The Minnie Youmans Place

From "19th-century farmhouse, Lexsy" by Brian Brown. This is grander than
my grandparents' house, but it is in Lexsy--my grandmother Kate once had
a fistfight with another woman in Lexsy, back when she lived there for a time.
Evidently Kate "Little Bear" was defending one of the children...
I am hoping Brian will not mind if I "borrow" his image, as he once
borrowed from one of my posts to illuminate something about
the house my maternal grandfather, a house builder, made for his wife...
Be sure and visit his wonderful site, Vanishing South Georgia.

     It never belonged to my grandparents, even though they worked the land near Lexsy for decades, plowing with mules, shaping the resistant earth until gullies became flat and usable. Even the girls plowed, at least until the last baby came along. Preston and Kate labored as tenant sharecroppers in south Georgia, and if you have ever read James Agee's passionate Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or seen Walker Evans's photographs wedded to that prose, you have a hint of what that means. It was a postwar world, after all--why wouldn't the neighbors eat dirt, why wouldn't my father see his first jealous, throat-slitting murder before he was ten, why wouldn't he early on see the rural ways of sexual congress in a field, why wouldn't he run to join up with the Army Air Corps at 17?
       A long pale road of packed dust led by swamp and blackberry tangles: then a turn, and a visitor drove between fields of horse corn, tobacco, and cotton. The shack with its burst of trees in the midst of flat fields, its tumbledown outbuildings, the rusted stove that sometimes held rattlers, the gaudy flowers rioting from coffee cans, the half-fallen cedar with tiny scorpions in the cave underneath, the cloyingly sweet but tiny white blooms in the shining hedge that sheltered the porch from a blaze of sun: there is not one picture of the place. Not one. No one thought it worth the cost, I suppose. And later on the four-room house (living room, two bedrooms, kitchen--no bathroom, no hall, no closets or frills) was burned by vandals.

Public domain, Wikipedia. Walker Evans photograph of 3 sharecroppers,
Frank Tengle, Bud Fields, and Floyd Burroughs, Summer 1936

     Long ago I read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as I biked around the perimeter of Ireland on my green Peugeot that German tourists fondled whenever I left it outside a pub. (They seemed to spring into being whenever I lashed the bike to a post.) I left the book behind somewhere in a Derry that, terrorized only hours before, was full of drifting smoke. I hope someone found the book, took it home, read, and passed it on.
     How I still wish there was a photograph somewhere! One of the reasons I wrote A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage was to make a sort of picture for myself. And it is a book where my family slips in--my grandfather's mixed race brothers (my great-grandfather Nathaniel Youmans/Yeomans sired twenty-two legitimate children and at least two illegitimate children, though Ancestry.com doesn't know the half of it!) inspired the loss at the start of the book, and Pip contains elements of my father and one of my children. The well with ferns growing inside, the pomegranate trees, the chinaberries, the smolder of summer sun, the graveyard with its stones topped with shells: I wanted to keep those things, as much as I wanted to hold on to people.
     Some years past I went back to the site of Lexsy and then the Minnie farm. No one then lived in Lexsy; perhaps they have come back now, though I doubt it. The farm was now owned by an international corporation; there were signs meant to bar us from a place that was one of my loadstones in this life. My mother and I bumped down the road, still pale dirt, between the blackberry ravels, and turned down the drive toward the house. Nothing built by hands remained, not the shack, not the outbuildings, not the well. Doghobble ran wild in the yard. The chinaberries still stood in a messy row. The fields went on forever under the hot Georgia sky.

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

Ecclesiasticus 44:1 King James Bible

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Summer sampler, part one

"Its themes and the power of its language,
the forceful flow of its storyline and its characters
have earned the right to a broad national audience."
30 July 2012 John M. Formy-Duval.
About.com Contemporary Literature

excerpt mid-way in Chapter 10, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. Pip runs away again, and this time he thinks to take Clemmie and her baby.

* * *

Stillness had come over the world; the train had been checked in its flight and was taking on water.
“Come with me,” Pip whispered, the idea so new and bright and large in his mind that he never thought to hold back the words, any more than he could think to keep the orb of sun from cresting the horizon at dawn.  He had grown another inch in the past month.  He bent down and kissed her on the mouth, and under his hand he felt a flutter at her throat.
Clemmie laughed and then kissed back, pressing against him until the baby squalled and she drew away.
“Come with me.”  The words seemed potent and magical, like what he had imagined back in the Emanuel Primitive Baptist Church as Preacher Bell described the peal at the world’s end when souls would be threshed from their husks.  Would it be so different from the two long whistles that meant the brakes had been released and the train was moving?
The locomotive released a head of steam; a black thunderhead sprang from the chimney.  And at once Pip understood that this was what he had been meaning for years:  Come with me.  Had he known all along that the three of them would be standing by the train, that he would draw Clemmie by the sheer force of his own wish, and that they would swarm, laughing, into the shadows of an empty boxcar?  They would be a family, flying across the flatlands, feeling the earth swell under their heels and break from the plains in mountain surges.   It was not anything to do with Bill; it was about him.  In the light of his rapture of need, her earlier bonds looked wrong and weak, would crumble to dust and drift across abandoned farms like ghosts exposed to the dawn.
He could see the double-headed engines now, black boulders crowning a rockslide barely held to the groove of track as it eased to round the curve—then the train was upon him, the rumble quickening and the whistle crying the crossing signal of two long notes, a short, and another long that seemed to pluck at his skin, alerting every inch of his body.  The lead engine shot past, the engineer and fireman towering above him, sparks from the wheels zinging onto his pant-legs like beetles of fire, but he did not stop staring at Clemmie, who was laughing again but not shaking her head.  For once in his life, he was locked onto a woman’s eyes, her pupils widening to take him in.  He grabbed her hand and began to race alongside the train, the baby shrieking in bursts like a small steam whistle.  When he leaped for the boxcar, Pip made it easily, but their hands uncoupled, and he shouted at Clemmie to hurry.
She did start after him, lifting Lanie as if she would throw the child into his arms.

A beginning, with green sheep...

*
The Ferrol Sams Award.
*
Silver Award, Foreword Book of the Year Awards.
*
"Its themes and the power of its language,
the forceful flow of its storyline
and its characters have earned the right
to a broad national audience."
--About.com review

I have been busy with children and deadlines and applying for a short fellowship, so here is a little snip from A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage in place of a post I've had no time to write. A snip, a clip from the beginning to a first chapter, instead...

1.

Death comes to White Camellia Orphanage;

A savage laugh, a riddle and reply.

The boy called Pip by his father—who had named him after a boy in a famous book, a child for whom everything had turned out well enough—woke in the dense warmth of an Emanuel County summer at 4:17 a.m., a fact that he learned years later when he became acquainted with clocks because for the rest of his life he would wake at the very same hour, the very same moment of the morning as if his body could never let go of the need to be awake for that minute of the day.  He did not open his eyes.  He did not need to open his eyes.  He knew where he was, the same place he had been for almost a year.  He was on the farm sharecropped by the Hooks family although the land was always called by another man’s name as if to remind the husband and wife that they owned not much more than debt and the clothes on their backs plus a spare change for Sunday and a clutter of ironware and dishes and a few clanking enamel chamber pots.  For the last several years it also had been known as The White Camellia Orphanage or The Cottage because of the doings of Mr. Sam Truetlen, owner of a nearby cotton gin and the far-off Gen’l Notions Store, who had traveled all the way to New Orleans and on to Dallas once upon a time, and there, on the outer edge of the known world, had toured a cottage-style orphanage intended for destitute white children and run by the Klan.  Some years later, Mr. Sam, being a man prone to fits of “projecting,” backed his own orphanage though most of its children still claimed at least one parent on some played-out, ramshackle farm.  Wherever his kind had sunk so desperate and low as to scoop up the red clay to eat, Mr. Sam would arrive on muleback and plod away with one or more children riding pillion, some to stay at The Cottage for a month, some longer. It got so that people for miles around could recognize Daisy Belle, the white mule, and Goshen, the soot-gray one.  As for the name of the orphanage, that was the influence of the Klan, with its Knights and Dragon, its Cyclops and Nighthawk and Kamellia—and Mr. Sam’s tip-of-the-hat to the city of Dallas.  So that was where Pip had been lodged for almost a year, in The White Camellia. 

It was high, hot summer in Emanuel County, Georgia, and not one soul was saved from the day’s blaze or from the night’s smother of warmth; up and down the county, the only sleep was a restless sleep, and near Lexsy, one or two old people woke in a fright because the air was just about too dense to breathe—their trembling hands reaching for funeral-parlor fans printed with a portrait of Christ and some luminous, faintly green sheep—and on some gully-shattered sharecropped place, an infant who had been fighting for air yielded up the ghost on his mother’s naked breast.  Mr. Sam, next door to the cotton gin, returned to bed and dreamed his nightly dream of being weighed in the scales and found wanting.  At The White Camellia Orphanage, the bone-tired children slept without dreaming, all but one, who dreamed about a lost penny.    

When he woke, Pip knew something was akilter.  He did not know more, neither whether the hour felt wrong or right.  There was a faint slippage of coolness on his back where his brother—his half-brother—Otto normally slept.  The kinship bond between them was tangible, such that the children seemed inseparable, a blood brotherhood of commingled beings.  Loss and grief had only made their physical need and ache for each other more clearly manifest.  The musky smell that belonged to the little boy was ebbing away, and Pip could detect only the presence of the two others in the bed and the four across the room.  The brothers always slept together, with a careful space between themselves and their bedmates, an act that demanded they cling to their perches even in sleep to avoid tumbling down into the deep valley of the bed.  Now Pip lay breathing in the scent of near-naked boys and the stink of the chamber pots. These were smells he did not find disagreeable, just as he did not dislike the fumes of kerosene from the lamp or the odor of Miss Versie, unwashed and marked with a faint whiff of blood.  

Where was Otto?  

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Thank you, Renea Winchester--from her Christmas book list

from Blog the Farm:

Marly Youmans grew up in the South and now makes her home “up North.” (but she returns to the mountains every chance she gets). She spent most of this fall in Jackson County, NC with her mother where she launched her latest book, Glimmerglass. Today I write about her previous book, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. I mention it only because I haven’t a moment to begin Glimmerglass, which is receiving wonderful reviews. Her words truly are spellbinding. From the first chapter the reader is drawn toward the story. Youmans possesses the talent of word-weaving that makes me proud to be an author. Winner of multiple awards, including the Ferol Sams Award, I strongly recommend giving A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage as a gift this year. Read an excerpt from the book here.

***

Renea Winchester just bought a house in western North Carolina, so I look forward to meeting her when I'm next there. And that would be some time in 2015...

She has a second book (stories! color! recipes! Southern life!) out, Farming, Friends, and Fried Bologna Sandwiches. She posts at blogthefarm.wordpress.com.

* * *

Review plus post, the Star (NC)

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Glimmerglass.

A novel turn, rich and strange 

Review, Ben Steelman, StarNews 

(Wilmington, North Carolina) 

9 November 2014

   

3-page review begins here

Clip: "Fantasy and myth mix with classic whodunit in “Glimmerglass,” the latest novel from poet and South Carolina native Marly Youmans. This is only detective fiction, though, in the sense that “Hamlet” is a play about a kid who can't get along with his stepfather. Youmans takes a couple of overworked genres and makes them undergo a sea change into something rich and strange."

Photo by Paul Digby, July 2014
This one was taken in Ohio right after I taught
at the Antioch Writing Workshops.

The lady behind "Glimmerglass" 

Background post
by Ben Steelman, 

Bookmarks blog

at StarNews Online 

9 November 2014.

Read it here.

Favorite clips:

...Youmans writes one of the best writers's blogs in the ether...

Youmans’ poetry collections include “Thaliad,” “The Throne of Psyche” and “Claire.” I have been meaning to write for years about “The Foliate Head,” her 2012 poem cycle about the Green Man, published in Britain by Stanza Press, which must rank as one of the most beautiful books of the 21st century. Notable are the illustrations and illuminations by the Welsh artist Clive Hicks Jenkins. Jenkins also did the artwork for “Glimmerglass.” *

*Glimmerglass, Thaliad, and The Foliate Head all contain exterior and extensive interior artwork by Clive, and his art is also on the cover of The Throne of Psyche and Val/Orson. The design work on The Foliate Head is by Andrew Wakelin, wonderful UK designer.

Thank you, Mr. Steelman!

* * *

crew list here

There's a typo in the blog post that I find amusing. My father was a sharecropper's kid and teenage tail gunner on the WWII Incendiary Blonde who, thanks to the G. I. bill, later became a professor of analytical chemistry. (His teen train escapades, his farm home, and his father's love for one of his mixed race brothers influenced the creation of Pip in A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage.) As a professor, he couldn't help butting heads with administrators and often said, "The lightweights float right to the top." And so I found it comical that he appears as a college president rather than professor... He also liked to quote Lewis Carroll's "I'm mad. You're mad. We're all mad." That one is a little more generous, as it puts us all in the same zany boat!

If you click on the picture, you'll see my handsome young father standing at far right. Hubert Lafay Youmans of Lexsy, Georgia... Hu. His hand looks a little odd--swollen from a fistfight in town the night before.

Real / irreal

Clive photographs the title page.
Glimmerglass.
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.

For an essay of mine having to do with what is called fantastic and what is called realistic, please go here to the Mercer blog. And here's a taste:

    Given the way books are discussed in our time, it’s possible to say that my A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is a realistic narrative about a Depression-era’s orphan’s struggle to find his place, or that Glimmerglass is a search that takes place in a solid, realistic world but does the fantastic thing of taking the muse as a possible, literal figure—and at one point borrows from the ancient form of the somnium, or dream vision. But I would not reach for genre terms to describe either of them. For me, books are on a kind of thread or continuum, moving from one way of telling the truth to another. All that matters to me is whether they are good books or not.
     All art is created, shaped, dreamed into existence. What matters is not genre or categorization but the extent to which a fabric made of words—the warp and weft making up a kind of little maze—contains an Ariadne’s thread of energy that leads to larger life.

Comments are open there. I'd love to know what other people think about these things and have already gotten an interesting letter from a fellow novelist... Please leave a comment at the Mercer site if you have an opinion!

Blog hop, bog hlop for Richelle Hawkes

Now in pre-order
Available via Mercer, online shops,
and your favorite indie bookstore

Richelle Hawks of Shipwreck Dandy asked me to participate in her blog hop, and so here goes--

What am I working on?

Right now I have finished up a week at the Antioch Writing Workshops in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I ran a poetry workshop and also met one-on-one with various people to discuss both poetry and fiction manuscripts. It was great fun, and I met lots of wonderful people, and stayed with writers Robert Wexler and Rebecca Kuder. Now I’m staying with friends-in-the-arts Lynn and Paul Digby, and Paul is taping and filming me reading poems and some fiction. Later on he’ll make some videos (and there will be podcasts) with his own music.

When I go home, I need to finish up some manuscripts that have been lying around, waiting for attention.  I have a poetry manuscript and a novel for children that are in need of some final polish or tweaks here and there. I have a novel forthcoming next year that I mean to revise one more time—occurred to me that I really ought to change the order of a few things, long after it arrived at the publisher's office.

More here

I won’t start a large, new project until those things are done, though I’ll be writing poems and small stories. I’ll be doing some traveling on behalf of my  novel, Glimmerglass, beginning with SIBA in Norfolk in September. I really need to arrange more events at the moment. And I’m still doing some work to help out recent poetry and fiction books—The Throne of Psyche, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, and The Foliate Head. (See tabs above for information.)

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I write lyric poetry, long narrative poetry, short stories, novels of various sorts, and even a few Southern fantasies for young adults, so I find that one a daunting question. Think I’ll leave it for readers to answer!

Ferrol Sams Award,
Silver Award, ForeWord BOTYA
More here

Why do I create what I do?

One of the most beautiful, good, and true acts human beings can perform on planet Earth is to rejoice in the greater Creation by making things. To create art is to live a larger life, one with greater energy and joy and scope.  

I make things in order to speak to and give back to the created world—to make shapeliness and to seek power and truth in words that, once pushed into the right order, may become an experience for another human being. I love the thought that somewhere, someone may be reading one of my books and feel something of what I felt when I was making it.

How does my creative process work?

More here

I might as well say that it falls as a golden waterfall from a distant star. The more I go on, the less I know and the more I feel about the mystery of art. If my writing is moving in its most natural and most potent way (as opposed to my simply doodling with words because, say, I haven't written a poem in a while and want to do so), it simply pours through me like a wave of energy that becomes embodied in words. Words and stories and poems swoop in, and later on I polish them and play with them until they are right. 

All work falls short of the fire that burns in the mind, but approaching that original fever is a constant lure. I love that fay call from within (or perhaps from without?) and the attempt to answer back.

More here.

And who to tag for the Gob Holp, Ogh Bolp, Blog Hop?

Scott G. F. Bailey
Scott's blog hop response here

More to come...

The glittering fall

The Ferrol Sams Award
Silver, ForeWord Book of the Year in fiction
Books and Culture Favorite Books of 2012

     Alden kept whispering in the dark, but Pip was emptied out and unable to speak. The jag of glee had depleted him, and he felt as if he had been gulping at some fine mist of drowsiness. Perhaps it was the Sandman's crystals, flung by the handful into the air. For a long time he lay caught in a no-man's-land between waking and sleeping until he opened his eyes and saw that a delicate and glittering rain was falling in the room. It came to him that he had seen many wonders in his travels, had gone north until he met the midnight flares of the aurora borealis, had waded through the high prairie grass until he knew it to be endless, and had crossed a western beach piled with agates and inset with pools of pink and green stars, but that now he had come to what might be home and this sight was the strangest of them all. In its in-between realm, he struggled to name the peculiar snow but could not. When he realized that he had felt no surprise, it occurred to him that he must be asleep. But yet he could feel the flecks against his skin and piling in the bedclothes though not moistening them. He closed his eyes.

Novelist Stephen Roth at Amazon

The Ferrol Sams Award
Silver Award, a ForeWord Book of the Year

Thanks to novelist Stephen Roth for taking the time to review on Amazon...

It's a rare achievement when a work of fiction contains enough detail and nuance about a particular place in history that you, the reader, feel like you understand and inhabit that world. That's how I felt reading Marly Youmans' A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, which is part murder mystery, part road story, but also a poetic rendering of life in the rural South of the 1930s and early 40s.

White Camellia tells the lonely story of Pip, a Depression-era orphan who loses his half-brother to a horrific, unsolved murder at the Georgia orphanage where he lives. Soon after, Pip decides to leave his squalid existence of picking cotton and sleeping in close quarters, "breathing in the scent of near-naked boys and the stink of the chamber pots." It is the golden age of the hobos, so Pip chooses a life crossing the country and hopping the rails. Like another fictional orphan named Pip, his coming-of-age journey comes at a brutal cost, but he also experiences kindness from a series of eccentric strangers who are drawn to the equally eccentric and fiercely independent Pip.

Throughout the tale, Youmans captures the surroundings, mood and language of the era so convincingly you almost expect to find red clay caked around your shoes when you set the book down. If you enjoy beautifully crafted descriptive prose and a coming-of-age story that is in turns heartbreaking and uplifting, check out A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage.

Seonjoon with white camellias--

Here's a sort of mini-review from Seonjoon in the realm of Twittery. I like it! Tweets are short but can encompass a surprising amount of thought. And at the end there's a review of the review... At her blog, Seonjoon describes herself this way:

Ordained Buddhist monastic.

Incorrigible bibliophile.

Novice shutterbug.

Aspiring practitioner.

Coffee-lover.

I am glad she is an incorrigible bibliophile. She read the book in the air between Seoul and New Haven, finishing up with her feet safely planted on the ground. Thank you, Seonjoon (and DeathZen!)

* * * * * * *

Seonjoon @seon_joon · 8h

I'm wasn't entirely sure what to expect when I started @marlyyoumans' A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, but it surely wasn't this:

Seonjoon @seon_joon A contemporary American epic, tenderly and piercingly rendered, resonant with the rhythms of the American south.

Seonjoon @seon_joon · 8h

The novel's language is lush without excess, a rare feat, and characters are brought to life with deft surety. My favorite read so far year.

Seonjoon ‏@seon_joon  9h @marlyyoumans But #ADeathattheWhiteCamilliaOrphanage was fabulous. Finished it afternoon. Looking forward to your book this summer!

Death Zen ‏@DeathZen  5h@seon_joon As well you should! :) Seriously, who else could write such a strong book review in two sentences?! @marlyyoumans

Catherwood update / in-print books

Small vignette for Glimmerglass
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Catherwood

After the Entertainment Weekly tip-of-the-hat to "heartstopping" Catherwood, used book dealers sold a good many copies of the book--this, of course, was both lovely and a little frustrating, as I have in-print books that need homes and am planning on a new edition of Catherwood. I've decided to turn down (with many thanks, and after too much dithering on my part) some offers from publishers to reprint, and to experiment with doing the reprint myself in my so-far-imaginary free time. Despite the usual too-crammed schedule, I am aiming to have the book out in paper and ebook within a year.

And my books now in print--

See tabs above for reviews and other information on A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (novel, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award and a Silver Award, ForeWord BOTYA), Thaliad ("exciting and heartbreaking myth of origin"), The Foliate Head, and The Throne of Psyche. The first two were both on the end-of-year 2012 Favorites at Books & Culture. The last two are poetry collections, and I'll let this quote recommend my work in that line:

Youmans is a traditionalist in her use of forms, and her work will delight those who enjoy classical poetry with direction and structure, yet her strong and inventive metaphors and similes evoke an otherness that only Coleridge attained....wholly beautiful and brilliant. Youmans is a writer of rare ability whose works will one day be studied by serious students of poetry. Greg Langley, The Baton Rouge Advocate

All four of these books were lucky to have exceptional designers--Burt and Burt of Macon, Georgia (who won an Addy for The Throne of Psyche), Elizabeth Adams in Montreal, and Andrew Wakelin in the UK--and several have beautiful art both within and without by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Marly at random

Eucalyptus bark, courtesy of Ruth Steele, Devon, UK and sxc.hu 

Today I am spending most of time in ways that take me back to high school--I went to see the twelve Ruggles essay finalists, all juniors, including my own youngest child and others I know well. And I'll be off to Mt. Markham for a track meet soon. In between I wanted to read galleys but had too much else to do, alas. Maybe tonight I will manage it! Update: Somebody give me a gold star. Almost two hours in the sleet with an umbrella over my head. And give child no. 3 a gold star as well. Frozen. These wild, hardy Yanks finally called off the last three events. All the kids were soaking wet and shaking with cold. Brrr!

Not having much time, I am going to just open up one of my recent books, stab a finger down, and leave you with whatever I found... And here it is, the start of a scene (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage) after the wandering Pip has lit down in California, which looks very different from the sharecropper's farm he knew back in south Georgia.

* * *

     After a while one of the little girls began crying in her sleep, and Irisanne woke and got up. He could see her sitting on the floor by the cot, her hand swooping along the child's spine. The Rushing of the wind through the branches grew louder, made him feel uneasy. When her daughter tossed restlessly in the cot, the mother began to sing an old tune:

          Silvering's on the Jordan stream,
          Silvering's on the feet that pass,
          And bright silvering's on the tree.

          It's lessening that time imparts;
          Hours of sorrow fall upon us,
          And sad and sere are all our hearts--

     To Pip it felt eerie and comfortless, the melody even more mournful than the verses. He got up and slipped down the stairs. Outside the house, he could still make out the words, the notes mixing with the noise from the leaves.
     Swain had called the trees a windbreak, but they were more like a confined, immensely high forest than anything so domestic and useful. He walked on the aromatic debris, looking up at the chinks of moon through the canopy and pausing to touch the bones. He had never seen anything like the grove of eucalyptus with the moonlight showering down. The older trees had few lower branches, and the trunks were tall and tapering but straight like masts for a clipper ship. Where the saplings were crowed, they spired up, narrow and tall. Some of the mature trunks looked as if they had been sheathed in tattered wallpaper that shed in ribbons and flakes, but underneath the smooth naked skin was as smooth and fair as the inner thigh of a girl--one with hair so pale and metallic that she might be an elf or a fairy. He touched a tree like mottled silver marble. The wind fell away, and the mosaic of leaves above him grew still: blue, light green, grey-green, and jade.

Up in the writing room--

Mary Boxley Bullington, Avian Adventures
over a Barbarous Land. Acrylic and mixed
media collage, 22" x 22 1/2". Available.
If you don't know her work, go find her
on facebook. Mary's work is fluent and powered. 
by a great sluice of passion. I recommend it!

Labyrinthine tangles, or what's coming up in the writing room--

Although I have had Maze of Blood at the publishers for a year or two, accepted as was, I nevertheless got the wild wire to revised it and change the order around entirely. This is clearly madness but is now underway. We (me and my mad alter ego) hope it is a fruitful madness. I am going to spend some time getting my drifts of manuscripts into order this year. I have been saying that I would tweak The Aerenghast Game (a children's 3-in-1 novel) and send it out for some years, and I am now saying it again. Also, I must send out The Book of the Red King, which has been sitting around, retting in a flax pond, and needs only a mild scutching and hackling, or swingling, or something. Then I have to get some of these untidy heaps of poems in some kind of order. Best of all, I have an idea for a novel that I am just a wee bit nuts about--if I can only find time (or a maid and secretary, plus a chauffeur for child no. 3. Don't all volunteer at once--stampedes can be dangerous.)

Mary Boxley Bullington, Come Dog Days, Snake
Makes his Get-Away. Acrylic, gesso, India
ink on paper, 19" x 22." All paintings 
shown here are available for purchase... 

Glimmerglass, trala,

is next up on the publication schedule. Please check out the tab above. The muse. The house in the hill. Labyrinths. Somnium. Love and dangers. And more art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Of course!

Note to moguls, moles, gulls, etc.--

You know, having the teensiest little fannish mention in Entertainment Weekly really moved some books--some out of print books, that is, particularly Catherwood and the two Adantis books. What I'd really like is for all you Hollywood types with bags of money to go purchase some of my in-print books. They make grand gifts. Y'all hear? That means the books on the tabs above that say 2011 or 2012... People who like to fantasize about such things tell me that A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and Thaliad would make great movies. I'm always surprised when they say it about Thaliad because it's a long blank verse adventure! That's like making something like--oh, I don't know--Beowulf into a movie. Only with more adventures and female roles. I don't ever fantasize about anything happening to my books because that way leads an unpleasant kind of madness (as opposed to a Maze-of-Blood-retweaking kind of madness!) P. S. You never know, a lyric poem or narrative might be a good movie--better pick up The Foliate Head and The Throne of Psyche while you're at it!  (✿◠‿◠)

Mary Boxley Bullington, Only Last April.
Acrylic, gesso, oil pastel, India ink,
watercolor and collage on rag paper,
22" x 22." Available for purchase.

My reading

I've been very busy and so am listening to some books this week, which I find is a challenge--I'm too used to being able to back up a paragraph and reread... But in this pellmell way I have just finished Chesterton's A Short History of England and am now listening to Ruskin's Lectures on Landscape.

April Fool's Day

No tricks this year--I am my own April Fool, and the closest I come here is the fantastic idea of moguls reading my blog! Happy day, all who tilt--as I do--with their own foolishness.

Mary Boxley Bullington, open studio day, Roanoke