtesy of Natalie Morris of Orangevale, CA and www.sxc.hu/.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
The Visible Beam
From the laurel thicket
the rush of water below
sounds
stone drums &
their echoes
***
Poet Jeffery Beam is about to have a special day on Friday. It has to do with his poems but also with his pictures and travels. The picture above, "Mossaic," is his.
More about that below!
***
OMEGA
For Z is zest
--Christopher Smart
Take the zig-zag
walk, for instance.
If something was first,
it just had to be last.
In all directions and
no directions it goes,
As the last step is
the first
into Eden.
***
Out of my whole library, I think my favorite book inscription is the one in Jeffery Beam's The Fountain, where he wrote a little song-like thing to me and said that my characters "breathe the natural world like spirit water." Isn't that lovely?
Jeffery is a soul-awakener, a boy dryad, an aesthete of beauty and nature. It is easy to feel kindred to him because he wakes up a part of one that often drifts off to sleep.
***
PASTORAL
I should have some seedlings
tomorrow
some columbine fit for a king's
chamber--
the clamoring stream side
by the garden
where we'll lie
Not enough for cutting now but
come Spring
all swell & bell will
break loose.
***
One of my favorite memories of Chapel Hill is going to Jeffery's wonderful winter solstice and Christmas celebration at Wilson Library. It was perfectly magical, with poems, and stories and surprises. My older children still have a few moon drops, somewhere--on a windowsill, or in the bottom of a toy box, shining quietly like Pandora's hope.
Here you may read a poem by Jeff and see where we plan to stay when visiting France.
And here you may see Jeffery Beam looking like a woods sprite and also read a tiny poem or hop to his web site.
&
Here you may find a fairly up-to-date list of his books and recordings. If you would like to purchase one but haven't been able to find it, try the Bull's Head Bookshop.
(919) 962-5060
CB 1530. Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1530
bullshead@store.unc.edu
***
HELLEBORE
With arms of
green & rosy blossoms
my blameless love
comes.
Blessed by cows &
sorcerer's spittle,
I pass
through the air, dark,
leaf-shining,
invisible.
***
Another place to see some of Jeffery's poems is at The North Carolina Arts Council. Scroll down!
Here's a quote from the arts council site: "Jeffery Beam's forte is the natural world; his poems present the wondrous idea that humankind is an intrinsic part of nature rather than an observer. He understands that in the natural world, 'Death & Being exchange vows' forever. His poems, coiling and uncoiling, put prickles on the back of my neck." -- Janet Lembke
***
FOR LORINE NIEDECKER
Green and
bronze
Galax
in a blue Cole vase.
Outside snow
Somewhere war
In between
peace
A full life
Alas, I can't get the html to obey on the spacing right on that one... Lines 2 and 3 are staggered from the left margin, as is "peace."
***
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN & HELL
Pandora, the box smokes. No common form
mentioned by its shape.
I cannot shift my eye far from its glare.
I sense neither sound nor glimpses of desired hue.
Black the brilliant shadows sleek.
Before night falls nothing will quiet me.
Devils. I break from you my private trembling.
When I walk my shadow will attach to me.
No formless box opens to clamp shut
unless the shutting figures me its Light-giver.
I illuminate and turn Spirit
upon itself. A healed wing.
So, I stand suddenly embracing you.
Where swarm bees imperishable.
From all blackness I gather myself.
***
A show of Jeff's poems and photographs begins on Friday. I wish I could be there for the poetry reading and reception. Since I can't, here is the gallery's description:
Viewing Jeffery Beam's "Daedalus Landed Here: Poetic Views - Earthy Travels" is a little like taking a crash course in art, creative writing, European history,and the wisdom of the ancients, except classes were never this interesting. Pairing beautiful photographs with exquisite poems and narratives rich with historical and personal feelings, Beam guides us through 30 years of travels in Italy and France- through ancient towns, gardens, churches, and countryside. Viewed together, they recount a story--each photograph unique and significant about that place; that moment in time.
Beam has frequently collaborated with other artists in his works, but this timehe collaborates with himself. An accomplished Hillsborough-based writer, he has turned to re-visioning with the camera's eye what his soul translates through his pen. In this case, the subject is his travel. He explains, "Steven Forrest, the astrologer, once told me in a reading that my work and my spiritual development would grow most through travel. His perception has proven true, and although I don't get to travel much, when I do, I take it as an opportunity to absorb as much scholarship and visual inspiration as I can."
Born and raised in Kannapolis, Beam works as the Assistant to the Biology Librarian in the Botany Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has published over 12 books and recordings and received numerous awards for his work, including three American Library Association Notable Book nominations, an IPPY small press book award, a Durham Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant, a Duke University Chronicle award, and a grant from the MaryDuke Biddle Foundation. His spoken word CD was a finalist for the only national-scope audio awards, a 2003 Audie. Beam is also the poetry editor for Oyster Boy Review and a contributing editor to Arabesques Review. You can read more about his work, read some poems, and hear a poetry reading at his web site: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html
Through This Lens
303 E. Chapel Hill St.
Durham, NC 27701
919.687.0250
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
5-Revelations Frolic
1. My blood relatives all believe and frequently have reason to say that I magnetically attract crazy people who want to be my best friends. This has been going on for many years and has become a family cliché. (If you are my friend, worry not; you might not be one of the crazy ones. If you are, I love you anyway.)
2. When I was small, I ate mostly raw food—beans, black eye peas, okra, lady peas, green peas, green peanuts (being a proper Southerner, I also liked them boiled), potatoes, turnips, carrots. My skin had a beautiful orangey flush, and my nose was the little nub of a carrot. I now eat most anything. In fact, I’ve had curried antelope in the past week. How many people can say that, I wonder? I still, however, can be caught raiding the uncooked food, and my children like raw green beans and peas.
3. I also never, ever, ever drank milk as a child and may not have any bones.
4. The five people in my immediate family write fiction of various sorts (3 commit poetry!), all but little N, who is probably doomed to write in the future when he is not so little. My daughter went to Alpha this summer. The others tend to keep their scribblings a secret.
5. As a child, I could not bear tags in clothing, or any stiffness around collars, or harsh seams. I still cut the tags out of my clothes or else saw them into frayed half-moon shapes. This may be related to the potpourri of neurological weirdness in my family line, but let’s not go there, okay?
Somehow this whole meme feels familiar, though it is said to be new.
Perhaps I have done it before. And given precisely the same answers. Or weirdly similar answers. Or entirely different ones. The antelope part is definitely new, though I have now eaten antelope in so many different ways that it is beginning to seem quite ordinary, despite its pleasant tang—as of mesquite and bitter herbs.
Perhaps it is merely a passing sense of déjà vu, the sign of infinitesimal small strokes in the brain.
Or perhaps confession is just one of my recurring nightmares.
And here is the mandatory meme-plug: "PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL ‘PEOPLE COLLECTION’ POSTS Remember that it isn’t always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it ."
People Collection. Strange.
Two people I tagged have turned up with responses: "How about The Grove Palace, inhabited by one of my writing seminar students from a week at NCCAT in 2005? She hasn’t been posting, so perhaps this would inspire her… And Jarvenpa, who is a poet/bookseller beleaguered by bears and fire and wandering folk in the wilds of northern California. She’s probably digging out from a mudslide right now." All else is silence.
Oh, 6:
I file my books backward, because I’m tired of Y being down in the right-hand corner with the dust bunnies.
Credit: That picture is out of date, snagged off the SciFiction site. That's why it has the little corner missing. The hair is, all on its own, going curlier, and I requested to see the weirdest eye glasses in New Hartford and promptly bought them. Alas, the boondocks are dull--they are merely burgundy semi cat-eyes with cream and green trim. Next time I get my zany eye frippery in NYC.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Reading in paradise, etc. & Poetry aphorisms
"acquired," like a virus
I dropped the Grumpy Old Bookman from my Links because he annoyed me so very mightily one sunny morning in spring. Now I am adding him back again, on this nasty fall day with yellow leaves stuck to all the windows. "Something of an acquired taste," he says. Taste acquired, particularly in the region of truth-telling about the inner tickings of publishers.
Love books, want job?
"The Defense Department needs you to work in 'one of today's most challenging, interesting and rewarding environments,' according to a recent advertisement for chief librarian at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba."
"Researching the penal code"
What book-loving librarians look like these days, and how the boy lawyers react. Book links via TigerHawk--and both those were sent to me by Mike, energetic blog reader.
Poetry Aphorisms, continued
aphorism no. 60, or the "Fret not, poet" aphorism
The size of the poetic gift is of no moment: only the harmonious shaping of it in air.
aphorism no. 59, the Genesis aphorism
The origin of poetry is in the death of one’s twin—something that near and intimate.
aphorism no. 58, the Bad Frolic aphorism
There is a perverse delight in reading the very worst poetry.
aphorism no. 57, or the Meaning of Life aphorism
Existence is a dry bone unless it is fleshed in the sublime uselessness of poetry.
aphorism no. 56, the Tweaking Critics aphorism
There is no such thing as realism in poetry or, indeed, in anything that is not reality.
Photograph, "balance prime," courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and Anatoli Styf of Tallinn, Estonia.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Poetry aphorisms; Skewered by Poe
continued
no. 55 Let your poems be as a piece of news heard on a distant planet, lit by a green star.
no. 54 Like a fairy mound, the poem wants to be a place where you and time get lost.
no. 53 Gusto is in the marrow of poetry.
no. 52 Only fearlessness in poetry will ever win the laurel.
no. 51, or the pollen-tube poetry aphorism: In the little green room of poetry, an egg waits for the magical unfurling of a hallway and a door to let the pollen in.
The photograph of a holographic eye was found on the sxc.hu website and is used by permission of Georgios M. Wollbrecht. Many thanks!
For more aphorisms, take a slide down the page.
**********************************
Quote of note
. . . the qualities I'd suggest are essential if something is going to be called a poem, among which I' d say were a definite inner and outer design, an unassailable sense of itself as something made and not to be broken or tampered with, and a complete resistance to paraphrase. --from Martin Stannard, “The Question That Has to Be Asked,” in Stride Magazine (U. K.)
**********************************
Reprint of a note on William Wilberforce Lord
In the last century, many a poet found himself bleeding on the thorns of life planted so assiduously by Edgar Allan Poe in his guise as critic. Here's a little something written for readers of poetry in Cooperstown, but perhaps interesting elsewhere as well. William Wilberforce Lord was a poet of considerable fame until he fell into the clutches of Poe. Lord also has the distinction of having been rector of the Anglican church at Vicksburg during the Civil War's great Siege of Vicksburg. After poking around the web, I conclude that he must have hopped from Christ Church Cooperstown to Christ Church Vicksburg. A dangerous leap! Later on, he returned to the Village of Cooperstown. He is buried in a plot overlooking the lake, not in the Christ Church graveyard.
LORD OF POETRY; OR, POE’S CONTEMPTIBLE IMPUDENT?
Curious about the former rector of Christ Church, William Wilberforce Lord, the poet pilloried by Edgar Allen Poe? It’s said that Father Lord dared to parody Poe’s “The Raven.” Poe proclaimed the following in print: “The fact is, the only remarkable things about Mr, Lord’s compositions, are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast. We do not know, in America, a versifier so utterly wretched and contemptible.” If you would like to see for yourself, hie yourself to the web and visit http://www.bartleby.com/248/index14.html, where you may find a number of Lord's poems. (The headings on individual poems confuse him with the famous abolitionist, William Wilberforce.)
If you like poetry, you may find something familiar here, because the poems are workmanlike pieces with a sensibility that evokes the English Romantics and our own William Cullen Bryant. The little wandering blind girl at “The Brook” harks back to Wordsworth’s rural figures and the love of the English Romantics for the rural and common man. “Worship,” with its mingling of faith and wild, romantic nature, could be a page out of Bryant: “For them, O God, who only worship Thee / In fanes whose fretted roofs shut out the heavens, Let organs breathe, and chorded psalteries sound: But let my voice rise with the mingled noise / Of winds and waters;--winds that in the sedge, / And grass, and ripening grain, while nature sleeps / Practise, in whispered music, soft and low / Their sweet inventions, and then sing them loud / In caves, and on the hills, and in the woods.” Like the Romantics, he is a devotee of all the arts; his narrator listens in rapture to a great singer as “a cloud of sound, / Rising in wreaths, upon the air around / Lingered like incense from a censer thrown.”
Clearly he sought to place himself on the highest ground as a poet, and his “Ode to England” praises a pantheon of contemporary poets—among whom he no doubt wished to place himself. Here is the close of his passage on the death of Keats: “Into that gulf of dark and nameless dread, / Star-like he fell, but a wide splendor shed / Through its deep night, that kindled as he fell.” Though he invokes Keats as Endymion, beloved of the Moon, in a reference to one of Keats’ own poems, Lord’s blank verse conjures up the blank verse of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Satan falling like a star from heaven—a “twist” on the former image, and an expression of lost heavenly power.
Drop by www.bartleby.com and take a look. You’ll see what appears to have been Lord’s most famous poem, “On the Defeat of a Great Man,” and some creditable verse, by no means deserving of Poe’s gleeful roast. Unfortunately, Lord the poet did not manage to be the defeated “Great Man” whose enemies “fall who give him not / The honor here that suits his future name” and “towers aloft.” Achievement in poetry has never been doled out on the basis of personal goodness and contentment, and the anxious, fevered Poe sits in that pantheon where Lord wished to sit. Yet Lord was as much or more what Hawthorne called “the artist of the beautiful,” the maker who has snatched at and seized high goals, and who may look on the destruction of his art with equanimity.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Skewered by Poe
LORD OF POETRY, OR
POE’S CONTEMPTIBLE IMPUDENT?
Curious about the former rector of Christ Church, William Wilberforce Lord, the poet pilloried by Edgar Allen Poe? It’s said that Father Lord dared to parody Poe’s “The Raven.” Poe proclaimed the following in print: “The fact is, the only remarkable things about Mr, Lord’s compositions, are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast. We do not know, in America, a versifier so utterly wretched and contemptible.” If you would like to see for yourself, hie yourself to the web and visit http://www.bartleby.com/248/index14.html, where you may find a number of Lord's poems. (The headings on individual poems confuse him with the famous abolitionist, William Wilberforce.)
If you like poetry, you may find something familiar here, because the poems are workmanlike pieces with a sensibility that evokes the English Romantics and our own William Cullen Bryant. The little wandering blind girl at “The Brook” harks back to Wordsworth’s rural figures and the love of the English Romantics for the rural and common man. “Worship,” with its mingling of faith and wild, romantic nature, could be a page out of Bryant: “For them, O God, who only worship Thee / In fanes whose fretted roofs shut out the heavens, Let organs breathe, and chorded psalteries sound: But let my voice rise with the mingled noise / Of winds and waters;--winds that in the sedge, / And grass, and ripening grain, while nature sleeps / Practise, in whispered music, soft and low / Their sweet inventions, and then sing them loud / In caves, and on the hills, and in the woods.” Like the Romantics, he is a devotee of all the arts; his narrator listens in rapture to a great singer as “a cloud of sound, / Rising in wreaths, upon the air around / Lingered like incense from a censer thrown.”
Clearly he sought to place himself on the highest ground as a poet, and his “Ode to England” praises a pantheon of contemporary poets—among whom he no doubt wished to place himself. Here is the close of his passage on the death of Keats: “Into that gulf of dark and nameless dread, / Star-like he fell, but a wide splendor shed / Through its deep night, that kindled as he fell.” Though he invokes Keats as Endymion, beloved of the Moon, in a reference to one of Keats’ own poems, Lord’s blank verse conjures up the blank verse of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Satan falling like a star from heaven—a “twist” on the former image, and an expression of lost heavenly power.
Drop by www.bartleby.com and take a look. You’ll see what appears to have been Lord’s most famous poem, “On the Defeat of a Great Man,” and some creditable verse, by no means deserving of Poe’s gleeful roast. Unfortunately, Lord the poet did not manage to be the defeated “Great Man” whose enemies “fall who give him not / The honor here that suits his future name” and “towers aloft.” Achievement in poetry has never been doled out on the basis of personal goodness and contentment, and the anxious, fevered Poe sits in that pantheon where Lord wished to sit. Yet Lord was as much or more what Hawthorne called “the artist of the beautiful,” the maker who has snatched at and seized high goals, and who may look on the destruction of his art with equanimity.
Picture by somebody I probably know--who?--is from the Christ Church website, but I see nary a trace of a credit to the village photographer.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The palace aphorisms: poetry series, nos. 46-50
Let a star lead you willy-nilly until the poem is born.
for October 14
aphorism no. 49
The poem is a pomegranate of jewels and blood.
for October 13
aphorism no. 48
The poem is a question from the Sphinx and a mortal reply.
for October 12
aphorism no. 47
Poems have dwindled like the fairies, who were once fair and tall and swift, the shakers and ravishers of mortals.
for October 11, birthday of R, who has seen fairies and left them gifts
aphorism no. 46
The poet is born like Minerva from Zeus’s head—from the puckered, scarred tissue that marks the site of a grievous childhood wound.
for October 10, 2006
The picture above is by and of Michael Fäs of Aesch, Switzerland with "a fireball in [his] hand." Courtesy of the photographer and www.sxc.hu/.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Palace Aphorisms: poetry, continued
aphorism no. 45
When the poem is a star, a stone will burn.
9 October
aphorism no. 44
The poem is lock, key, door, and vista.
8 October
aphorism no. 43
On a table in the hall of tears, the poem says Eat Me, Drink Me, Be Whole.
7 October
aphorism no. 42
The key has slipped into the lock and turned, and now the long-desired door is about to open: that is the poem.
6 October
aphorism no. 41
The poet who writes in the rose room is waist deep in pollen.
6 October
Poetry aphorisms extend to the post below.
NEWS:
Received my two Firebird paperbacks of The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove yesterday, and Renato's covers look lovely. That's my first "little" paperback, and they are quite tidy and cute. From a new Locus review: "The newest original anthology from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Salon Fantastique, could well be their best so far. This may in part emanate from the absence of a central theme: the book is intended simply as a gathering of fine fantasists, a meeting of the minds like the literary salons of 17th and 18th century France, where intellectuals of all classes could confer freely, exchanging ideas and establishing standards. Liberated from any imposed agenda, the contributors have excelled themselves; but given the huge innate strength of the line-up, they might well have done so in any case. / "Three stories stand out especially. Marly Youmans’s 'Concealment Shoes' is a beautifully written evocation of adventurous childhood, in which a small boy and his elder sister find moving into a big new house a marvelous experience, tempered by the discovery that hostile spirits are trying to infiltrate the abode. The parents carelessly remove the mansion’s wards; nasty apparitions issue from the chimneys; the battle against them is startlingly vivid."
Since there will be 14 people running amuck in my earthly castle this weekend, I'm doing a little time travel and posting "ahead." Yes, you may feel sorry for me, pushing my little broom and mop.
The sketch of "Manju reading" is courtesy of Laura Murphy Frankstone and Laurelines, http://laurelines.typepad.com/my_weblog/.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
The Palace Aphorisms: poetry series
Poetry
**********
aphorism no. 40
Never discourage a young person from poetry; it is utterly impossible to say how the disasters and fires of youth may transform and temper the metal between the ages of 15 and 30.
5 October
aphorism no. 39
A brain exceptional in all ways is a hindrance to a poet. Likewise, a poet may be a hindrance and a stumbling block to a brain exceptional in all ways.
5 October
aphorism no. 38
Lyric poetry is the most hopeful of arts because it aims at making syllables of air and a lost moment last.
October 4
aphorism no. 37
Poetry is the lover who is followed and never caught, despite repeted satiation.
October 4
aphorism no. 36
When the poem is a labyrinth, the poet must be lost and spin her own thread.
3 October
aphorism no. 35,
or an uncomfortable fact
Poets in the academy convert poems from their natural, wild state of sublime uselessness into something bourgeois and useful—that is, into a mere publication credential in a list that will contribute to promotion, merit pay, tenure, and desirable middle-class commodities.
3 October
aphorism no. 34
Don't be afraid of saying in a poem what you do not yet understand.
3 October
aphorism no. 33
To shred passable prose into bad poetry is a hobby of many contemporaries who are called poets, yet were not called to be poets.
3 October 2006
aphorism no. 32
Poetry never matches the burning dream in the head. No match will light that dream, but a dream may light the match.
2 October 2006
aphorism no. 31
The best poetry casts the shadow of a further secret.
1 October 2006
Note: The week's aphorisms will be gathered into a 'collection,' as is appropriate to the subject--an aphorism per day, all under the heading above. And this one is going up early, since October 1st falls on the weekend--and time is strange at the palace.
Slide down the page for the remainder of the Cooperstown aphorisms ('fat people & tourists' series).
* * * * * * *
The glass bowl of pencil shavings is courtesy of Laura Murphy Frankstone of http://laurelines.typepad.com/my_weblog/. Currently she is sketching, painting, and eating well in Paris.
The photograph of streaming light and rosy leaves is by Francis Valadj of Jacareí, Brazil. Courtesy of the photographer and www.sxc.hu/.