New anthologies & Val/Orson special

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Postscripts 19: The PS Quarterly Anthology (P. S. Publishing) contains my story, "The Red King's Sleep." The publisher says that "this Postscripts anthology is probably the best yet, containing gripping, stylish stories by some of the finest genre writers around . . . Marly Youmans enters the world of Through the Looking Glass from a terrifying angle."

Editorial - Nick Gevers
Daniel Abraham - 'Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor's Vengeance'
Andrew Hook - 'Bigger Than The Beetles'
David T. Wilbanks - 'The Cacto Skeleton'
Matthew Hughes - 'Enemy of the Good'
David N. Drake - 'A Life Cliched'
Marly Youmans - 'The Red King's Sleep'
Tim Lees - 'Meeting Mr. Tony'
Scott Edelman - 'The World Breaks'
Justin Cartaginese - 'The Portrayed Man'
Chrs Beckett - 'The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolis 9'
Ron Savage - 'Famous People'
M.K. Hobson - 'The Warlock and the Man of the Word'

http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/acatalog/Postscripts_19_ltd.html

In addition, P. S. Publishing is running a special on the four P. S. books reviewed recently in "Black Static," including Val/Orson. You may find that offer at the P. S. website: http://news.pspublishing.co.uk/2009/08/24/special-offer-the-black-static-foursome-for-just-45/. If you want to see a clip from my "Black Static" review, sail to http://www.marlyyoumans.com/ and check out the Val/Orson page.





















Available for pre-orders at your friendly neighborhood bookstore or elsewhere: The Beastly Bride (Viking), another marvelous anthology from Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

My story is "The Salamander Fire," in which you may find a young glassblower, a lawyer who is busy turning into a demon, fire bathers in an underworld, a salamander, and much more. I like the anthologies in this series and am pleased to be in this one.

Author list: Christopher Barzak, Peter Beagle, Steve Berman, Richard Bowes, Carol Emshwiller, Jeffrey Ford, Gregory Frost, Nan Fry, Jeanine Hall Gailey, Terra Gearheart, Hiromi Goto, Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Steward Moore, Shweta Narayan, Johanna Sinisalo, Lucius Shepard, Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, E. Catherine Tobler, Jane Yolen, and Marly Youmans.


Upcoming is Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's anthology, Last Drink Bird Head: Flash Fiction for Charity (Ministry of Whimsy). The author list is nigh-infinite: here. The tale (and the picture) behind this curious anthology can be found at

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2009/06/10/last-drink-bird-head-an-october-surprise/.

The Appreciation Corner: "Spring Pools," for the season in-between + Stories

SPRING POOLS
I always think that Robert Frost must have been somehow remembering—in some vague, inchoate way—Philip Freneau’s “The Wild Honey-Suckle” when he wrote “Spring Pools.” The form is very close: Freneau ends a six-line tetrameter stanza with a couplet; Frost begins a six-line pentameter stanza with a couplet. Freneau and Frost turn to weak rhymes, expressive of the shivery frailties of flowers, and both poets rhyme flower with power or powers. Freneau closes “The Wild Honey-Suckle" with this: From morning suns and evening dews / At first thy little being came: / If nothing once, you nothing lose, / For when you die you are the same; / The space between, is but an hour, / The frail duration of a flower."

In both poems, the flower is tied to the brevity of life. Powers are opposed to the flower: in one, autumn and the seeing death of nature; in the other, a more surprising move—the onrushing sweep of life. There will be more life, but the flowers and pools will be lost in its great pour:

SPRING POOLS

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods--
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

The pools and flowers belong to that tenuous time when the Snow Queen’s grip on the land has loosened and the first brave flowers bloom. The simplicity—the tendency toward monosyllables, the parallelism (“And like the flowers beside them”/“Will like the flowers beside them”, “To darken”/“To blot”) the almost “total” lack of flowery ornament—save for the very appropriate use of antimetabole to describe a mirrored scene: “These flowery waters and these watery flowers.” The use of the antimetabole, the repetition of words in transposed order, means that all ends “in balance,” though it is a balance that will soon be gone. The last line reinforces that balance by returning to a regular metrical line.

This is no allegory, and yet we sense our parallels to these small shining pools and tiny flowers and are capable are feeling grief for their passage in a reading of the poem. The unthinking trees whose branches lend “defect” to the reflected sky loom above in dark patterns, their pent-up life about to break from the bough. Their powers will make a fantastic Black Forest of the land; they will annihilate and suck away the delicate life of pool and blossom. The force is over-bearing; they do not merely “blot out” but “blot out and drink up and sweep away.” Any one of these would do, but the heaping up stresses the utter blank and dark to come.

Instead of joining with the greater life of streams, the pools will be strained through roots and not transformed into darkness but lost there. The snows that melted yesterday have assisted the rule of winter, and the forest likewise is a great power. Flower and pool are but ephemeral: “frail duration.” Already ruffled by chill breezes, they will yield to the dark forces of death and destruction, their own lives taken that there might be more life.

"Spring Pools" came to mind last week. During a sunny day, the snow melted from the two flower beds next to the warm southern wall of the house. Underneath proved to be many yellow flowers, tightly closed, of aconite. Then it rained and mist rose up from the heaped banks of snow, and melting snow and rain puddled in the flower beds. And then I thought of Robert Frost’s “flowery waters” and “watery flowers.”

Addendum, March 26, 2:00 a.m.: Without thinking, I posted something about Frost yesterday--and here today it is his birthday.

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UPDATE ON STORIES

Last night I sent off some stories, and this morning I woke up to find them accepted. I always find that sort of thing pleasing. Enthusiam is always dear. New forthcoming stories: "The Red King's Sleep" (continuing the Carroll motif of the last post) and "The Horse Angel" in Postcripts (U.K.) The "Sleep" takes that old chestnut "then I woke up and it was all a dream" and turns it inside-out and sideways. "The Horse Angel" began with an elderly neighbor here in Cooperstown, and I make use of her character, her house and handed-down possessions, and her marriage of 63 contented years. There are a lot of stories in the pipeline labeled forthcoming, and that is good because I have been devoting myself to poetry lately. Another forthcoming story (from the same editor as the two last, so I just found out about this one as well) is "Static," scheduled to come out this year in Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology, ed. Nick Gevers (U.K./U.S.: Solaris Books). Never had my innocent little mind turned to the thought of writing a steampunk story, but I had a splendid romp in the writing. Lots of steam as well as peculiar characters, an imprisoned young woman, perilous lightning, and some enlivening combustion.

MEMES

I know. Haven't done them. Will do, honest. At least one or two. Soon.

Photograph credit: The "spring shot of Llantisilio churchyard with snowdrops" is courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and "Plutarch" or Sandi Baker of "Chester, Cheshire, U. K." It's not in the woods, and it has no spring pools. But it has spring flowers and bare branches and more than a hint of time's passage.

Tinnerty Leaves a Note

During Advent, an evidently-tiny elf sometimes leaves very small messages around the house for N, who a terribly busy small person and easily bored in the absence of daily Peewee football. As I am still laboring away on qarrtsiluni Insecta with poet Ivy Alvarez--please go see our magnificent bugs in word and image--and still struggling to recover from that pernicious bug, The Flu, I now present one of those notes, found under my pillow along with an uncomfortable lump that turned out to be books.

Still wondering what to give your great big lumpen friends of the human kind? How about one of these gigantic books, packed like St. Nicholas's pack with good stories? Love, Tinnerty

There! Getting an elf to write one's blog posts seems an excellent idea. I may have to continue the practice.

Logorrhea has to be the most imaginative idea for an anthology in years. John Klima, editor of Electric Velocipede, invited writers to contribute stories inspired by a winning Scripps spelling bee word. Mine was smaragdine, a word I knew from the marvelous Puritan poet, Edward Taylor. Daydreaming about the metaphysical poet, stuck in the wilds of Massachusetts, I came up with a story called "The Smaragdine Knot. " (I confess to having used the divine Mr. Taylor before, as the unnamed Puritan minister at the close of Catherwood.)

Excerpt from "The Smaragdine Knot"

"Smaragdine" podcast mini-tale by Jeff Vandermeer, from his round-up story that hit each of the words in the anthology.

For author bios, more excerpts, reviews, and more, go here.


Looking for an Epiphany present? Rich Horton's Fantasy: The Best of the Year will be out on New Year's Day. In it, you may find my story, "The Comb." Here’s an Amazon link for reference.


Other recent and forthcoming appearances that may be of interest to the literary shopaholic include my novella set on St. John's, "Drunk Bay," forthcoming in this month's issue of Postscripts (U. K.). The issue is forthcoming in hardcover and paperback. Soon coming up is a story in Firebirds Soaring, the next anthology from Firebird/Penguin and Editorial Director Sharyn November of the magnificent red hair. For more upcoming publications in anthologies and magazines, as well as information about recent publications, see my bibliography for more information.

And here's one final suggestion...

Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling's Salon Fantastique recently won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology.

The collection includes my "Concealment Shoes" (a Locus Recommended Reading pick.) This is a story that--unlike most of my work--uses real elements from my life. The concealment shoes were at one time in the living room chimney. All three of my children and one of the cats (the calico, not the idiot Russian Blue, cute and bug-eyed) make appearances, and my 1808 house gets a starring role, along with a nearby bit of the Village of Cooperstown. It is related in setting and characters to the story "Rain Flower Pebbles," forthcoming in Postscripts (U. K.)

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Image credits:
In order of appearance, the covers shown are from Bantam, Prime, and Thunder's Mouth.