Precipitous slippage

Once upon a time I was a new-made Associate Professor with tenure; my answer to that lovely promotion was to quit academia entirely because I wanted to be a poet and novelist, not an academic poet and novelist. I felt that I would be a stronger, better writer outside the land of ivory towers. What I did not grasp at the time was how completely the academy would take over the world of writing, particularly the realm of poetry, and make it into a near-monolithic enterprise. (Simultaneously, both poetry and literary fiction began to move toward being minor arts--well, poetry was already on the way.) This change has meant that academic writers support one another and give one another various helpful privileges.

Those of us outside the academy are somewhat in the cold, particularly if--as I do--the writer believes that the diminishing returns of Modernism are upon us, and that the way forward is back through tradition and form. Free verse and an obsession with originality (I don't see how that works, given that we're more than a century past modernism's birth--Modernism hasn't been modern for a long time) have become a kind of ideology in our university system. A large number of journals are associated with colleges or are founded by MFA graduates. Most of these are primarily interested in free verse. Meanwhile, I am not primarily interested in free verse, although I do have a recently-finished collection containing poems that derive from a foreign chant tradition that looks free but contains many rhetorical flourishes allied to that tradition.

Do I regret my decision about leaving the academy? No, I don't. I am a better writer because of that choice, and I also had the luxury of having three children, which I probably could not have managed if I had stayed in college settings as a writer and teacher. I find that it is hard to do three major things well, but two--well, you can give up a lot of things that are enjoyable but not essential and so make two big callings work.

I still have a few writer friends who are in the academy and make their living there; I think it's fine that they made the choice to stay in. Most people who gain a perch there do, after all. I just think that I made the right choice for me. What else can we do but try to make right choices? I admire people like poet-professor-mother Luisa Igloria who grasp after mastery in three realms. The late Doris Betts (professor, dean, writer, mother) comes to mind among novelists.

We live in a time when very few poetry books sell in reasonable numbers. I've talked to various editors about sales and found that some poetry books don't break the 50-mark. That's pretty sad, isn't it? I hear that Copper Canyon books sometimes make it to 600; those are the sorts of little numbers a poetry press depends on. (The funny thing about a poetry book is that it can become the sort of book that you return to again and again. So in that way it's a better bargain than most books.)

My picture of how my own poetry books are doing is a bit fuzzy. I know that Thaliad continues to trickle (or seep, maybe!) along in sales for Beth Adams's Phoenicia Publishing and is heading toward the 400-mark in combined paperback/hardcover. [Update: I was pleasantly wrong! 425 copies so far, as of January 19th.] The Foliate Head has sold out its first and second hardcover printings at UK's Stanza Press, though there are still a few copies available on line. I'm don't know the paperback or hardcover numbers at Mercer for The Throne of Psyche. Those are my three books that can be called "in print," though The Foliate Head is technically out of print.

Interior illustration by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for The Foliate Head

If you care about poetry, please consider buying books. While I would like you to support mine, I tend to be pleased when I see anybody buy a good poetry book. And I always remember the quote taped up on the poetry shelves at the Bull's Head Bookshop (UNC-Chapel Hill shop, now defunct) run by novelist Erica Eisdorfer: People who say they love poetry and never buy any are cheap sons of bitches. --Kenneth Rexroth. It's not polite, but it gets at something. I just looked it up online and found a different version that says, I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. Maybe both are right, as Rexroth didn't hold back and may have been muttering variations on the theme for years!

Yes, poetry is rapidly losing its status. Yes, what was once an important art is now a minor one and in danger of going the way of lacemaking. Times change. Television and internet make inroads; well, that's just how it is, we say. What we add to culture changes culture.

But if you care about poetry, do more. In fact, all of us need to support what we love in a time when what is seen and praised and supported is heavily-marketed, commercially-validated books, film, visual arts, etc. And we need to remind ourselves over and over again that we can choose. We can choose roads less taken. It will make all the difference.

Rerun: 4 Digby video poems from The Throne of Psyche

Mercer University Press, 2011,
in hardcover or paperback
Cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt

Carving pumpkins, herding cats and progeny, writing some tight small poems in a pause mid-novel: I've been empty of blog posts somehow, so please take this little homage to and appreciation of Paul as an apology. More anon.

Videos by UK-born Paul Digby, composer, videographer, singer, fine cabinet-maker, painter, knitwear designer, computer genius, and more. There is nothing this man cannot do! Or so I suspect. He writes lovely music, but evidently that's not enough for him--he has to put the rest of us to shame in innumerable categories of creation with his apparent belief that he is a human being and so can do things! He lives in an obscure corner of Ohio. I can't imagine what they can do to deserve him.

This one is a riposte to Billy Collins, for writing a poem about taking off Emily Dickinson's clothes, a thing that is forbidden!



And this one is about the sad adventures of a nesting doll. It's a harsh, cruel world out there, full of unexpected powers.



Here is where I let it all hang out about being a Southerner in the bitter, snowy, lakeside winters of upstate New York. Do I always feel like this? Of course not! Snow is magical.



And this poem I wrote when my eldest child had meningitis--about the strong, sudden knowing that he would live, when things were at their worst.

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!

In-print roundup

Novel inspired by the life and times of pulp writer Robert E. Howard.
Jacket and interior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer University Press, just out!
More here.
Amazon book info. Find an Indie.
...

"a strange and wonderful book" --editor John Wilson
...
"a haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, 

rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose"  --Midori Snyder. Full review here. 

Dear friends and readers, I am taking a little break from the blog. I leave you with this list of my books in print. (Some of the earlier ones should be back in print soon.) Happy reading to you! Meet you here anon....

Novel. A failed painter chases her muse, and more.
ForeWord Indiefab finalist.
Jacket and interior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer, 2014
More here.
Amazon. Find an Indie.
...

It’s brilliantly well-written, shockingly raw, and transportingly—sometimes confusingly (but not in a bad way)—weird.... It’s difficult to overstate the emotional effect that Glimmerglass has had on me. This is a beautiful, complex, moving book. Marly Youmans’s prose flows like clear water, and every image is, as Cynthia observes, “full of meaning” (p. 39). --Tom Atherton. Read the complete review here.
...
Nature, architecture, dread, thrill, sexual dilemma, and murder echo against Youmans’ gorgeous prose and terrifying romance, which glides like a serpent―without a single extraneous or boring word. Youmans is my favorite storyteller. I come back to her as if to a holy well. --poet Jeffery Beam

    

Novel. A Depression-era orphan, searching for light.
ForeWord BOTYA Silver Award & The Ferrol Sams Award.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer, 2012.
More here.
Amazon. Find an Indie.
...
...Its themes and the power of its language, the forceful flow of its storyline and its characters have earned the right to a broad national audience. --John M. Formy-Duval About.com full review here.
...
Every page in this book resonates with beautifully crafted language, a "universal melody that sings of deep loss and conciliation," and a moving story of a young boy, who after the death of his beloved younger brother, takes to the rails in Depression-era America. I agree with one reviewer that said this is destined to be an American classic. --Nancy Olsen, Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year

Long post-apocalyptic poem with epic, adventure, and novelistic tendencies.
HC Jacket / pb cover and interior art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Elizabeth Adams.
Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012
Note: The hardcover is available via Phoenicia only.
Paperback via the usual suspects!
More here.
Amazon. Find an Indie.
...
...It's a high water-mark of what's possible... It's old school book-crafter perfect. With that book you leapt from being one of my favorite writers to a game-changer. The literary sphere will have to catch up to what I and others have already seen--but there is no doubt it is a remarkable achievement. --James Artimus Owen
...
This is a beautiful and powerful book--worth owning, worth reading and rereading. I am so glad that it exists in the world and that I can turn to it, time and again, glorying in the language and the hope. --Rachel Barenblat, "Marly Youmans' Thaliad," from Velveteen Rabbi

And a collection of poems, some very green!
Now in second printing.
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Andrew Wakelin.
UK: Stanza Press, 2012.
More here. 
Amazon. Find an Indie.
...
Ben Steelman, The Star News (Wilmington, NC) 9 November 2014
I have been meaning to write for years about “The Foliate Head,” her 2012 poem cycle 
about the Green Man, published in Britain by Stanza Press, which must rank as 
one of the most beautiful books of the 21st century. Notable are the illustrations 
and illuminations by the Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Another collection of poems, The Throne of Psychewith hc jacket / pb cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
and immaculate design work by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer, 2011.
More here.
Amazon. Find an Indie.
...
...Youmans is a traditionalist in her use of forms, and her work will delight those who enjoy classical poetry with direction and structure, yet her strong and inventive metaphors and similes evoke an otherness that only Coleridge attained....wholly beautiful and brilliant. Youmans is a writer of rare ability whose works will one day be studied by serious students of poetry. Greg Langley, Books editor,The Baton Rouge Advocate, October 2, 2011

Midori Snyder on "Maze of Blood"

A pre-pub review pilfered from novelist Midori Snyder's In the Labyrinth, a great place in general, and also a great place to find a review of "Maze of Blood," labyrinths and mazes being kindred... Though near the end of the pre-pub period (pub date is September 1), the book is already available.

February 24, 2015

An Early Review of Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

“In the end, he thought, a neat labyrinth or an untidy maze was a place that was simple. You reached its heart and were devoured by the beast, or you reached its heart and the spot was absolutely bare and pulseless. Maybe the beast and the blankness were the same. Maybe it was the emptiness that had teeth and hollowed you out.”

Marly Youmans' new novel Maze of Blood is a fictionalized biography of a small town writer, based on the life of pulp fiction author Robert E. Howard, noted for his stories of extravagant adventure as well as his suicide at thirty years old, coinciding with the death of his mother. For both Howard and the protagonist Conall in Youmans' novel, it is hard to imagine a more terrible beauty than a writer’s life imploding in a maze of contradictions: to be gifted with boundless imagination but compelled to remain rooted in the dry soil of a Texas oil boom town; to have a mother as muse filling his childhood with a love of poetry and epics, and then emotionally trapping him in the narrative of her own slow dying; to connect via mail to an admiring world of fans and writers, and to be marginalized by local friends disparaging his work as a worthless activity.

Youmans’ evocative prose digs deep into the visceral ache of living perched between sublime poetry and harsh reality, between the refusal to compromise a writer’s prodigious vision and the price paid in isolation and loneliness. The novel is full of mythic moments: Conall believes his imagination was formed at childhood when touched by the luminous fire of a falling meteorite. He is alive to the world when he is creating it, folding in history, poetry, and epics into his story telling. There is something heroic about the way he rejects anything in mundane reality that interferes with that passion. Yet, Youmans also reveals the darker side of compulsions, the siren-song of his mother, calling him to a love of language, but drowning out all other voices save hers that might have influenced his life in a different direction.

Maze of Blood is a difficult story, but one so beautifully crafted by Youmans, unraveling in short chapters like prose poems constructed from spare dialogue, the dusty Texas landscape, a sudden flash of vibrant nature, and the sweep of a starlight sky. The reader can not escape the tragedy of the story, but Youmans weighs it against the more powerful scenes of a gifted storyteller, whose originality and labors transcend the confines of his life, allowing us a chance to celebrate the writer's efforts-- and perhaps because it burned so brightly in such a bleak place, we value it the more.

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans is due out later this Fall from Mercer University Press -- with another handsome cover from Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design from Mary-Frances Glover Burt. Check out the tempting sneak peeks of the art shown above and below.

NPM5: I give you sphinx and snow cats--

April, national poetry month, no. 5

Here's one I may have posted before--certainly I have posted Paul Digby's video of the poem earlier. It's an iambic tetrameter poem in couplets, so it resolutely rejoices in rhythm and rhyme. I thought of this one because I read it at the Fenimore Art Museum on Monday, and somehow people always think it very funny that a poem should reprove a popular poet for removing Emily Dickinson's clothes. All those tiny buttons...

The poem appeared in TheThrone of Psyche (Mercer, 2011), available in hardcover and paperback. Both have a cover drawn from a detail of a Clive Hicks-Jenkins painting, and beautiful design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt. It was originally published in an issue of Raintown Review guest edited by Joseph Salemi.

***

FIRE IN ICE
A riposte to Billy Collins, “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” 


Don’t think because her words are wild
That Dickinson’s a sylphine child

For your undressings—don’t rend the haze
Of veils that shields you from her blaze.

Her hands are capable and know
The ways of burning—how sparks blow

When flames are jostled by a bold
Adept, her fingers tipped with cold.

And though in after-hours she threads
The dew she plucks from spiderwebs,

Or answers Who? to midnight’s owls,
Or strokes the cats, returned from prowls—

Or takes to skipping to and fro
With moonlit maidens made of snow,

She’ll freeze, inviolate and meek,
If you so much as try to speak.

Shove off—avoid those brazen wings:
She’s not for your unbuttonings.

The polished stone above her head
Declares her state among the dead:

Here waits that sphinx whose secret power
In riddles found her finest flower.

***

Here is Paul Digby's video of the poem. You may find seven of his videos of my poems here.

Mercer at PW

Congratulations to Mercer University Press, director Marc Jolley, and staff on Mercer's 35th anniversary! Here they are on the back cover of Publishers Weekly. Below, see them on the interior back cover. (You can find Glimmerglass on one of those, and me on the other.)

As someone who writes both poetry and fiction and who values collaboration, I've inevitably found a wild range of publishers--Big 6 (now Big 5) houses, mid-size houses, small presses, and university presses, and there are very different things to say about each. But I can say that Mercer is distinguished as producing immaculate books that pass my librarian mother's tests (the only time a book has ever passed her demanding scrutiny), allowing writer input and collaboration (as Glimmerglass, with art by Clive Hicks Jenkins), and possessing a stellar design team (Mary-Frances Glover Burt did a wonderful job with Glimmerglass.) I have enjoyed frolicking with smaller houses and being a part of making beautiful books like Glimmerglass, Thaliad, and The Foliate Head. Mercer's designers also made very handsome books for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and The Throne of Psyche, which won an Addy for design. (See tabs above if you're curious about any of those books.)

As a child I spent part of every summer in Georgia and still go back there at times--mostly for funerals, alas. I was born barely over the South Carolina line in Aiken, but Georgia was the only constant place in my childhood because my father--the bright Georgia sharecropper's boy who became a teenage tail-gunner in World War II and then a professor of analytical chemistry--had a strong itch to move on and see the world. So I rather like the idea of having a publisher who returns me to that part of the country.

Addendum to the day: West Chester Poetry Center and Conference

To support Kim Bridgford, just removed as Director of the WCU Poetry Center, write to:

Dr. Lori A. Vermeulen
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Chemistry
West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Anderson Hall, Suite 119
West Chester, PA 19383

Thanks to Allison Joseph for sharing the news. If you care about the conference and poetry center, please write in support of the stellar job Kim Bridgford has done.

Real / irreal

Clive photographs the title page.
Glimmerglass.
Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.

For an essay of mine having to do with what is called fantastic and what is called realistic, please go here to the Mercer blog. And here's a taste:

    Given the way books are discussed in our time, it’s possible to say that my A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is a realistic narrative about a Depression-era’s orphan’s struggle to find his place, or that Glimmerglass is a search that takes place in a solid, realistic world but does the fantastic thing of taking the muse as a possible, literal figure—and at one point borrows from the ancient form of the somnium, or dream vision. But I would not reach for genre terms to describe either of them. For me, books are on a kind of thread or continuum, moving from one way of telling the truth to another. All that matters to me is whether they are good books or not.
     All art is created, shaped, dreamed into existence. What matters is not genre or categorization but the extent to which a fabric made of words—the warp and weft making up a kind of little maze—contains an Ariadne’s thread of energy that leads to larger life.

Comments are open there. I'd love to know what other people think about these things and have already gotten an interesting letter from a fellow novelist... Please leave a comment at the Mercer site if you have an opinion!

More Glimmerglass news...

The book has arrived at the Mercer warehouse... If you would like to order Glimmerglass straight from the publisher, here's how to get free USPS shipping and a 20% discount via online order and coupon code or via phone call:

Click!

Glimmerglass, the postcard--

Mercer sends me a present.

Postcard in the making, complete with one little error...

Metaphysical gold star if you find it!

Perfection still to come...

                      

Catalogue page for "Glimmerglass"--

Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
prefatory drawing for Glimmerglass

I'm posting the catalogue page for Glimmerglass today--go here.

"I know of no writers other than Marly Youmans who has the genius to combine the spine-tingling suspense of Gothic storytelling with the immense charm, grace, glamour, realism, and simplicity of Hawthorne. Glimmerglass does more than shimmer and grip; it entertains and hypnotizes. Youmans, one of the biggest secrets of contemporary American fiction, writes with freshness and beauty." -from poet Jeffery Beam's blurb

I'll be posting more comments and images as the summer goes on...

Clive's "Marly and me"

Clive Hicks-Jenkins takes a look at our collaborations, past, present, and future. Please hop here for a peep.


* * *

At left is Clive's English lion, one of the interior vignettes for Glimmerglass, out from Mercer in September.

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.

The Glimmerglass News

Clive is busy transforming the world of Glimmerglass.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins + Glimmerglass

If you'd like to see how the cover is progressing, go here. That's the second peep at what Clive is doing with Glimmerglass, forthcoming from Mercer in 2014.

Me + Glimmerglass

The book has been sitting at the publisher's for a very long time, waiting its turn. And so I decided to tweak it once more and have promised to give it right back. So that is what I am doing, along with many other things that keep stopping me. But it'll be back in...

Others + Glimmerglass

As two people asked to read the book in manuscript, I asked them for blurbs. So that's poet Jeffery Beam and editor John Wilson. And I've also asked Margo Lanagan. Three just might be enough... I'll be posting them soon. Clive has already posted most of Jeffery's long comments here.

And other books

If you like the looks of this early progress, please take a look at some of the other books Clive and I have worked on. Most recently, that means two poetry books--Thaliad from Phoenicia and The Foliate Head from Stanza Press (UK.) The Throne of Psyche (Mercer) also has a Clive cover, as a detail from one of his paintings is the jacket and cover image. And as we set out with a new book, I don't want to forget my other recent paper children, particularly these three and the novel, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, also from Mercer (The Ferrol Sams Award; Silver Award, ForeWord Book of the Year Awards.) Please click on the tabs above for more information.

Mercer Frolics in Atlanta

I'm back in Cullowhee, North Carolina after two days in Atlanta with the 23rd annual Mercer Authors Luncheon. You might think that a luncheon would be a luncheon, but in this case it is a reception and dinner for 65 dear friends of Mercer University Press and some authors, and then some more events the next day, primarily book signings and a fancy luncheon for a much large number. It was quite posh. I was terribly well fed, and aspire to stay at the Intercontinental Buckhead more often... I didn't take a single picture but will post some links when Mercer pictures go up. Lisa Alter spoke (another wonderful Globe Pequot book! one popped up as winner in nonfiction at the National Book Awards), along with Ann Ross, Jeffrey Small (who I met the night before at the reception), and Louis W. Sullivan.

I had a grand time meeting Marc Jolley, Marsha Luttrell, Mary Beth Kosowski, Jenny Toole, and sundry other Mercerians. In addition, I chatted with a large number of bigwigs (the President, the Provost, and other vital P-people.)

And when it was all at an end, I had a lovely visit with Robin Rudd, future children's book author, who was one of my students when I did a summer gig as writer-in-residence for the MFA program at Hollins in 2010. We used to get up early and walk the loop of campus a couple of times before the world got--as it did--hot.

Small horn toot for Catherwood--

Trala, Catherwood is coming! (The novel was originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1996, and afterward by the Bard imprint and in French, Spanish, and German translation. And Braille...) I was just writing some materials and packaging up review clips and so on for Mercer. I am so glad. It's always a good sign when publishers want to bring one's out-of-print books back into print. I've kept the ebook rights for myself, so it'll be a physical book. And the rebirth of a book seems like a good thing to announce on the first Sunday of Advent.

Starting out--

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage
(Mercer, 2012 - The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction)

Pip Tattnal woke in the dense warmth of an Emanuel County summer at 4:17 a.m., a fact that he would learn much later when he became acquainted with clocks. For the rest of his life he would jerk from sleep at that very instant, his body refusing to sleep through the stroke of darkness. He did not open his eyes. He did not need to open his eyes. He knew where he was—the same place he had been for almost a year. He was on the farm sharecropped by the Hooks family, although the land was always called by another man’s name as if to remind Mr. Jimmie and Miss Versie that they owned not much more than debt and the clothes on their backs plus a spare change for Sunday, a clutter of ironware and dishes, and a few clanking enamel chamber pots. For the last several years it also had been known as The White Camellia Orphanage or The Cottage because of the doings of Mr. Sam Truetlen, owner of a nearby cotton gin and the far-off Gen’l Notions Store, who had traveled all the way to New Orleans and on to Dallas once upon a time, and there, on the outer edge of the known world, had toured a cottage-style orphanage intended for destitute white children and run by the Klan. Being a man prone to fits of “projecting,” he later backed his own orphanage, though most of the children still claimed at least one parent on some played-out, ramshackle farm. Wherever his kind had sunk so desperate and low as to scoop up the red clay to eat, Mr. Sam would arrive on muleback and plod away with one or more children riding pillion, some to stay at The Cottage for a month, some longer. It got so that people for miles around could recognize Daisy Belle, the white mule, and Goshen, the soot-gray one. As for the name of the orphanage, that was the influence of the Klan, with its Knights and Dragon, its Cyclops and Nighthawk and Kamellia—and Mr. Sam’s tip of the hat to the city of Dallas. So that was where Pip had been lodged for almost a year, in The White Camellia.

It was high, hot summer in Emanuel County, Georgia, and not one soul was saved from the day’s blaze or from the night’s smother of warmth. Up and down the county, the only sleep was a restless sleep, and near Lexsy, one or two old people woke in a fright because the air was just about too dense to breathe—their trembling hands reaching for funeral-parlor fans printed with a portrait of Christ and some luminous, faintly green sheep—and on some gully-shattered sharecropped place, an infant who had been fighting for air yielded up the ghost on his mother’s naked breast. Mr. Sam, next door to the cotton gin, returned to bed and dreamed his nightly dream of being weighed in the scales and found wanting. At The White Camellia Orphanage, the bone-tired children slept without dreaming, all but one, who dreamed about a lost penny.

When he woke, Pip knew something was off kilter. He did not know more, neither whether the hour felt wrong or right. There was a faint slippage of coolness on his back where his half-brother Otto normally slept. The kinship bond between them was tangible, such that the children seemed inseparable, a blood brotherhood of commingled beings. Loss and grief had only made their physical need and ache for each other more clearly manifest. The musky smell that belonged to the little boy was ebbing away, and Pip could detect only the presence of the two others in the bed and the four across the room. The brothers always slept together, with a careful space between themselves and their bedmates, an act that demanded they cling to their perches even in sleep to avoid tumbling down into the deep valley of the bed. Now Pip lay breathing in the scent of near- naked boys and the stink of the chamber pots. These were smells he did not find disagreeable, just as he did not dislike the fumes of kerosene from the lamp or the odor of Miss Versie, unwashed and marked with a faint whiff of blood.

Where was Otto?

Past the window

The wandering orphan, Pip, in the midwestern wheat fields... 
     “You feeling all right, Joe? Say, Joe—”
     The voices around the fire slid away. All Pip’s thoughts were gathered and reaped: there was nothing in his mind but Opal and the pallor of her wrist with the little blue vein flicking across—he tightened his grip and claimed her for his own.
     A surprising power burns in the demands of a boy who has seen and known too much. Her dead husband under the apple tree made no protest. Already he was nothing but bones, shreds of cloth, hair glued to a skull. The blackness of the universe, with which Pip was already acquainted, made no comment. The earth trembled slightly under his feet as a train swooped forward, ten miles off.  
     For days he had been sleepwalking along the wooden ties, feeling detached and ghostly. Suddenly the world slipped into place and was again genuine, and the connection between him and Opal glittered in the air like the lace of a quarter-million miles of steel track, the paired rails racing side-by-side over into valleys once jammed with men dreaming gold as they gouged a pickaxe into the hip of earth. Lines shot across the continent, gripping down and holding North America in her place on the shifting seas.
     “Come on,” he said, “let’s go for a walk.”

The window behind us
   Publishing's famous three-month window for a novel to show what it is going to do is now in the past for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer, 2012.) A prize winner from a university press, the book was never going to burst into the world like a pent-up waterfall. I hope instead that it will continue to sell and be read, trickling and streaming here and there.
   I have updated and tweaked the book page for the novel, adding and subtracting, hoping that this paper child will put his best face forward--that, though an orphan, he will be adopted and loved by many. Here are some bits from reviewers: "As someone who has long written reviews professionally (many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and other periodicals), and who now begins most novels with a touch of skepticism, I was bowled over from the start by Marly Youmans' book." "It is a stunning book; both cruel and tender, dark and light, but always shot through and stitched with a powerful beauty." "Each word, each name, is made to count; each incident is telling..." "A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is a historical novel, a mystery novel, a coming of age tale, a picaresque adventure, a character study of what we might now call Asperger's Syndrome, all woven into a lyrical text that tells of both love and horror with a quiet, insistent beauty." You may find these and more here. And you may read the first chapter here

Foliate / Death

1.  GREEN MAN DREAMING

Probably I shouldn't bother to post today because Clive Hicks-Jenkins has put such a long, interesting recollection of our first acquaintance in the comments of the last post that it is bound to be more appealing than whatever I could possibly write! Clive and Andrew Wakelin are currently in cahoots on the interior and cover designs for The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press), and I can say is that it is going to be astonishingly beautiful. I've seen a version of both, but they are still tweaking, and the book of poetry and with its green man illustrations grows more marvelous by the instant. It has a color head on front and back with many black-and-whites inside. Lovely, lovely, and yet again lovely! 

2.  A TASTE FROM A DEATH AT THE WHITE CAMELLIA ORPHANAGE

Roiphe has driven a car for the first time with Pip as passenger; Roiphe's mother, Lil, is standing out in the Georgia dirt yard, unfastening the pin curls set around her head. Alden, Roiphe's younger brother (or younger bother) is close by.

“Mommer, would you go comb your hair?  You look like a medusa.”  Roiphe climbed out of the car, staggering a little as if the ground were a foreign medium.

            Her fingers moved nimbly around her head, collecting the crooked pins into a small dark sheaf, which she bound with a rubber band and dropped into her apron pocket.  “You could have been killed, the pair of you, or landed in the county jail with a pack of misfits.  Roiphe Tattnal, you don’t know the least thing about driving, no more than a fresh-laid egg.”

            “He does now.  The boy proved himself a driver of ingenuity and downright verve.”  Pip clambered from the passenger seat and leaned for support against the side of the auto.  He was not sure he could walk away yet, having recently been startled by a close call with a straggle of cows in the lane. 

“Lil, that was a dadgum shattering experience, but I believe—I truly believe that he could have done a powerful sight more if he had put his unthrottled genius into the thing.  If he survives, Roiphe Tattnal has some kind of a future in transportation.”  With a wrench, Pip yanked a bushel basket off a headlamp and surveyed it.

            “First man on the moon,” Alden crowed.

            “First idiot on the moon, more like.  Y'all better pluck those chicken feathers off the front before Mr. Louis sees it,” Lil advised.  “That’s all I’ve got to say.”

            “Would that it were.”  Roiphe rolled his eyes dramatically.  “All,” he added in case she had not understood.

            “I got your drift, bud.”  She started combing her hair out with her fingers. 

            “Pip wants to ride out to the cemetery,” Roiphe announced.

            Lil gave her brother a quick glance, half screened by hair, and then turned back.

            “Is that so,” she said, no hint of a question in her words.

3.  LINKS AND GIVEAWAY

Please don't forget that the Goodreads giveaway of 24 copies of the novel ends on the 15th, so sign up!

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

Read chapter one at Scribd 

See the book page

See the new facebook page

Goodreads giveaway, April 15-May 15

Amazon hardcover and ebook

Indie bookstore search

Buy direct from Mercer

In which I am thankful

The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction
Read chapter one at Scribd.

Thank you to Marc Jolley, publisher of The Mercer University Press (as well as to Barbara Keene, marketing director, and to the staff) for deciding to nominate A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage for several national awards.

While evident to them that few books make the short list for a major award, writers are quite grateful for a nomination. Compared to the number of books published each year, the number of nominations is tiny, as they are limited, costly, and time-consuming for a publisher.

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage sprang out into the world three days ago. I've been fooling around with various marketing ideas (that thing that all writers these days must fool with!) and have been pleased by shares of the news and a sample on social media. "Reads" at Scribd stands at 626, so I suppose that may be good, although most went up in the first day.

I continue to be very thankful for those of you who share the posted chapter at Scribd and book page, especially since I have laryngitis and can't tell anybody anything!