Hard to pin--

PIN-POST TABLE OF CONTENTS
Being rather fat, it needs one!
TO PIN

On the classification of this creature, Marly Youmans

A NEW 'PIN'

A fresh classification for the same

UPDATE ON THE ADDY FOR THE THRONE OF PSYCHE

More news about the Gold Award Addy

Golden butterfly--"gilded butterfly on a needle"
courtesy of sxc.hu and Karen Steiner of Austria.

TO PIN
In honor of Elsa Louise, let's change it to: IMPOSSIBLE TO PIN

For publishers and reviewers and booksellers, the writer needs to be pinned down.  It's helpful to sort and place him in a box with others of the same kind. It's helpful when placing the book on a shelf in a bookstore or on a search list in an online shop.

Some of us are hard to pin. Keep putting different pins in us, and we may turn out to be all holes: invisible to the naked eye. And that is true even though, from the inside of the writer, all the work seems to flow from the very same fount and to have a kind of seamlessness. Try and catch a butterfly? It can all go the beautiful, destructive way of Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful."

For a long time I was called a poet. Then I was titled "literary writer." When I set a  novel in the past, I was suddenly "historical novelist" to some--to more when I did it again. Then I further messed up the box of labels by writing a couple of books especially for my daughter and so publishing a Southern fantasy that was marketed to children, and then another marketed to young adults, although both were reviewed as crossover books that adults would enjoy. 

That's another mixed category. My adult novels tend to be mentioned as crossover books for bright teens. My children's books tend to be mentioned as crossover books for (also-bright, I am sure!) adults.

Meanwhile my poetry veers from lyric to monologue to narrative to epic. My 2011 collection, The Throne of Psyche, moves from a long blank verse narrative to a wealth of shorter forms. And what about the short stories, which might puzzle a labeler as well, being set in present or past and called realist or irrealist, depending on the story and the reader?

My upcoming books are equally mixed: a picaresque tale set during the Depression era (my ninth book and winner of The Ferrol Sams Award, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, now available as a pre-order); a novel that tells the awkward coming-of-age and destruction of a pulp writer, leaning on the facts of one such writer's life (Maze of Blood) and interspersing the story with fantastic faux-pulp passages; a story of a artist's rebirth in mid-life and pursuit of the muse, twisted together with a sort of dream journey/vision (Glimmerglass); an epic poem, post-apocalyptic (Thaliad); a collection of formal poems, many of them intensely "green" and mythic (The Foliate Head.) I'm working on revising a manuscript of poems called The Book of the Red King; oddly, the stories of the Fool and the King feel in some curious way like the most autobiographical thing I have ever done. (I am, of course, not the King--whose identity is various and unpinned--but the Fool.) I'm not much interested in autobiography unless it can be wholly transformed.

What kind of butterfly am I, flitting in the one bright meadow?  

Morpho peleides courtesy of Rudy Tiben of the Netherlands
and sxc.hu--I picked a morpho because one of the characters
in The Book of the Red King is linked to a blue morpho.

A NEW 'PIN'

Today I'm rather pleased to find myself in a whole new category. At this point, it seems that I am destined to be collected in many ways and so to be a collector of categories! When I have been pinned in a sufficient number of categories, perhaps I will have a kind of roundness in the world's eyes. It's hard to pin what is round.

If you hop over to Hellnotes, you can see that I have now been collected in a new box: "25 Women Horror Writers You Probably Haven't Heard of (But Should Know)." I am described like this:  "award-winning author Marly Youmans has a decidedly more darkly fantastical vibe to her than 'traditional' horror but has produced some of the most beautiful dark fiction." I like it; it sounds positively Hawthornean.

Certainly my two books marketed to children/young adults are rife with shadow, and a number of anthologized stories and others in magazines have a dark, fantastic tint as well. I'm quite pleased to be in some good company and also to venture nearer to a new set of readers. I even have meaningful linkages to several writers on the list, as I narrated Kathe Koja's essay on the maquettes of Clive Hicks-Jenkins for a film when I was in Wales last spring, and Catherynne Valente wrote an introduction for my forest tale, Val/Orson. So thanks to Hellnotes and to Darkeva, who snagged me as part of her collection.

UPDATE on AN ADDY FOR THE THRONE OF PSYCHE

Earlier I posted about the Addy Gold Award for The Throne of Psyche. If you would like to see the full list of Addy awards for Burt and Burt and Mercer, hop here.  The design team and Mercer now go onto regionals and, one hopes, nationals--they managed to beat out more than 50,000 other designs to place, so that's exciting!

If you would like to see how Clive Hicks-Jenkins, painter of "Touched," responded, jump here. You'll also see responses from some of Clive's real-life friends and e-friends, including the painting's owner.

Val/Orson, coming in early May

"The spirit of the forest is alive in the beautiful writing of Marly Youmans' Val/Orson; a compelling legend of romance and mystery both ancient and modern at once." --Jeffrey Ford

"Incendiary, passionate writing propels Val/Orson, an utterly fearless story that takes chances and passes that test brilliantly. Brave, beautiful, and fey." --Jeff Vandermeer

"What a gorgeous tale! I'm always delighted to read a new work by Marly Youmans, and Val/Orson both enchants and satisfies: it is a combination of myth, Shakespeare, and modern environmentalism, with not a little magic thrown into the mixture, written in prose as lush as it is precise. A treat for anyone who loves fantasy or just a tale well told." --Theodora Goss

Editions & how to order...

Jacketed hardcover limited edition (200) A handsome cloth edition signed by Marly Youmans and the writer of the introduction, Catherynne M. Valente, with jacket image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and interior by novelist-designer Robert Wexler. Click on the image above to see the jacket in full. A larger run is the unjacketed limited edition (500) signed by Marly.


P. S. Publishing
"flap copy,"
with special thanks
to Philip Lee Williams
and Robbie Mayes:

Inspired by the French medieval tale Valentine and Orson, this moving, insightful novella from award-winning author Marly Youmans reclaims a 500-year-old epic for contemporary readers.

Through the dazzling double-story of a stolen twin and the secrets of an ancient forest, Youmans roams also among the sweet spirits of Shakespeare’s romance plays.

Val/Orson opens with Val long saddened at the loss of his stolen twin brother. He has grown up in the California forest, climbing mysterious redwoods and finding his greatest pleasure in a landscape that seems alive. And sorrow for his lost sibling—his double—haunts his walks.

From boyhood, he has worked with all his intelligence and strength to save the ancient trees. Now Val's world is increasingly populated by environmentalists, sometimes dangerously radical, sometimes merely idealistic, and further shaded in connection with the disappearance of a particularly bewitching tree-sitter--a woman who has both captivated and confused him.

“I fear seeing a luminous being crouched by the hearth, ready to swing its intense light-drenched gaze toward me. I fear that I’ll never grasp the terms of my own damnation or what happened to the woman I knew only by the name of Diamond . . .”

Did she die in her wanderings? Is she still in the deep forest with her lover, mocking Val? As he searches for his lost twin, he must find out.

The sequoia groves are the stage where a company of figures worthy of a Renaissance “winter’s tale” (Fergus, the Sherwood band of tree-sitters, grief-shaded Bella with her wild inheritance, Clere, and mysterious others who seem close by, half-hidden in trees) engage, entertain, and challenge Val. As their stories mesh and unwind, they lure Val deeper into the rich complexity of their narratives and toward revelation. And as the mystery in Marly Youmans’ magical world intensifies, Val moves from revelation to a stunning transformation as son, brother, lover, and steward of the wildwood.

P. S.

I've enjoyed working with publisher Pete Crowther and editor Nick Gevers. I find that it's sweet to be asked for a manuscript and a pleasure to work with a smaller house. I recommend it!

New anthology, soon-to-be-new book

WE THINK, THEREFORE WE ARE

Somehow I neglected to mention that Pete Crowther's anthology of stories centered around artificial intelligence(Penguin/DAW) is out, including--oddly enough--a story by me. Note the interesting male-to-female numbers here.

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Contents:

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“Tempest 43″ by Stephen Baxter
“The Highway Code” by Brian Stableford
“Savlage Rights” by Eric Brown
“The Kamikaze Code” by James Lovegove
“Adam Robots” by Adam Roberts
“Seeds” by Tony Ballantyne
“Lost Places of the Earth” by Steven Utley
“The Chinese Room” by Marly Youmans
“Three Princesses” by Robert Reed
“The New Cyberiad” by Paul Di Filippo
“That Laugh” by Patrick O’Leary
“Alles in Ordnung” by Garry Kilworth
“Sweats” by Keith Brooke
“Some Fast Thinking Needed” by Ian Watson
“Dragon King of the Eastern Sea” by Chris Roberson

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Harriet Klausner, who is surely the quickest and most prolific reviewer on the face of the planet, already has a review and notes, "the compilation is superb as the authors contribute diverse tales with some seemingly weird like Marly Youmans' 'The Chinese Room' adding depth and variety." "Weird," eh? This was the last thing I wrote during my Yaddo stay, and when I fired it off to Pete, he did mention something about it being just a bit different.

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For those of you who are allergic to artificial intelligence, it may comfort you to know that there are no robots whatsoever in "The Chinese Room," though there is a computer. There are midgets and ex-jockeys and general commotion. There are sausages in bed. There is childbirth. There is pent-up love from here to China.

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The story is based on the "Chinese Room" thought experiment of John Searle. As our friend Wiki says, "The Chinese Room argument comprises a thought experiment and associated arguments by John Searle (Searle 1980), which attempts to show that a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may behave." For more about the original Chinese room, go visit Wiki, right here.

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VAL/ORSON

“Flap copy” for spring’s book, Val/Orson, is up at last. As I am feeble and Milquetoastish when it comes to proper boasting, I enlisted help. And now the thing seems properly flappy and boastful. See here!

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The two limited editions (plain or signed and fancy, take your pick!) are available through the online catalogue at http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/. Thanks to bloggers and reviewers who have let me know they would like a pre-publication e-copy of the book to review or feature; if anyone else would like to sign on, write me or leave me a note here.

Catherynne Valente has written a lovely introduction as well, so that will go up some time closer to the spring pub date, along with a jacket image and other news.

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This book is also associated with publisher Pete Crowther because he and Nick Gevers were kind enough to ask for a short novel for their novella series (U.K.: P. S. Publishing). I love to be asked, as does every writer I know, and I love it when people read and like my work and want to see more. Thanks to both of them.

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CHILDHOOD & WRITING

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I was talking to my mother yesterday, and she mentioned that I knew in third grade that I was going to be a writer, and that it was perfectly clear to her what I would be. Interesting. I find that I have a rather soupish memory which renders much down to alphabet when I would like to have clear text.

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She was standing under the pear tree in our family home in Collins, Georgia. The blossoms were not quite open... This summer I canned pears off that tree. One of my childhood memories is of my Aunt Sara fishing a snake out of that tree with a hoe and killing it, chopchopchop.