4th publication of "An Incident at Agate Beach"

"Ocean Sky" by Nathan Allworth.
On the Oregon coast. Courtesy
of the photographer and www.sxc.hu.

“An Incident at Agate Beach” is online! The story originally appeared in James Artimus Owen's handsome Argosy Quarterly 3 (2005) and has proved popular. It was reprinted in the anthology Northwest Passage: A Cascadian Odyssey (Windstorm, 2005) and in The Year’s Best in Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant, and Kelly Link (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006.)

Today the tale is published for the fourth time at weirdfictionreview.com, a site (what an attractive home page!) dreamed up by the well-known-for-weird team of Jeff and Ann Vandermeer and managed by also weirdoholic Adam Mills. It is, indeed, a strange, fantastic thing, and I hope will find many new readers.

The day I visited Agate Beach in Oregon, I knew that I would write a story about the place. But this is not the one I expected. If you have comments, there's a spot to leave them at the close of the story. Enjoy!

Oh, and thanks to Rebecca Beatrice Miller for that leading-with-the-chin, uncanny eyebrow portrait...

Marly goes Lightspeed

The story is illustrated by Galen Dara.

Read at Lightspeed

"Prolegomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix" (short story) is up at Lightspeed. Many thanks to writers and publishers Gavin Grant and Kelly Link for its original print publication in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (2007), and to Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams for asking to reprint the story. (John Crowley also has a reprint in this issue.) I am glad to find that even the stranger dictates of the heart may find a welcome out in the world.

Listen at Lightspeed

Paul Boehmer's reading of "Prologomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix" is also available for download (time 38+ minutes.)

Read more: Author Spotlight

Christie Yant interviews me, asking questions about the story in the areas of response, family secrets, poetry vs. prose, theme, and upcoming publications.

Later: Oops. I suppose that I should have noted that a place for leaving comments is at the very foot of each Lightspeed page... Enjoy!

Marly, the dervish of NYC

Photography credit: by Ellen Datlow, editor extraordinaire. As I have always been a great maker of weird faces (and even somehow managed to be in a picture at KGB where I appear to have a bust of double-dirigible proportions--how?--bizarre posture? is that my next insult to photographers?), I present a nigh-insuperable challenge to the candid photographer, and I congratulate Ellen for catching me without one of my especially peculiar faces now and then. Most people can't manage it! She has many more on her site, but here are a couple of me (one with Paul Guran of Prime Books) and one of Dan Braum, my co-reader, and his fellow Clarion South grad, Ben Francisco.

My mighty whirl through New York is finished. I took the 8:30 puddle-hopper bus to the city, immediately fell into an on-going interview with Jim Freund of "Hour of the Wolf" at WBAI and John Klima (editor of the anthology Logorrhea and zine Electric Velocipede, recorded "The Girl in the Fabrilon" with Jim, did an interview with Jim, taped a few poems for other shows, did a reading of "Prolegomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix" at KGB Bar (hosted by Gavin Grant and Ellen Datlow and also captured by Jim, though I felt that my reading was a bit ragged-and-rugged by then), went to dinner at a Chinese place with part of the KGB mob, ran around with Dan and Ben, slept for a few hours at the blessedly quiet HoJo Express on East Houston, went to breakfast with writer Maggie Paley at the Noho Star (we met at Yaddo last year--she's the author of Bad Manners and, yes, The Book of the Penis), met up with my friends Jack and Anne for a Turkish elevensies (like hobbits, I was doing an extra meal), bought presents at Pearl River, caught the subway to the Port Authority, hopped on a bus, got delayed by an unfortunate tractor-trailer accident, and finally arrived back in the peaceful little village of Cooperstown (where it is always snowing and so was) around midnight.

Did that sentence seem rushed? Now you know what my trip was like.

But I think it was fruitful; the prose and interviews will be on three shows, and the poems will be tossed in elsewhere on other shows. The next step is that Jim Freund will call and wake me up at 3:00 a.m. when he runs a story so that I can answer questions. I think this will be comical because I am not at my best at 3:00 a.m. We all know that 2:00 a.m. is my proper hour...