Swifts from the buttonwood--

Before long I'll be abandoning my family in Cooperstown for a little while, visiting classes taught by Jeremy L. C. Jones at Wofford College, doing a reading, and visiting my mother. It should be pleasant, if I can ever get through that annoying To Do list and leave . . .

In stray moments I'm reading Abandoned Quarry: New and Selected Poems (Mercer University Press, 2010) by John Lane, who teaches at Wofford. Also an essayist, he teaches Southern literature, Environmental Studies, and more.

The poems draw on thirty years of publishing books and chapbooks.

Here's a sample:

SYCAMORE


Praise the sycamore for its huge girth when left alone,
              so thick that settlers used its hollow heart for a barn.
              For the beauty of the buttonwood lies in the trunk.

Praise for these trunks more thick and sturdy than all other deciduous trees,
              a true forest giant of stream sides, flood plains and river bottoms,
              for dark spaces where swifts congregate and fly out at dawn.

Praise for sycamore bark, flaking off in big green patches on old trunks,
              for the wood, clay-yellow and warty, furrowed, bone-like,
              and yes, for the leaves, bright green and huge, paler below.

Praise for what we've made from them: oxcart wheels, barber poles,
              old stereoscopes, lard pails, hogshead for grain,
              piano and organ cases, crates, boxes, and butcher blocks.

Praise for the Carolina Parakeet, now gone, our only true parrot,
              and for their yearly feasts on sycamore buttons in spring when
              clouds with wings passed through so thick the sun was obscured.

And praise for the cooling depth of the sycamore's shade, for the rich
              deep bottom lands where the field guides say it still "takes happy rest,"
              for the streams running past and the sycamore leaves floating there.

G's and Jeremy L. C. Jones

Jeremy L. C. Jones has a piece about his childhood in Cooperstown in Strange Horizons. I like it a lot, and not just because he gives me a nod! (Thanks, Jeremy!) I see Pomeroy Place every day of my life here, and I know a lot of practical, straightforward people who claim to have seen ghosts. Although I thought that our 1808 federal-style house had been one of the ones to escape haunting, evidently Mrs. Lee (two owners back) came down the front stairs and swept into the living room to find three little children dancing in a ring, each dressed in old-fashioned clothing. She turned to call to her husband upstairs, and when she looked, they were gone.

I'm not telling my youngest, who used to be powerfully afraid of "G's," as he called them. G's. It was dangerous even to say the word...

*
Pub date for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage arrives in four little days! Kindly spread the word, O great Word of Mouth...

Interview at "Clarkesworld"

Image: I picked this image from the Clarkesworld covers because it's a sort of foliate head, and I have a mania for foliate heads and even a book coming out called The Foliate Head. The artist is Adam Chowles of the U.K.

If you pop over to the current issue of Clarkesworld, you can find a rather long interview with me. The interviewer is Jeremy L. C. Jones, who I will be meeting when I mosey down to Spartanburg for Shared Worlds. An odd thing is that his grandparents lived in the house across the street from me, and his father grew up one door down from that house. His grandfather was a famous figure here in Cooperstown. Meanwhile, I was born in South Carolina. It strikes me that Jer ought to live where I live, and I ought to live where he lives. But life is strange, and so is Clarkesworld.

Here's the jump.

Comments are turned off because I'm sure Jer and Clarkesworld deserve them more than I do! You'll find a place to log comments at the bottom of the interview. Thanks, Mr. Jones . . .

Booklife / Shared Worlds

Little mini-essays written for "Shared Worlds" are starting to pop up on the Booklifenow site. I pass something in, and Jeremy Jones writes a nifty little introduction and slaps a title on it. Other writers respond to the questions, producing varied results. New topics include questions on good and bad advice and writing about the Other.

And Jeremy has also done an interesting interview with Michael Curtis, longtime editor of The Atlantic. Here's a sample question and answer:

What has been your greatest editing challenge?

Curtis: My greatest editing challenge. I can think of three:
A) Shortening stories far too long for The Atlantic format but so distinctive and artful that we hated to give them up. One early example was a story by Joyce Carol Oates, at the time a little known but already prolific writer of short fiction. Trimmed to half its original length, and retitled, the story appeared in The Atlantic in 1964 and was then chosen for inclusion in the O. Henry Prize Stories for that year and was awarded First Prize as the best of the stories in that collection. A more recent example: two stories by a writer whose first collection won a Flannery O Connor Award in the 1990s. We published two of his stories at roughly half their original length without, I believe, leaving out essential detail or nuance.

B) A second challenge: working with writers (often poets who have turned to fiction) whose ideas about language have less to do with literal meaning than with the sound of the words, in isolation or in sequence. This kind of writer often resists the objection that he/she hasn’t said what is plainly intended, and that other words would do a better job. “But I like that word,” he/she will say, “and why can’t I use a noun as a verb, or vice versa?” Problems like this get solved, eventually, but not always in the editor’s favor.

C) A third challenge lies in the use of language too frank or sulfurous for general audiences. When such language is fundamental to a story, can’t be changed without damage to the intent or affect of the story, we usually just return it. In many cases, however, alternates are available and are often just as effective. Such revisions, however, require negotiation and patience. In recent years, frankly, The Atlantic has allowed language it would not have published in the 1960s, offending a handful of readers but probably going unnoticed by the vast majority, and certainly by those familiar with, and comfortable with, the loosening of artistic boundaries in all the arts.

Today's assignment has to do with inventing creatures to be illustrated as part of the Shared Worlds writing camp. Should be hairy and scaly and interesting...

Illustration: The logo above is by John Coulthart, a book designer who is amply suppied with both coult and hart. The image is drawn from Jeff Vandermeer's Booklife jacket. More of John Coulthart's designs and concerns can be found at Atelier Coulthart.