Thaliad and thanks

Early morning facebook post: Smolder of light in the dense clouds... Tiny rift of blue above Glimmerglass, gone gunmetal gray. Momentary canyons break into day-after-hurricane clouds; the awe of world-weather is with us again. But this time we have no giant Kentucky coffee tree on the cars and, to my surprise and delight, never lost power.

And I have worked on marketing, one of those things that I do not particularly love but which must be done in a year when a writer publishes a novel, a collection of poems, and an epic poem in blank verse--A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, The Foliate Head, and now Thaliad.

The new Thaliad page for this website is now up (see tab above.) It offers a little taste of the words and images that will appear in the book. Please take a glance, and let me know if there's anything you see amiss or that you would like to see there. A link to the pre-order page at Phoenicia Publishing is tucked in as well. 

What a year for books! I thought A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage an unusually handsome novel, immaculately designed for Mercer by the Burt and Burt team. Then I fell in love with Andrew Wakelin's design and Clive Hicks-Jenkins's art (green men!) for The Foliate Head from Stanza Press in the UK. But now I am struck by the great beauty of Thaliad. It is profusely illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and designed by Elizabeth Adams of Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal. Just looking at the print-out--as I must do today, checking for tiny spacing problems and so on--brings home to me what a marvelous collaboration it has been.

I am lucky and blessed to have such friends to me and my books (those mentioned and many more) in the worlds of art and publishing, and again I want to thank Mercer, Burt and Burt, Andrew, Clive (and Peter too!), and Beth for their great gifts of time and love and care for beauty. Thank you for believing that my writing was worth those gifts.

And to all who trust in the work enough to be my readers, many thanks. We live in a peculiar time when the media and the powers of the world like to cast fairy glamour on dead leaves and rot--to encourage people to value and run after things that are empty of life and worth. For this reason, I am especially grateful for those readers who find joy (though sometimes glimpsed through darkness) in my words and continue to support my passion for making story and song. Thank you.

The writer operates at a peculiar crosswords where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. --Flannery O' Connor