Whee! A book landing on the list...

CURRENT's 100 Books of the 21st Century

Read the intro and run your peepers down to no. 29!

Summer sampler, part two

Named as one of their Favorite Books of 2015
at Books and Culture Magazine, Maze of Blood 
(Mercer University Press, 2015), is a visceral
shot to the senses and a fine filament tugging
at the imagination that examines the results
of thwarted dreams and desires in the life
of a young writer. Set in rural Texas
in the 1930’s, Marly Youmans uses language
as both scalpel and wand to conjure a place
and time as real as the abandoned oil wells
and as otherworldly as the magical lands
of the great epic poems.... Suzanne Brazil

The start of the 11th chapter of Maze of Blood...

The girl broke into his house like a wave.
Windows were thrown open to let the breeze in, and the crickets sawed like mad on their dry, chitinous fiddles. Somewhere in the background a radio played a cowboy song about horse thieves and a broken heart. Conall had been rattling the Underwood’s keys and ranting a story to the air when she sailed through the door and splashed against the walls.
His mother and father tried to turn her away, as if pushing with their dried, withered fingers against the blue-and-green swell of a mermaid. But her voice rang out so loudly that she woke him from a tale of bushwhacking across the wilderness, and he came into the living room.
Her brown eyes held his.
    He could feel the walls starting to buckle—could feel some kind of radiance pouring out of her and pushing at the meager room, making the dilapidated couch and chairs stand out in all their cheerlessness. Perfume blossomed in the air that had been stale and smelled faintly of illness. Her presence diminished his mother and father, and they dwindled to toys. She might as well have been a tiger roaming the Sikhote-Alin mountains, and they two little rabbits in the ginseng leaves! Her body moved easily, as if she were more at home in the house than they, with more of a right to be there. Conall felt a ripple of pleasure—or gratefulness—perhaps even joy. Whatever it was, the sensation was so unfamiliar that he could not put a final name to it and knew only that for all his bulk, he felt very light on feet that seemed about to float up from the floor. He wanted to rush to her, wrap his arms around her, and sniff the scent of her hair, and he would have been content to hold her that way for a long time.
“You reminded me of a poem,” he told her, later on in the evening.
“What poem?”
“‘Kubla Khan.’ The way the water goes dancing and diving.”
“Next time I’ll bring my dulcimer,” she said..
“My Abyssinian maid,” he said, and smiled.
“The Abyssinian maid melted away like the poem.”
“I’ll have to hold on tight,” he said.
She dazzled him. A kind of bewitchment was shed from her fingertips as she spoke. In the distance, crickets were chirping, and a few spotted chorus frogs were throat-singing—their vocal sacs emitting a series of rasping trills. Conall said that the frogs had been Mongolians in another life but had been sent to Texas to repent of their sins. He told her that he had called up the moon especially for her and that the harvest moon belonged to Ceres. Soon, he said, the daughter of the goddess would be leaving for the winter kingdom of Hades. He wondered how Persephone, so full of light and life, could endure such a kingdom of darkness.
   Clinging close to the horizon, the enormous autumn moon had taken on the surprising color of a rutabaga. Perhaps they had danced under the moon together. Conall didn’t know how to dance but couldn’t imagine that ignorance would have stopped him. He could not remember, though he could still feel her hand that was small and warm and sweet-smelling. Perhaps the dancing had come later in his dreams.
Her name was Maybelline.

Note: hardcovers of Maze of Blood and Glimmerglass are currently on half-price sale at Amazon.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Sarah Raphael-Balme at Lotte Inch, York

CLIVE HICKS-JENKINS & SARAH RAPHAEL-BALME

THE MIND'S EYE

12th May 2017 - 17th June 2017

"Featuring the weird and wonderful, the imagined and the exaggerated, with prints and original paintings by artist, illustrator and designer Clive Hicks-Jenkins and York based painter Sarah Raphael-Balme."

As you can see, original art from Maze of Blood is among the offerings. (The book was Finalist, Forewood Book of the Year Awards, and was featured in Favorite Books of the Year at Books and Culture and Books of 2015 in First Things.) And there are cunning little pendants from Clive as well.

More about the Sarah Raphael-Balme and Clive Hicks-Jenkins here.

Sarah Raphael-Balme

Interior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Maze of Blood

Sarah Raphael-Balme
Lots more of her images collected here

More about Lotte Inch Gallery here

Facebook photo pilfered from Sarah Raphael-Balme.
You can see one of the Gawain prints,
a pen-and-ink piece from The Foliate Head,
as well as copies of Hansel and Gretel,
Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Maze of Blood, 
and Six Poets The Book of Ystwyth - 
Six Poets on the Art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
available (click title) post-free from Grey Mare Press.

Thank you

to those who voted for Maze of Blood in the Foreword comments section on the maze-page (or who do so by May 20th.)  You have helped to make the book a little more visible, and that is always the difficulty for good books in our age: to be visible. I thank you for helping!

Book soup

A springing mind--
by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Maze of Blood
(Mercer, fall 2015)

Advice to writers

Advice to writers, even my own, makes me cringe a little. Perhaps I prefer some silly bit of advice like David Sedaris saying that you must write with a candy cane pen.

Because it doesn't matter a whit what writers say about writing or painters about painting or dancers about dancing, etc. Just get on with the playing with words, the pushing of paint, the moving of a body in the air, or whatever it is that draws you.

And if, after a while, you don't want to do that thing, know it and stop (preferable to having the desire seep away in dribs and drabs, I imagine, though I am not sure. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps that is easier. And then there are those who compare making something out of words to slashing open a vein--what of them? Terrible to have no sense of joy and play...)

It is impossible to say anything against advice without committing advice. Silence is, I expect, better.

What's up on this rainy day (other than dandelions)

I'm writing a little play for teens and children today. It's about the boy who becomes King David... There will be lots and lots of sheep. (Last year I was commissioned to write one that I called "The Great Flood of All the World." Fun.) And I'm daydreaming about a novel that I want to write. And maybe I'll do a little tinkering with poems. Also: massive heaps of laundry are mumbling my name.

Thank you to those of you

who voted for Maze of Blood in the comments at the Foreword site. (Voting closes in a week, but such things generally result in a small flurry upon announcement.) If you were here, I would give you a peach-colored tulip with raindrops.

The truth is, I'm not very good at asking for anything that might help my books, even now that I've moved to a small press and university press setting, where I ought to do so. Thanking people for helpful acts is easy. When I was struck by how easily and forthrightly McKinty asks for Amazon reviews and support for his novels, I came to the realization that I just can't do it. My polite Southern ancestors all seem to sit up in their graves and stare balefully.

But I am very thankful when people show that they care about the books. I thank you. The green lawn and the wet tulips and uvularia with its yellow bell flowers all thank you, or so I declare! Words are magic.

Emily Barton

has a new book. The Book of Esther. I'm not going to read it until later because I have a golem idea for a story, but I am going to get it to save. Here's a wonderful review that starts with the line, "In her third novel, brainy and ebulliently eloquent Barton (Brookland, 2006) tells the story of a Jewish Joan of Arc on the forbidding steppes between the Black and Caspian Seas."

Brazil interview for Maze of Blood

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer, fall 2015

Suzanne Brazil interviewed me about Maze of Blood for Women Writers, Women's Books. And as she did when interviewing me when Glimmerglass appeared, she asked interesting questions. You can find the brand new interview here. (See the note about Suzanne at the foot of the interview--she's a busy lady.) Thank you to Suzanne!

Interview for Maze of Blood at Women Writers, Women's Books

Review of Maze of Blood at Blogcritics by Suzanne

Interview for Glimmerglass at Blogcritics part one and part two 

or The Seattle Post-Intelligencer part one and part two

Review of Glimmerglass by Suzanne 

Art, Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Design, Mary-Frances Glover Burt

Maze of Blood - reader voting

Two of the unluckiest things that have happened in my life happened on a May 20th, so I'm hesitant to mention this, as it closes on that date. I tend to dive through that date on the calendar in hopes that nothing bad happens.

But if you are a fan of Maze of Blood, you have the chance to vote on the book for a new readers' award. The book is currently a finalist for the Foreword indie awards in the literary fiction category--as were Glimmerglass and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, the latter of which won the Silver prize for fiction. Here is the page for my book.

Evidently voting is done by leaving a comment plus hashtag #INDIEFABFAVE; if you're a Facebook member and check the box, it'll also post a notice to Facebook. If not a Facebook member, I think that you have to create a Foreword Reviews account, an easy thing to make, in order to vote. Foreword says, "The book with the most reader endorsements will be named the INDIEFAB Reader’s Choice Winner." And that's the story. Thanks to any kind souls who fly that way and vote.

https://indiefab.forewordreviews.com/books/maze-of-blood/
And it's a two-post day; see below....

Maze-mapping, etc.

Maze

The Maze of Blood page has been revised and updated with clips from new reviews. Forthcoming is a new interview about the book from Suzanne Brazil--up soon!

"The Child and the Night Gaunts"
Did I say that I have a small story in the very attractive Dreams from the Witch House? It is an anthology of Lovecraftian tales by women, edited by Lynne Jamneck, and with by Daniele Serra art for every single story.  Stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and more.

Bad and good
1. Bad: reading another writer's post on appealing to readers to post Amazon reviews and realizing once again that I am completely unable to ask (thanks to a large bolus of inherited Southern genteel politeness fed to me in childhood) anybody to do anything at all for me and so am not at all fit for the current material, commercial day with all its marketing liveliness. 2. Good: two talks in Florida in the next year; The Book of the Red King swimming along nicely, though I got stuck on revising "What the Fool Whispered to the Wentletrap" for three whole days and will probably dither over it a bit more; lots of poems coming out here and there, in print and online; lovely requests, even if I'm too busy to fill them; movie bite (though I don't really regard these, as I have been getting them since 1996 without much progress); possible trip to L. A. in June if I wish, and perhaps I do; snowdrops and aconite in bloom.

Writing child
And if you haven't seen this (I've posted it everywhere, it seems), go look: lovely BBC video of the late 18th-century writing boy automaton by Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz (Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel.)

St. Patrick's Day
St. Patrick's Day dinner, made by my Irish-Dutch-Akwesasne husband: corned beef, cabbage, salt potatoes, honeyed carrots, Guiness chocolate cake with Bailey's cream cheese icing. Today is my mother's 87th St. Patty's Day birthday.

Finalist, Foreword Book of the Year Awards

Foreword Reviews' 

2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist 

Literary (Adult Fiction)

Maze of Blood

Maze of Blood is my third university press novel, 

and my third finalist ranking with the Foreword 

Book of the Year Awards for independent publishing. 

Glimmerglass and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

were also finalists, and the latter won the Silver 

Award in fiction.

Foreword Reviews' 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist

Literary (Adult Fiction)

Contributor(s)

Marly Youmans

Publisher

  Mercer University Press     

ISBN-13

978-0-88146-536-5

Publication Date

 Sep 1, 2015

Pages

 224

Retail price

 $24.00

Tags 

#finalist

#literary

AMAZON

 

INDIEBOUND

Foreword rating: 

Reviewed by
Clarissa Goldsmith   Review Date  November 27, 2015

Simultaneously poetic and economic, this is a layered and complex exploration of human existence and the experiences that mold a person. Maze of Blood reads almost like a poem. Marly Youmans’s language is sweeping and grandiose and renders the character of Conall Weaver in broad, even harsh...

Read the Review

For clips from other reviews, go here.

Congratulations to the other finalists in literary fiction--Barbara Stark-Nemon, Peter Grandbois, Caitlin Hicks, Lindsey Drager, Vanessa Blakeslee, Paula Closson Buck, Ben Nadler, Kathy Giuffre, Suzanne Heagy,  Lorraine M. Lopez, Shann Ray, Coleen Kearon, Stacy Barton, Barbara Roether, Elizabeth Harris, and Brian Kindall. Best of luck to their books!

Maze of Blood at First Things

Having just fished a snow-laden contributor's copy of First Things out of the mailbox, I am pleased to find not only my review of A. M. Juster's St. Aldhelm's Riddles (thank you to Matthew Schmitz for asking), but also an appearance in the year's roundup of 2015. I'm very glad to be among the lucky few included in the essay.

Here's a look, for visitors who don't have a subscription. (The essay will probably up online later on, just as last year's was.) I should clarify that the reference to "who wasn't written for Marly or for me" is a glance back to prior paragraphs, where Claire Vaye Watkins is mentioned, along with her much-read (yes, I read it) essay in Tin House that stabs at a good many targets, especially "white male literati."

* * *

from John Wilson, "Books of 2015," First Things (March 2016)

Jacket art, Clive Hicks-Jenkins;
book design, Mary-Frances Glover Burt

      Marly Youmans's new novel, Maze of Blood, has an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges (who wasn't writing for Marly or for me, but whose books I have read and reread over the years). It's taken from Borges's story "The Garden of the Forking Paths": I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars."
     I hate to give away too much and spoil someone's first reading, but here I will be violating that rule a bit. Maze of Blood is (among other things) a novel about the imagination--"about it" by enacting it. (Coleridge is a tutelary presence throughout.) The protagonist, Conall Weaver, is based on Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Youmans tells us that before the book begins. But it is not a novel "about" Howard. Rather, it takes his experience as a kind of template.
     Howard committed suicide at the age of thirty--stunning, if you consider what he'd already achieved. (Lots of writers today have published very little by the time they are thirty!) Conall Weaver also kills himself--very early in the book. This is a novel told in reverse chronology: In the last section, Conall is a young boy.
     By now, you may be shaking your head--what sort of book is this? "Experimental fiction"? Ugh. Actually, no--though it may not be your cup of tea in any case. If you are willing to trust the writer, you'll soon get the hang of it. Conall Weaver, like Robert E. Howard, grows up in hardscrabble Texas, a setting in which his writing seems out of place. But he's not just alienated from his setting (which he also loves); he feels at odds with his "time." As does Marly Youmans in her "time," which is ours as well. His stories are an act of rebellion and an act of celebration.
     But this isn't simply a Portrait of the Artist--for Artists (or would-be Artists) only. We are all characters in search of an Author, so the Spirit of Story tells Conall:

     For everything inside a story--and know most of all, that the world is a story and began with a word--is made up. And so the tale of a Green Knight with his chopped-off head still holding a knight of the Round Table to promises made is no less true than the tale of a man crammed with secrets who spontaneously combusts and leaves behind only a black, tallowy mark on the floorboards, and his story in turn is no less true than the tale of a Texas sharecropper's wife who has had a miscarriage only ten days before but just this morning was walking behind the mule and guiding the jerking plow.

Maze of Blood in Baton Rouge

Title: "Maze of Blood combines romance, adventure, mysticism."

Greg Langley, for many years the wise and wide-reading Books Editor at The Baton Rouge Advocate, has written a review of Maze of Blood. Find it HERE.

Clip: So “Maze of Blood” is a love story. It’s an adventure story. It’s mystic in places. It’s literary and poetic. It’s a Texas Gothic tale. All that is wonderful, but the book does have one hurdle for readers to overcome: The end is at the beginning. Caradog has died. Maybelline is no longer Conall’s best girl. And Conall, hero of the tale, has taken a fatal step almost before the plot finds its first complication. Then Youmans writes the story forward from a past point. It is told in first-person in the rich and sometimes fantastic voice of Conall. This may sound confusing, and in the hands of a lesser writer, it would be. But with Youmans, you can count on the entree being just as sweet as the dessert — no matter which one is served first.

Brazil on Maze of Blood

Suzanne Brazil reviews Maze of Blood at blogcritics.org. Opening paragraph:

Named as one of their Favorite Books of 2015 at Books and Culture Magazine, Maze of Blood (Mercer University Press, 2015), is a visceral shot to the senses and a fine filament tugging at the imagination that examines the results of thwarted dreams and desires in the life of a young writer. Set in rural Texas in the 1930’s, Marly Youmans uses language as both scalpel and wand to conjure a place and time as real as the abandoned oil wells and as otherworldly as the magical lands of the great epic poems.

Click here to read the rest.

So pleased

that writer Scott Bailey is reading another of my books and starting to comment. He is a grand reader and always has insights that make me remember what it was like to write the book. First installment--"no limit Texas hold 'em"--is here. 

I expect you can tell that the book under consideration is Maze of Blood (MDA Books, formerly of Rhemalda.)

And if you want to order one of Scott's books, go here.

You asked, no. 2: writer, artist, designer

Clive Hicks-Jenkins: When time allowed and opportunities came my way, I began to make book cover images for some of my friends, the chief among them being Marly Youmans, who because of her reputation as a writer was able to persuade one of her publishers to employ me. For The Foliate Head she even persuaded the publisher to take on my brother-in-law, Andrew Wakelin, as the designer, and he produced a splendid book-cover and ensured the layout inside was handsome. It was The Foliate Head that also established my regular practice of making page-division images and vignettes for Marly’s books.

Sienna Latham asked how Clive and I work with a designer. Perhaps there's no one answer to that, as to so many things! But now I'll try to think my way through and find out, right now.

What is always the same is our relationship. The two of us trust each other to do good work, and we don't interfere--I don't try and make the artist draw a certain element or in a particular mode, that is, and he doesn't try to encourage me to write other than I do. We never try to hurry each other in any way. We are curious about what the other is doing. Although we are very different, we have common loves, a kinship in sensibility, and are drawn to some of the same material, something we discovered early in writing letters back and forth.

As there are some books that have only a jacket (and cover) from Clive, I'll speak to those that are also decorated by him on the interior. We have worked with three designers on interior / exterior art, and I would say that it's a great help to have a designer care about the material. Our three designers are Andrew Wakelin (The Foliate Head), Elizabeth Adams (Thaliad), and Mary-Frances Glover Burt (Glimmerglass and Maze of Blood.) Perhaps it is surprising that each of the three people involved with making the book--writing, art, and design--is so free to do what he or she likes. Certainly I've been in situations where I've had little knowledge of what was happening with a jacket/cover. I've also been privy to the sight of publishers (not mine) and writers (not me) attempting to budge Clive, though why one would do so, I cannot imagine. Gratefulness that he wants to do a piece of work for a book of mine is always my slant on things.

The main hurdle with books with a good deal of art is getting publishers to agree with what we will do. The great advantage with heading toward small and university presses is that people can be willing to agree or compromise. (The down side tends to be less visibility, less "push" for books, of course, as there is less muscle behind a launch.)

Andrew Wakelin, the brother of Clive's partner, was an interesting choice as a designer, in that it was possible for Clive and Andrew to meet in person to discuss layout, and for Peter Wakelin to render opinions as well. Clive and I have a love for foliate heads, and the images arrived with that sense of ease that comes from love and long practice. I had little to do but admire, although we certainly discussed choice and placement. As I had met Andrew while in Wales, I found it easy to imagine their meetings at Ty Isaf when reported by email. The primary challenge with having Andrew serve as designer is that he is not an employee of Stanza Press (a division of P. S. Publishing in the U.K.), and so we had to get permission to use a different designer and also to tinker with the Stanza Press template for poetry books. (Val/Orson, which has jacket art from Clive, was outsourced by P. S. to writer / designer Robert Wexler, so we knew it was possible. Interestingly, I got to stay with Robert and his wife, Rebecca Kuder, when I taught in the Antioch summer workshops.) It helped that Pete Crowther asked for a poetry book, since when people ask, they're more likely to accept some variation (though Pete is a wonderfully nice and agreeable man.) It also helped that Andrew is a grand designer. We had an unexpected bit of difficulty with pagination and length because of the template, and at the last moment added a few poems that were congenial with the manuscript.

Designer-and-more Beth Adams is someone I met long before she asked for Thaliad (Ivy Alvarez and I had edited an issue of quarrtisiluni, the magazine she founded with Dave Bonta, and I live not far from Beth's childhood home.) She is a visual artist, writer, editor / designer, and publisher. Her Phoenicia Publishing (Montreal) is a micro-press in staff and a macro-press in ambition. As a team, we had many common interests and were united in the desire to make the most beautiful book possible, given the constraints of small press. (Constraints are often good challenges that lead to ingenuity.) The three of us kept in close touch. Our emails were full of forwarded quotes from one another and the many images Clive made, all influenced by American folk art.

One marvelous aspect to Phoenicia Publishing is that Beth's hand is in everything. Because she writes and makes art and designs, there's a seamlessness and feeling of a central editorial taste about all Phoenicia's books.

Mary-Frances Glover Burt, who designs for Mercer University Press (her company is Burt and Burt), had a great many images to work with for Glimmerglass, as Beth Adams did for Thaliad and Andrew Wakelin for The Foliate Head. Because the press stands as an intermediary between artist and its chosen designer, one would think that we might feel a little more detached from Mary-Frances. But it's a new world now, and we're all hooked together by social media. We're big fans of Mary-Frances. Here's Clive on her imaginative jacket design:

Clive: By contrast [with The Throne of Psyche, which used existing art] I made the artwork for Glimmerglass specifically for the project, and I’ve greatly enjoyed working with Mary-Frances Glover Burt as she’s sensitively transferred my drawing to the cover and made clever adjustments to finesse it into what you see at the top of this page. (I shall not spoil the illusion by indicating where adjustments have taken place, but suffice to say that she’s been quite the magician!) Moreover she’s made the wrap-around truly beautiful, with the lettering for the cover cleverly reconfigured for the spine, and the foliate elements unspooling onto the flaps. I particularly like the detailing of where she’s inserted a white rectangle for the necessary barcode on the back cover, but sweetened it by having a foliate element passing in front of a corner of it. Gorgeous work, Mary-Frances.

We felt confident about each person's part in the process--Clive and I had already seen what an elegant job Mary-Frances did with The Throne of Psyche, which won an Abby design award for Burt and Burt and Mercer--and we looked forward to seeing what she would do. (Clive's description of what she has accomplished is so appealing, and I also liked the tiny minotaur on the spine, hooked onto the lettering Clive mentions.)

Perhaps it's in Maze of Blood where one sees most vividly how very imaginative a designer can be. In some ways, Mary-Frances appeared to have less to work with and more of a challenge when Clive's many small decorations for the interior of Glimmerglass gave way to something larger. with Maze of Blood. Despite being busy with other projects, Clive made six portraits for division pages, plus the head on the jacket.

Clive: The drawings, which are variously embellished versions of a man’s head, are intended as poetic expressions of the text rather than as representing specific episodes. Because I had only six images to play with, I tried to densely layer my ideas, so any one drawing might be seen to be referencing multiple aspects of the narrative. Vegetation and flowers figure strongly in Marly’s text, as do the imaginative universes the protagonist conjures in his novels and short stories. I wanted to combine both in this image, and so while the ‘flowering’ has been informed by aspects of American folk-art… particularly appliqué-quilts… by setting it like the crest of a headdress, it can simultaneously echo of some of the writer’s elaborate inventions of ancient and mythic cultures. In each image the man’s eye has been replaced by a substitute. There’s been a beetle, a flower, the sighting of a revolver and a coiled ribbon of paper. Here a ‘folk-art’ bird is the stand-in, and I like that the plumes of its tail might be seen as ‘tears of blood’.

At one point, Mary-Frances requested a sketch of folded paper like the maze in one of the heads, and she used it on the title page. Other elements were plucked from the six portraits--a bird, a gun, insects, flower--and woven into the text pages, as well as appearing like a passage into the prefatory and out the concluding pages. The jacket flaps and rear of the jacket also show how she has re-used signal elements like the passion flowers and moth and gun, all dark and shadowy in the rich blue of the background. The foliate bar code detail that Clive liked on Glimmerglass? There's a moth that has settled onto, slightly into, the bar code of Maze of Blood.

What strikes me about all these triangular relationships is that they are founded on a trust in the abilities and creativity of other artists. In all cases, the people involved respected the abilities of the others and left them in freedom. While it always seemed that a good deal of collaboration was happening because I was constantly seeing fresh images, in truth we were simply immersed in one another's work and having the great and happy pleasure of watching how one art generates another. Seeing the energies of the initial work flow elsewhere and generate new work is marvelous. When this sort of collaboration goes well, each person is a part of a dynamic, moving whole--as, say, one spiral branch of a triskelion.

p. s. In answer to another question, the hardcover of Thaliad is only available via the Phoenicia site. The paperback can be ordered via the usual places.

p. p. s. If you want to see Clive's lovely response and some also-lovely comments, go here. And Alan Lee has ordered three of our books! My fantasy-loving, writing-and-cartooning child was as excited as when a Diana Wynne Jones blurb arrived for Ingledove.

p. p. p. s. All the above is an attempt to describe something that is simple, full of love and joy and magic.

Maze at Foreword

5 / 5 stars

The Foreword Reviews review of Maze of Blood by Clarissa Goldsmith evidently popped into the world while I was looking in another direction... 5/5 stars. You can read it here. 

Clip: Simultaneously poetic and restrained, Youmans’s portrait of Conall Weaver is honest and, at times, heartbreaking. Maze of Blood is a layered and complex exploration of human existence and the experiences that mold a person.

Maze at Bookloons

A new review by Barbara Lingen for Bookloons--see the whole review HERE. 

CLIP from the review:
Marly Youmans truly writes a unique kind of prose. This story, which is based on the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, could have been Texas dusty and dry, with characters as plain and weak as the mundane world around them. Instead what we get is a wealth of stories based on timeless figures both real and imagined, along with amazing descriptions of nature - all this on top of the plot itself.
...At the end we realize that a very toxic story has been bejeweled and bedecked with magical insights and sparkling prose.

In Wilson's Bookmarks

from Wilson's Bookmarks (see column here)
in "Christianity Today" (print/online)
23 November 2015

This is one of the strangest books I have read in a long while, and also one of the best. It is a novel based on the life of Texas writer Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian and many other memorable characters. Spoiler alert: Youmans’s protagonist, Conall Weaver, commits suicide at the outset, just as Howard did (at age 30), and the story proceeds in reverse chronology. Does this sound daunting? It isn’t at all, if you read with a child’s willingness to be astonished and a grown-up’s hard-won hope that somehow our tangled lives are part of a larger Story, the outlines of which we glimpse even now.

Mark Finn on Maze of Blood

The great images are from Sanford Allen's Candy Skulls

Mark Finn, author of a wonderful biography of Robert E. Howard, has written a review of Maze of Blood, which you can find right HERE at Candy Skulls. It's an interesting review from someone I feared might be offended by the whole idea of the book. Read the whole piece for a sense of how Howard fans might feel about my Conall Weaver, and for a sense of how the book relates to the life. Also, if you want to know how to make bacon-infused bourbon for a glass of Blood and Thunder...

Clip from the review: Youmans’ language is exquisite. She is clearly and obviously a poet, and her skill at choosing simple words to evoke complex pictures is well-served here. And, if I may be so bold, she knows a lot about Howard’s life, as well. I’m not sure if she’s a closet fan or an avid researcher. I’d like to find out what drew her to the subject matter. But Maze of Blood is a transformative work, as each event in Conall’s life is given resonance and stories told to him are filtered through his experience and retold on the printed page. That’s the essence of understanding Robert E. Howard, and Marly Youmans gets it.
     It was also nice to see her treating the delicate subject matter of Howard’s suicide with respect and gravitas. Her Conall Weaver isn’t so much like Robert E. Howard as the book goes on. Some of the more outlandish myths around Howard serve the fiction better than the man.
     In the end, Maze of Blood is a book I would tentatively recommend to less-sensitive Robert E. Howard fans, and unreservedly recommend to lovers of magical realism and stories about writers telling stories. There’s a lot of layers in Maze of Blood, but it’s that complication that makes the novel so rewarding. 

And here is my response to his curiosity about what drew me to the material.

* * * 

Dear Mark Finn,

So pleased that you found things to like in the novel. Truly, I am grateful that you did, as I loved your account of REH's life and always recommend it to the curious. 

And so, in gratitude for your book, I will answer the question you have about "what drew her to the subject matter." Perhaps it is a little surprising; I don't know how it will appear to you. 

As a child, I spent part of every summer in little bugtussle towns in a part of Georgia that felt kindred to hot, dry places in Texas. Half of the time I spent there was on my paternal grandparents' sharecropped 40-acre farm--a very poor, a very different world than my adult world. When I came to read about Cross Plains (I was completely unable to change that perfect name), I knew exactly how a yearning young writer would feel, wandering in places that were not the least interested in and did not need a writer, that in some innocent sense sought to destroy him. I had been that out-of-place, home-but-not-home, observant person when visiting the two branches of my family in Georgia. 

Moreover, there are two figures in my paternal family line who were driven, obsessive, bright, and socially awkward--who seemed to create their own eccentric worlds within the larger world, damn the consequences. One of them was also obsessed with weight-lifting and running in the early twentieth century, a time before those things were accepted. And I will readily admit that I am an obsessive sort of writer myself. So I felt REH as kindred, felt that I knew him, felt that he could have found a place in my family tree. In my life, I have loved (that complicated dance!) family members who seemed very much like him.

While I did read REH's stories and poems (I think it's sad he gave up on the poetry, though I understand why) and am fascinated by the whole idea of making iconic figures that stick in our cultural imagination, it was the life that most compelled me. I did not choose to make a book that would be solely "about" him--I wanted to shape it as I pleased, and so I do not claim the license of a biographer to use his name. 

I like to do something different from what I have done before, each time I make a book, and this time I used a life as a kind of template. For me, that sort of license goes back to Shakespeare, who showed us the fascination of borrowing an outline and some details and then coloring at will--displaying the energy and freedom of bridging gaps, leaping from point to point. 

So you might say that I ran to the coastal edge of Howard's writing and leaped off into my own strange seas. Anything less would have been derivative. I wanted to make a book that did justice to a man's essential yearning and loneliness. I wanted to praise and reveal the figure of a visionary caught in a complex maze that would have surprise and blind passages and beauty and savagery. 

Well, I find that it has taken me more lines to explain what drew me to the material than I expected. Thank you again for your interesting, generous words, and for the revelation that is bacon-infused bourbon....

Salud!

Marly

***

And in answer to various people (mostly facebookians), I will eventually say something about my travels in Chile, Peru, and Mexico. Yes, wondrous!

A review from Youmans/Yeomans land--

Marly Youmans

1 min · Edited · 

So fun! Thank you to a fellow Youmans (a far distant cousin of sorts, I trust) for a review of Maze of Blood. I've been surprised by how many writers named Youmans/Yeomans are out there in the world, and I now declare Claire the nicest.

Claire Youmans' Author Blog: Read Maze of Blood -- "a beautiful and important book."

Claire Youmans is an accomplished writer and author of The Toki-Girl and the Sparrow-Boy, Rough Justice and Women Before the Bench all available on Amazon.com.

CLAIREYOUMANSAUTHOR.BLOGSPOT.COM|BY CLAIRE YOUMANS

It's pub date for Maze of Blood--

I'm pleased and touched by the many shares of news about Maze of Blood on Facebook and also on twitter--thanks so much to readers and friends (irl-friends and e-friends) for supporting the book. Maze of Blood on the website here.

Follow Marly's board Maze of Blood on Pinterest.