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.

Maquettes for Paul and all

Almost noon, and a snowy Saturday is well underway... The wandering husband is no longer racing on horseback to the pyramids at Giza but is back in Morocco. Meanwhile I've taken the youngest to wrestling and gone to the store and picked him up and hunted black pants and then followed the school marching band to lay wreaths in memory of our veterans while I thought about Causley's "At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux" and about my father, who at seventeen ran away from his life as a sharecropper's child and flew runs over Germany and France. Pax tecum.

* * *

Film link:
http://www.culturecolony.com/videos?id=5571

Paul Digby asked to see the little movie of maquettes by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins yesterday. I sailed it his way, and Paul afterward said that I had not posted a link here... Well, maybe I did, but it's worth another look.  And I snitched the remarks Clive made on his blog about the making of this little film--addressed to "Gerwyn." You will notice that Clive is a very kind person; probably more than one take would be better!

Clive:
Oddly enough, I know exactly what you mean about the maquette film. It does have an hypnotic/trance-like quality. I noticed the first time Pete Telfer showed it to me. I think there are a number of reasons why. 

Marly Youmans, poet and author of the chapter on the ‘miraculous’ in the monograph, travelled from her home in New York State to Wales for the exhibition opening, arriving a week early so as to spend some time with us. Pete Telfer had already filmed the live-action linking footage for the film, and was waiting for me to come over to his place to record the narration, which was to be drawn from the chapter by another American contributor to the book, Kathe Koja. Kathe’s piece on maquettes was beautifully written… she’s an acclaimed novelist… but she was unable to come to Wales as she had to be in the US to complete a stage adaptation of her last book. I had supposed I would read her words myself, though intuition told me that an American accent would suit better, as would a woman’s voice. Enter Marly, who graciously agreed to stand in for Kathe. The sections of narration were recorded in Pete’s young daughter’s bedroom. (Thank you Alis!) With Pete… who is not built daintily… his recording machine and huge microphone plus Marly… who is dainty… crammed into the small toy-filled space, the only place left for me was a mattress on the floor, from where I offered occasional directions. (Marly says that I lay there in my sunglasses, which sounds very louche!) Marly is a ‘one-take’ kind of a girl, and it was her innate poet’s rhythm and dreamy, Southern-accented delivery that resulted, in part, in the hypnotic quality of the film. Pete had not initially been won over by the notion of a narration, but as soon as he heard his playback of Marly, he was enthusiastic to use the recordings.

The other aspect that lends the hypnotic quality is the soundtrack Pete recorded at Ty Isaf on the beautiful Spring day he came to film the linking sections. The sash-window of the blue bedroom where we filmed was open, and as I hung the maquettes on thin thread in the aperture, we were surrounded by the sounds of nesting birds in the rookery beyond, a perfect accompaniment to the painted card figures swaying in the breeze. The first animation sequence by contrast is completely without sound, which further emphasises a dream-like state, because it feels as though the puppet is in an other-worldly vacuum. (My head?)

Gerwyn, I’m delighted that you like Pete’s film so much. I think that it perfectly captured the spirit of the moment in the week before the exhibition opened, and it’s great that you ‘got it’. Everything about it was improvised, from the animation sequences made in a single afternoon and evening on our dining room floor and table (my partner Peter taking the stills while I animated the figures) to the last minute idea to film the maquettes on threads in the window. Pete is a guerilla-film-maker, enthusiastically throwing himself into the spirit of creativity wherever he finds it. The man is a force of nature!

* * * 

And now I really must get down to work!

Maquettes and Myra: wholly unrelated M's

Pete Telfer's shot of Clive
before the opening of "Clive Hicks Jenkins"
at The National Library of Wales, The Gregynog Gallery.

If you go to Telfer's Culture Colony site here, you can see a film
(a collaborative effort by Clive, Peter Wakelin, and Pete Telfer)
showing how Clive manipulates his maquettes to gain new ideas.
This film is one of two featured at Clive's retrospective show.

Voiceover is by me, reading words of Kathe Koja
from the splendid Lund Humphries monograph, Clive Hicks Jenkins.
Taped in the bedroom of Pete's daughter, with Clive
as godfather director, lying on the bed in sunglasses.

There are Telfers here in Cooperstown, and once there
once was a Telfer gallery.

And now for something completely different...

Just in case you're feeling
a. over the hill
or b. lacking in joie de vivre
or c. quite certain that old ladies are really boring,
here is my darling Aunt Myra, age 94 and recently out of the hospital:

"Parasailing granny does it again"
May 16, 2011 3:33 PM  Destin Log staff reports
Myra Morris celebrates her 94th birthday with style in Destin.
The South Carolina native has been parasailing
with Captain John of Gilligan’s Parasail
every year for her birthday for the past seven years.
Morris and her eldest granddaughter, Robin Morse
of Hattiesburg, Miss., got a bird’s eye view of Destin.
Morris was in town celebrating her birthday on May 12
 with 17 relatives from Mississippi, South Carolina and Canada.

And now I think the maquettes and my Aunt Myra are not so unrelated because they both twirl and hang on the breeze, these maquettes and this Myra, my aunt, a woman of great sweetness who is secretly a daring young girl on a flying trapeze.