Down and out in Cripplegate Ward

John Rocque's 1746 map of London, showing Grub Street in Cripplegate Ward, above and to the right of St. Giles and the Cripple-gate churchyard--running from Chiswell to Fore Street. Public domain, via Wikipedia 

I'm afraid there was no wondrous golden time for writers--oh, there were times when disparate talents came together in one region and vied with one another, but even then there was often jealousy and insufficient reward. Look back, and you find Robert Greene railing at that "shake scene" and "upstart crow," a Shakespeare "beautified" with pilfered feathers. Or look at the denizens of Grub Street, journalists and poets struggling to feed and house themselves in a poor bohemian quarter, only to be pilloried by that clever and amusing cripple, Alexander Pope.

In an essay for The New Republic, "Down and Out in the Gig Economy," Jacob Silverman (lovely name!) lodges a complaint that "freelance journalism is a monetized hobby," that it is nearly impossible to do more that "serve the whims of capital." Not only has he not found a secure, salaried perch, but he has learned a truth that many writers know--that it is quite possible to write a book that critics love but that does not sell, for reasons out of the writer's control. Well, I sympathize with his lot and agree that journalism is in a parlous way, that there were some brief, better years for essayists in the last century, and that it's difficult for a writer of any sort to find a happy niche. Publishing tends to be a winner-take-all scheme. Go to any airport bookstore and check out the Top 10 books on sale. There you go. Winner-take-almost-all!

Though I'd love for the writer's life to be easier and more straightforward, it is not these challenges that make me uneasy with "Down and Out" but the essay itself as revelation of how such disappointments may harm the writer, either for a period of time or permanently. Many, many writers have challenges like the ones Silverman names, and there are other, unmentioned disappointments that pop up unexpectedly--quirky, oddball twists of publishing fate. In the kingdom of writer-dooms, Melville has long been a hero of mine. Years after any notice was paid to him, an old man, he pursued the work it was given him to do, writing poems, writing Billy Budd. He endured the agony of being ignored and thought mad (and perhaps of being mad from neglect for a time), and yet he kept harrowing his piece of literary ground and planting new seed, even when no one remained to believe that what he made would mean anything in the world. He persisted. He won a victory, although he had no earthly reward for doing so. But I have known writers in similar situations whose minds and spirits were bent by lack of notice, lack of support, and who did not have the resilience to unbend. I won't say their names, but some drift into mind.

The dream of creating something strong and true matters to the soul. A strange joy, it burns in the mind. Resentment and bitterness will never help a work grow and achieve beauty. Putting words together in fresh patterns is a kind of alchemy that transforms the inner being of the writer--creation may make the self larger and more resilient on the inside. Yet self-poisoning by resentment and bitterness remains a risk for any maker. To a writer, young or old, I'd say that there's no shame in pursuing some other dream if resentment becomes a blight, just as there's no shame in keeping on despite self-judgment or the world's judgment, and in striving to pierce the cloud of bitterness...

* * *

Winnowing the libraries

Nineteenth century artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria
by the German artist O. Von Corven
Public domain, Wikipedia

Time is and always has been the great judge of the merit of books. Lost or long-forgotten books like the works of Edward Taylor and Emily Dickinson (left in manuscript) or John Donne (out of fashion for centuries) or Moby Dick (by heroic Melville, bravely writing on despite being wholly forgotten before his death) may be tossed into sight again. Whole fields of books are winnowed by the scythe of time and fall out of memory. Some books become unreadable or simply of no interest. Is this a perfect process? Probably not. Many minor but lovely works are read by fewer and fewer as time passes.

In our day, a librarian proposes that she is the one to judge, to do the winnowing: that she knows better than time, and that something more drastic than the library-sale practice of the culling of unread, inessential books is needed. Many applaud. But time winnows all things, and some day it will winnow us, including the librarian and the applauders and the current writers of books. Including me and including you. To usurp the work of time. It sounds fearsome, doesn't it? In fact, it is the work of hubris, a thing many classical works have warned us to avoid. But in striving to make libraries more open to a good cause--more writers of color, say--it appears that welcoming, open library borders swiftly turn into the desire to banish others.

Who needs to read these old white men, long dead? Who in the West needs the heritage passed down for centuries--who needs Ovid or Homer or the KJB or Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton? All those outdated foundational ideals (not always met, but yet our ideals), like the idea that every single human wandering the face of the earth was made in the likeness of God and so is valuable, no matter the sex or color and however much he or she mars that image... Why, we can send our children to be English majors at fine, much-heralded institutions where they can duck hearing those voices, these days. So who needs them?

I do. Young writers do. And that means young writers of any sex, any color. Do not deprive young writers of the legacy of the past because whether they like or dislike writers like Dickinson and Melville and Shakespeare, they need to climb up on their shoulders. They need to read with freedom, with no holds barred. And that reading should include not just people of color and people from fascinating and far-off countries but also those pesky dead white Western males like Donne and Herbert.

What results from the ability to put words together with high power and beauty is the rightful inheritance of us all, writers and readers alike. Despite the unchosen elements of race and sex that come with birth, writers are joined as one in the love of putting words together in the most stellar order, in striving to make something meaningful and marvelous where nothing was before. That is the work of the creator, to bring truth and beauty out of the welter that surrounds us.

Manuscript critique

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Who will read my manuscript?
This little gang of editors and writers was formed especially for the people who write and ask me to critique their manuscripts, and for those who ask for recommendations on how to find an editor. I have done some manuscript critiques for others (particularly friends-of-friends and locals) in the past but don't have time to do that now.  I hope this collection of people who critique and edit will help if you are looking for feedback on a book manuscript or screenplay.

Genres, experience, expense
Most of the people on the list handle fiction and nonfiction, but some deal with YA, screenwriting, and poetry as well. My recommendation is that you look closely at the links; the editors are quite varied in experience and interests, and some of them might just feel like a fit for you. I expect there may be a range in the pesky matter of expense as well; I've listed fees where easily available. If this helps you narrow down to a few editors, please google them and see what else you can find.

Investigate
When you read about someone who has worked in the publishing industry, see what they have edited. In the case of editors who are also published writers--as many here are--don't forget that you can often go to Amazon and read a portion of a book. Excerpts and reviews may be on other sites as well. Google is your friend. This is especially helpful with those who do not have a website. Most of the names here are based on a facebook query; if you want to look at the responses (some of which have personal recommendations and more information), they are here.

Recommendations, prose and poetry
I have included the novelist or poet who recommended each person, except when e-friends contacted me directly. Though I've focused on prose, there are a good many no-fee sites where you can share and discuss poems--perhaps the most rarefied being Eratosphere, which concentrates primarily on formal poetry.

Grow the list
Please feel free to add further names and information in the comments. I will be adding any others that come in via email and facebook. And if you use one of the editors, come back and leave a comment.

Thanks to Diane
Oh, and Diane Ducey deserves credit for writing a lovely letter that prompted me to make this list. Good luck to her!

MIKE LEVINE
About Mike Levine Editorial: here
Write Mike Levine on the MLE contact page: here
Recommended by poet and translator Alicia Stallings

JACKIE COOPER
jkershawcooper [at] aol [dot] com
About Jackie Cooper: here
Note: He will not review any book he critiques. (He reviews for Huffington Post.)
Fee for a novel critique: $400.

CAREY WALLACE
About Carey Wallace: here
theblindcontessa [at] gmail [dot] com
Fees worked out on a case by case basis.

LAURA AGIRI
silver [dot] graph [at] juno [dot] com
Laura has published novels and collections of stories
   and has worked as researcher, editor, and writer.

JEN VIOLI
About Jen Violi: here
Write Jen on her contact page: here
Recommended by writer Alice Marks

PETERNELLE VAN ARSDALE
About Peternelle Van Arsdale: here
peternelle [at] peternellevanarsdale [dot] com
YA, novel, fantasy
Recommend by novelist Jeff Giles

CINDY KANE / CINDY TRUMBORE
About Cindy Kane: here
Cindy [at] cindykane.net
Children's books and YA
Recommended by poet Julie Kane

JANET NAYLOR VANDENABEELE
Ink Stains Media: here
janetvan [at] gmail [dot] com

JULIE SCHEINA
About Julie Scheina: here
julie [at] juliescheina [dot] com
Recommended by novelist April Lindner

NEIL AITKEN
About Neil Aitken's work with poets and writers: here
Contact page here
Recommended by poet Robbi Nester

S. J. HODGES
Memoirs, self-help, fiction
About S. J. Hodges: here
Around $500 for a read with notes session, depending on length
She sends science and business mss. to LEIGH ANNE HIRSCHMAN
    at Hirschman Literary

MARGARET DIEHL
About Margaret Diehl: here, here
margaret [dot] diehl [at] gmail [dot] com

KAREN PALMER
About Karen Palmer: here
karenpalm [at] gmail [dot] com
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

MELANIE BISHOP
About Melanie Bishop: here
leximelanie [at] gmail [dot] com
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

JOAN ROGERS
to be added
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

Thanks to novelist Emily Barton for more recommendations,
   though they turned out to be overbooked. How busy
   an editor is just might be something to consider as well.

IMAGE
The Manuscript Critique: "$695 for up to six months of mentoring."
Writer and professor Jessica Hooten Wilson suggested
   both IMAGE's book service and IOWA BOOK DOCTORS.
   I haven't found enough information on the latter, but feel free to investigate further!

FREE FACEBOOK WRITERS GROUP
"Anyone may submit passages of written work for group critiques."
Find other writers who want to swap manuscripts for comments at any stage...
Recommended by Kim Beall, who says she found a few trolls but also
   some helpful friends. (Kim just sold her first book.)

FREE CRITTERS is a free service for writers of sf/f/h, though you have to critique
   other pieces before you take a turn with your own. So you "pay" with your
   time and thoughts. I talked to someone who used the service, and he was
   enthusiastic about one critiquer out of five.

To make or not to make--

This post is especially for Tim Davis, a retired professor who often visits here, and who just wrote a post about why writers write. He also linked to a Huffington Post article about the same. I started to answer him on his post and then realized my response was not a comment but a post itself and probably could be a book, though luckily I have no desire to write a book about the subject. Out this post goes with best wishes to him for better health.

Of course, I don't know why the group called writers write. I only know why I write, and why I did not stop when having my third book come out at FSG within two weeks after 9-11 destroyed my so-important "numbers," or why I didn't stop when various editors orphaned my books by leaving FSG or LSU or Godine before pub date, or why I'm still writing today. Those things don't make me special; every published writer has a collection of such stumbles and pieces of ill luck, and plenty of us have made wrong choices along the way.

So here it is: my plain truth. No varnish. No trim.

* * *

Making is joy.

Playing with words can feel like joy streaming through the body.

There is little that is stranger, wilder, and more thrilling than to go to what feels like a fount and to bring back a pail brimming with golden water.

The call is to bring a shaped thing out of the welter of things and names: to create using the materials of Creation.

A strange part of all this leaning toward shapeliness is that a writer is also made, enlarged, changed and transformed. She may fly into ethereal realms or trudge through the underworld, may die on the phoenix pyre many times. She experiences redemption, loss, debasement, courage, all wax and wane--a whole gamut of ways of being. She loves the unloveable as well as the much-loved. Like a fantasy object, a writer becomes bigger on the inside through making poems and narratives.

Giving a made thing away in the form of a book and having it be received is also fine. And lovely. And makes a writer pleased and glad. But when the book goes out from the writer, it is just that: gone out. Whatever flame it has may continue to burn elsewhere. Something new needs to be born. Yeats's Wandering Aengus chases his silvery trout lady until he is an old man; he will go on till times and time are done.

You ask about money and writers. Expecting to be rewarded financially for art in our current times is dangerous to the self: see all those annoying studies on black swans for evidence! Almost nobody is rewarded with a consistent living wage; as in many arts fields, a few (and often not the best) take home the main financial reward. I know people who were deeply harmed by not understanding this brute fact. Expectation of financial reward broke them. Expectation of easy publication broke them. Expectation that others would support their work out of love broke them. (Publication is, of course, easier now, with so many new modes, but writers of my generation did not have so many choices. Having many choices presents new problems and unintended consequences, but that's a different rabbit hole to be explored.)

In the comments, you question whether art or "readers and filthy lucre" matter most to the writer. One writer is not all writers, but maybe the life of one writer can shed light on your question. Earlier, you mentioned Hawthorne and Melville; the latter is an especially instructive example. Melville suffered mightily from the withdrawal of readership and encouragement over time, and he lived so very long without it. In the face of people who thought him nigh-mad, in the no-face face of being ignored and forgotten, he kept on making art, writing poems and fiction. He persisted. He died with Billy Budd in the papers on his writing desk. That's courage. Despite whatever flaws a biographer might gleefully unearth, that's human nobility. That's deep-diving devotion to beauty, truth, goodness, and creation.

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."

Wishing for Randall Jarrell

I've been thinking about Randall Jarrell, one of the poets I knew well as a child--I had a copy of The Complete Poems in high school (soon after it appeared--thank you, mother-librarian!) and knew them well at that time. He wrote in many different genres, and so I trailed after him into novel, children's books, and criticism. I believe his was the first criticism I enjoyed. I've been thinking about how strongly he felt about about the changes in culture, back in the 1950's, and how much of what he says could only be repeated or made stronger now. He was certain very able to empathize with the person (or the bat) who was lonely and desperate, longing for more in life and for change. ("Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!") And he thought that a poet's role was, in part, braving and living up to the lonesome idea that being misunderstood might be part of the call: "If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries, you will never look just right to posterity. Every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself."

Here's a comment from Suzanne Ferguson that shows how critical Jarrell was about the trajectory of cultural change. (Elsewhere, he lamented, "The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced."*)

The magnitude of what had been lost in American culture reaffirmed for Jarrell "the final, important, intense value" of art, of poetry for making sense of that loss. Paradoxically, his depression about the political climate, the devaluation of art in a consumer culture, and the plight of undereducated, oversocialized*** children created a need for him to write the tales, the now-classic children's books, and the late poetry in which he gives voice to the extraordinary feelings of ordinary people trying to transform their lives that are "commonplace and solitary." More and more it is the strength of this last creative work, after a struggle with what he saw as "ominous" changes in "the climate of our culture" (Sad Heart 86)*, that makes Jarrell a central figure in mid-century letters, one who cannot be relegated to the margins, where off "in a bright spot somewhere in the corner / Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth" (CP 333).* --from Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co: Middle-generation Poets in Context

*A Sad Heart at the Supermarket.
**The Complete Poems
***Somewhere he complains about American children being raised on applause, rather like current complains of an "everybody gets a prize" sort of schooling.

There's a grand bouquet of flowers to chose from when we think about American poets. But who is the most important critic in the states? It might be Eliot, though he left us. Or Auden, who is ours and not ours. But it just might be Randall Jarrell. I hope we grow some more poet-writer-critics of his kind.

The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are centuries
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.
            --from "A Girl in a Library"

Rips in the fabric of culture--

Portrait of the artist as flourishing, flowering...
Division page image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for my just-out Maze of Blood (Mercer.)
With this story, inspired by the life
of Texas pulp writer Robert E. Howard,
I got to revel in the life of someone
who died before I was born, who
was unlike me in almost all ways,
save for his love of words.

My third child is now in college, and I've thought a lot about how English departments have changed since the year when I gave back my just-won tenure and promotion and became a full-time writer and then also a mother. Clearly it's now possible in many places to obtain an "English" degree without having much acquaintance with Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton, and it's quite possible to have little acquaintance at all with the legacy of the classical world with its great transcendentals. In fact, it is so very possible to go without reading the life-giving, important writers of the past or present that studies tell us many people never bother to read a book again once they graduate from college!

Likewise, I've seen many mentions of MFA students who do not know the tradition--I feel sure that complaint is not always justified, but it appears to be true often enough for many complaints to be made in print. Similarly, the visual arts have suffered from a lack of craft and skills in student training. But what is an artist alone? We are not spiders working and spinning alone but one body with the work of the past--those of our own culture and works in translation as well. Moreover, the tools and techniques of the past are part of how an artist thinks, and without them, he or she is lessened. Artists of all sorts are linked together through time and space, and the fallen generation just past grew out of the work of all previous artists, and the generations alive now from them in turn. To make art out of ourselves like a spider is to ignore all the power, truth, beauty, and good work that came before.

As an inhabitant of a small, often convulsive world, I find alarming the tendency to avoid reading books. Novels and stories and poems are gifts to us across barriers of space and culture and time. They are a vital way for us to experience the mind and living energies of the Other, the person who is not like us, not our sex or race or religion or culture. They are a path to understanding and empathizing with another's mind, heart, and soul. They are often the closest we can come to experiencing--to being pierced and affected by--another's dailiness and pleasures and sorrows. And stories and poems catch us up with the sheer joy of creation.

Without these wonderful little time-and-space collapsers, we are lesser beings, caught inside ourselves, less able to empathize and to love the world in all its shapes and colors, less able to love one another. As a writer, I have been able to stream outside myself and become a seventeenth-century woman in the wilderness (Catherwood), a nineteenth-century soldier (The Wolf Pit), a Texas pulp writer (Maze of Blood), a Depression-era boy in flight (A Death at the White  Camellia Orphanage), a child in a post-apocalyptic world, fastening together the pieces (Thaliad), a painter in the heart of a hill, searching for truth in a labyrinth (Glimmerglass), and much more. My readers have been those things as well, choosing to take my hand in the wondrous storyteller-and-listener dance that has been going on for hundreds, thousands of years.

What can we say in the face of ongoing news of decline, except that there is much more to being alive than what is useful and practical? Without art and culture, we are left in a dry landscape of the useful and practical, without an oasis in sight.

Metaphysical tea party with Edith Sitwell and Flannery O'Connor and peacocks

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, interior vignette
for Glimmerglass

SEEING

 Edith Sitwell: It is a part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

 Flannery O' Connor: The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

 ON “KEEPING RABBITS”

 E: A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

 F: Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. 

HIDDEN LIFE

 E: The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

 F: I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

HALF-ALIVE

 E: I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.

 F: Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.

 WOOD FOR THE FIRE

 E: I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

 F: Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

 F: All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

 ART AND INCOMPLETENESS

 E: Poetry is the deification of reality.

 F: The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

 F: The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.

Peculiar things people sometimes say to a writer--

Preparatory art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins 
for Glimmerglass

That is, to this writer--

"I never read anything written after 1900." (Later on the same neighborhood man read one my novels and declared that he loved it, so maybe he was exaggerating.)

"I never read novels. Can't do it." (Another guy in my neighborhood. Twice. With accompanying head shakes. I'm still wondering if he forgets to what I have devoted my life.)

"Why don't you write something like Stephen King?" (Evidently we all want to sound exactly the same, we writers!)

"Why don't you write something that makes a lot of money?" (Oddly, we don't all have the bestseller gene and the desire to write about alluring vampires or some carbon copy of the latest book-to-movie trilogy or anything that puts money ahead of truth and beauty and well-made sentences--not that the good bestseller doesn't exist, just that it's not the norm. And all that said, we don't object to being paid.)

"Would I have heard of you?" (General mortification abounds.)

"What does the world need with another poem?" (Your answer here. This one came as a tease from a colleague, and it stopped me from poems for a year, during which I began writing fiction. So maybe it was a blessing.)

"Where do you get your ideas?" (I can't say that I get them from the fount at the end of the world and time, or they'll think I'm mad. But that's a better answer than most.)

"What are your books about?" (Read them, and you'll know! My 12th and 13th books are forthcoming, and I look back and see that my books are all as different from one another as rutabagas from fox kits.)

"How can I find an agent?" (I have no idea. Both of my agents asked, one through my first publisher, the other after Louis Rubin suggested my name. But some people ask this so very immediately!)

"Do people read poetry anymore?" (You. Tell. Me.)

Some more via responses to this post on twitter and facebook--

A familiar addition from poet Julie Brooks Barbour via a twitter response: "My favorite: Could you tell me how to get my novel published?" She posted a similar one in the comments with a funny remark.

From writer Gary M Dietz: 1. Your book is on an Amazon list. You must be rich! 2. On (multiple) job interviews "So, you are an author. Why do you want to this job?" (Maybe because my net income from my book is negative!) 3. How many words per minute can you type?

Here's a favorite one, via facebook:  "I don't tell folks I'm a writer. I tell them I'm an astrologer. But it doesn't help. They still say peculiar things" (John P. O'Grady.)

See the comments for more, including some peculiar things people sometimes say to a visual artist...

I am going to have to do a roundup of similar remarks from painter friends, I guess! I think this topic falls into the "weirdly fascinating" category.

A note from the Young Crones Club

Image via http://mahan.wonkwang.ac.kr/
Rare: an image of a medieval woman artist at work.

The glorious thing about being in the Young Crones Club is that suddenly you know well people of all ages. Of course, everybody knows about the down sides (like an over-cut diamond, growing older has many sides. I also think knowing a lot of people of many ages comes from living in a village setting, where the ages are not separated out and compartmentalized, as they often are in a city.)

It's a curious time of life, the time of the Young Crone, when children are struggling to fly outside or inside the nest, when parents are growing old and sometimes dying, when duties and requests for volunteer work increase madly when it seems they ought to lessen, and when the plain fact of growing older tells the writer (this one) to hurry up and finish all those almost-finished things strewn around the writing room. And then what? To dream of beginning a new work, death-defying and magnificent... Because every writer of any potency has the dream burning in the brain.

"Now let us sport us while we may; / And now, like am'rous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour." Words are sexy, fecund, powerful, and joyful: so Marvell sported in words with his would-be lover, the famous Coy Mistress, and made of desire that flies a kind of monument. And so we readers and writers may aspire to sport and rejoice through words--losing and finding ourselves in a more intense life.

P. S. Just peeked to see if I had written about the Young Crones Club before--and yes, I have (yes, the mind must be going!) And stumbled on this while I was at it: Joy in Poetry.

P. P. S. Thanks to Jenny B for including A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, The Throne of Psyche, and The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins on her list of recommended summer reads. Also included are books and chapbook by real life and e-life friends Dale Favier (never met but want to meet!), Robbi Nester (met in college), and Fiona Robyn (met in Wales in 2010.) And, of course, I can't leave out the poets in The Book of Ystwyth; I've been lucky enough to meet Dave Bonta, Damian Walford Davies, Callum James, and Andrea Selch in Wales, and I often feel that I know Clive's friend, the late Catriona Urquhart. It's a beautiful book, packed with Clive's images and well worth owning.

Letter to a young artist

Interior collage vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

I've been thinking about you and your aspirations as you drift into the world, slipping into a job, finding the time to make your art without someone at your shoulder. You ask for advice, yet always I fear being polonial,* and so needing a good stabbing as I stand behind the arras. And though you must discover your own path and make your own quest, I feel the impulse to warn you against certain beasts along the way. In our age, the barriers to mastery in the arts have become especially powerful and strange. They can lead you in directions that mean the destruction of art--that can cripple your future work at the very start.

I say this in part because you passed through the liberal arts college of the day, and sometimes you have been taught by academics to take angry little hatchets and chop away at the pillars that hold up Western civilization and tradition. (My stance? To teach is a high calling, often fulfilled with grace. But a professor who mocks and throws away the great works of the past is a mere chipmunk digging a hole under the foot of a giant.) Oh, it is good to look with clear eyes at the world and time. But it is wrong to dismantle and trash the glories of a civilization. The truest, strongest art is crafted in the sex-abolishing, race-abolishing spirit, using the tools of the trade.

Take the great works of the past. Make them your own. Know why some matter to you, while others do not, and you will know yourself and your aims better. Know the tradition from which you spring and so be a giant by standing on the shoulders of men and the few women who managed to speak well in spite of the expectations and constraints of their times and culture. Rejoice in the art, rather than dwelling on social critique and conditions as a measure of that art. Conditions and cultural beliefs are not the measure of an art, but part of a complicated soil of time and place from which a work grows and flowers.

Also, sift out and forget any nonsense you were served up in studio or workshop classes--to make art only based on "what you know," "to find your voice," etc. My education taught me that certain words were off limits, that literature was divided into genres and only one was worthwhile, and that I didn't need the ancient tools of my trade inherited from the masters of the past. One of the things I found useful about my education was that it awakened the desire to strive against or test what I had been taught. Question your received ideas, and toss them if they do not serve your art.

Let the art teach you. Know your tools. Remember that the way forward has long been through the tradition and the past. Each time you start a work, you will be starting over. But just make your art. In love. In truth. In grace. You will be making yourself, as well. Each time you begin again, you will be different--bigger on the inside, more emboldened and ready to leap into the unknown with a shout.

Love to you, luck to you--
Marly

* Yes, I made that one up. But it's a made-up word I've used for a long time, as Polonius and his advice always come to mind when I am asked for advice. Perhaps in such situations, we are all Polonius, or we are all the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," who would have been a good woman--would have spoken only what is true and what matters--if only there had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Video by Paul Digby.

Dorothy's rapier, etc.

Dorothy Sayers at The Lapidary Craft

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity: so have some little frocks; but they are not the kind that any fool can run up in half an hour with a machine. . . . [English] is a rich, noble, flexible, and sensitive because it combines an enormous vocabulary of mixed origin with a superlatively civilized and almost wholly analytical syntax. This means that we have not merely to learn a great number of words with their subtle distinctions of meaning and association, but to put them together in an order determined only by a logical process of thought. There is no good English with clear thinking, and (as some cynic has justly observed) “most people would die sooner than think, and most of them do.” - Dorothy Sayers

Recommending "Dorothy Sayers on Writing" at The Lapidary Craft.
Hat tip to The Prufrock News

Dorothy Sayers on men and women

I enjoyed the Lapidary Craft quotes so much that I'm tossing in another one by Dorothy Sayers... I've never read much Sayers, aside from Gaudy Night, so perhaps I ought to put her on the list.

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also. ― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society 

What I am doing

detail, proposed cover art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Drudging, ferrying, writing when I can.  I have been noodling around with tiny stories, which range in topic from cephalopods to celebrity fans (and do not always begin with "c"), but what I really need to do is finish work that has been sitting around in "almost" state for a year or more, waiting for me. I'm making a resolution to finish up three book manuscripts that need to be tidied and in two cases re-ordered--time-consuming but not difficult tasks. I also need to work on fall events for Glimmerglass, as I have done nothing about that matter! And I need to think about the summer workshop at Antioch.

Notes on my recent books, #1

Rose Kelleher, poet (Maryland) at Amazon. On A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage: I hope this book receives the recognition it deserves. I was going to say it was "beautifully written," but that seems superficial somehow, so I'll say it's ~masterfully~ written. Youmans is a poet, true, but the poetry here is used in the service of the story, to bring scenes and characters to life; it's not decoration. I'm amazed at Youman's ability to inhabit another world so fully, as if she'd been reincarnated and were remembering it all firsthand. As others have noted, you want to linger over the descriptions and at the same time move forward to see what happens next.

Fracas in Book Land

An interesting response from Smashwords to the Amazon-Hachette battle--something readers and writers ought to read. And a writer with a response to that response. Another. And another related one. And one on indie expansion. Feel free to add any thoughts or further links in the comments--readers and writers have a stake in these events. Big hat tip to Damien G. Walter. 

Here's an issue about paying artists for my friends who paint, collage, make encaustics, etc. Hat tip to Makoto Fujimura.

Death of the novel and why writers write

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, image
from the rear cover of The Foliate Head
(UK: Stanza Press, 2012)

    For some reason or other (people do argue about why these things happen, don't they?), I wrote a little short story--one about a fantastic event that caused a woman to begin living a set of experiences that would become her next novel--after reading Will Self's essay, "The novel is dead (this time it's for real.)" I didn't believe a word of it! Well, perhaps I believed he had a teen son who strummed a guitar... I immediately dredged up one of his prior remarks as commentary:

I’ve always enjoyed bullshitting people. I still enjoy it. --Will Self, interviewed by Jacques Testard at The White Review

     I've been equally unbelieving (albeit good-tempered) about some of the responses. After all, when a death is predicted for too long, methinks there may be too much protestation.
    David Ulin, book critic of the L. A. Times, says that Self is wrong (so far we agree, and I perhaps Self does too), and points out that even to have any ideas of lodging a book in historical memory is absurd, given the brevity of life and the deluge of books. In face of such difficulties, the job is "how to evoke experience in a manner that does it justice, that gives dignity to the evanescence, to the ephemerality." He believes that the ultimate vanishing of the evocation and the one who experienced is "part of the point; we’re just creating sand paintings against the void." Ulin concludes,

No, the only reason to write is self-expression, which is by its nature a fleeting conceit. --David L. Ulin, in "Notes on the (non-)death of the book," latimes.com

I enjoy his tribute to the shad-fly evanescence of life, but this idea of why we write is wrong. Wrong! Oh, yes, sure, along the way we can say that some evidence of the self (another rabbit hole--what is the self, Mr. Self? Mr. Ulin?) may possibly be expressed or extruded or fingerprinted or some such, but it's not why writers write.
     You have to be very cautious about listening to the claims writers make because they are in the business of making things up. In fact, right now, I might just be making things up. Don't trust me! I might be, like Self, "bullshitting people." I might happen to "enjoy it." However, such a thought never flew into my innocent head until I read Self's claim of the same, so you're probably reasonably safe, if (if only!) I can understand what my own reactions are and not trundle off on some possibly-circular digression.
    Ahem! End of small digression.
    So why do writers (real, sure 'nough writers) write? Because if there is a legitimate reason, perhaps word-twisting and this baggy, odd, changing creature we call a novel really can't die. I will tell you why writers write, and you may laugh at me and go on clicking on links, or you may pause and believe me, as you will. Here is the answer to a hard question (or at least to a much-debated one) in a mere four lines . . .
   Writers write because they find joy in playing with words, hearing them chink together and sing, and feeling them marry and meld with what is told. Writers write because they love to make things and so to bring something with the illusion of life and energy out of nothing. Writers write because to make a story or a poem is an act that is true, beautiful, good, and a singular mirror held up to creation and God, maker of the universe (or the multiverses) out of nothing, and to creation itself. Oddly, all this is true whether a writer believes in these elements--play, word-music, sub-creation and creation, truth and beauty and God and goodness--or not.
     The end. There. Settled.

* * *

P. S. I've been a bit unfeeling to write another post not many hours after posting an interview meant to help get the word out about a brand new anthology, so please pop down to the previous post and take a look, have a read, buy a book, etcetera!

A refusal to pine--

Note: If you're looking for the Great Poetry Giveaway, scoot down one post...

Image courtesy of sxc.hu and Patrick Nijhuis
of Deventer, the Netherlands.

I'm a little peeved at The Atlantic's writers-need-a-Vera article. I definitely don't agree with "The Legend of Vera Nabokov: Why Writers Pine for a Do-It-All Spouse." Let's just do the work, and if our bathrooms are cleaned a little less often and our laundry sometimes stands up in a mountain and we don't have as many dinner parties as we might like, well, so be it. And if we don't write as many masterpieces as we hoped . . . we can just remember than our number one piece of assigned work is life, and that we need to try to get better at it as we go on.

So what if some of us could use but can't manage a secretary, a housekeeper, and a full-time cheerleader? Sure, I lack all and would enjoy all, but who cares? My husband and I have three children to send to college, and I'd rather have the rather pricey children than the helpers. And I'm grateful that I was able to quit my "career" and stay home to write poetry, stories, and novels and raise children. I'm still pleased, and I'm not going to complain.

In fact, I feel wonderfully lucky not to have been born into a life where I'd end up cleaning hotel rooms (or crabs at the beach--what a tough job! I admire those women, cracking claws and laughing as they work), scraping paint off clapboard, or smiling as I ring up your brand new material possessions at Walmart. Writers need to be a part of the daily dirt and occasional magic of life just like everybody else, and we don't have to whimper if we don't live in a sweet rainbow bubble where other people serve us.

What is a spouse for? Not to be your personal servant, certainly! I'm glad to have married a man who likes to cook and does so. But I didn't and don't expect my husband to read or critique manuscripts, act as my secretary, clean the bathrooms, do the laundry for five people (or however many are in residence at the moment), vacuum, etc. Do I wish he would do all those things? It's a bit tempting . . . but no, not really, thanks.

As for Vera Nabokov, I thank her for managing Vladimir Nabokov's life and career. I hope she found considerable satisfaction and even some joy in her choice. Because that's what it was--a choice of how to live her life.

Pigs and pearls

I'm still thinking about Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal, published in time for Christmas gift-giving, and why that publication might have been a fairly bad idea. R. T. aka Tim brought it up on his new blog, A Commonplace from Eastrod, and there I simply said that the book was part of that unclean effort to trawl through a writer's remains and find something, anything publishable.

Long ago I was asked for my manuscripts and papers by a librarian at Wilson Library at UNC, and I replied that I was not sure that I liked that idea, and that I would think about it. I'm still not sure, though in a sense one would be lucky if anybody actually wanted to trawl through one's remains in hopes of finding a bit of ambergris in the beached corpse! Certainly a great deal has been published that would have been better to remain as rare library research material for academics or else destroyed. I'm still wondering whether it is not better for writers to burn the dross and leave the gold.

So one reason to dislike the publication of the prayer journal is that it was a private thing, not meant for people but intended by O'Connor solely for the maker of the prayers and the Maker of the maker of the prayers. Flannery O'Connor was guided by that purpose and her audience was one, or three-in-one. Some words are meant for a wide audience; some are not.

But there is another, stronger reason not to publish the journal, and it is one that surely compelled O'Connor in her writing: the well-known biblical injunction not to cast your pearls before swine. In the Bible, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a great, wondrous pearl. So when a Christian like Flannery O'Connor is enjoined not to strew pearls before pigs, she is being cautioned not to offer what is holy where it will be debased and muddied: "Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you" (Matthew 7: 6, NRSV.) And no, it doesn't mean people are pigs...

O'Connor the writer, reading that familiar line, knew that it was asking her to know her audience, and saying that it is wrong to be the cause (don't strew your pearls willy-nilly!) of other people trampling on what belongs to God. What is holy can be muddied and torn by people with no sympathy or understanding, and that can lead to rejection and scorn for the one who offers the pearl. Well, that's familiar as part of the story of Christ, isn't it? Interestingly, the gospel record shows that Christ was willing to say the most astonishing things to people just-met but was rather close-mouthed and oblique with unsympathetic questioners. Moreover, the gospel shows us the peculiar power of story. Parables often carry the freight of meaning; they tell the truth but tell it slant--that is, stories protect the pearl yet reveal it to those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

Flannery O'Connor seems to feel in a similar way about art and writing in her essays: “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” Without eyes to see and ears to hear, one never grasps the pearl of art. And in O'Connor's view, that understanding is limited to those who will take the trouble to grapple with stories. What is regarded as the difficulty of her stories can be seen as a way of obeying the injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Only those who will take trouble to understand will, in fact, receive them.

 * * *

For further comments and some sharp arguments against me, go to Pigs and pearls, part 2. Some of them have a better grasp than I do on those pigs and pearls!

Out-of-fashion characters, creation, one writer's mind--

Image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins from Thaliad
(Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)
www.phoeniciapublishing.com

Certain subtleties of character creation are seldom seen in the novel these days. And they are hard to catch. They are difficult to portray in our time, being rejected by the various gatekeepers of the novel, those who know best or feel that they do.

I'm thinking about someone I know, someone I hardly noticed for a long time because she was very quiet and modest and also there was nothing to call attention to her appearance. She did not put herself forward in any way, and clearly did not think particularly highly of her own gifts, though she often admired others and their abilities. Yet she grew on me over time for the simple reason that she seemed to have a lovely quality of goodness--a steady, shining light.

Such a character is entirely out of favor as a subject for the literary mainstream in our time, and no doubt would be considered unbelievable or sentimental by many critics. Mere inclusion of such a figure would be difficult; could a writer even get away with it? And yet it is as true as many another character, and a wonderful example of noiselessly bearing up under life's slings and arrows and witnessing to the nobility of human beings.

This person shed light elsewhere on other characters as well, and is a good example of how many fictional and real people bump up against each other and illuminate one another. (If fictional characters do not collide and illuminate in a story, well, the tale is less true to how we live and learn.) That is, when I finally began to notice and admire her light-bearing character, it struck me how quickly a newer acquaintance of mine had been drawn to her, and how he had seen in her a lovely, tender light it took me years to perceive.

And that understanding told me several things about character. It told me that my newer acquaintance was a person with a delicate, discerning sort of mind, and that he had no care for what the world thought in establishing his friendships. I admired both those qualities. It also suggested to me that I was often a little too busy to pay attention and that I was not as discerning a person as I might like to be, no matter how many paper characters I had created in books.

It also suggested to me that I might like to pay a little more attention to the more subtle ways that light (or dark) is shed from one character to another in my books. It suggested that I might want to be a little more alert to these linkages in real life. Suddenly I knew myself better, and almost felt myself to be a character in a story, one whose world had suddenly turned a little faster on its axis and who had come to a greater self-knowledge.

Friends with Etsy shops and new books, 2

Thanks to pre-Christmas events (last night meant four very interesting hours given over to practicing and then singing for an ordination, and the calendar of events is packed, it seems), I'm falling a bit behind on promises to share some of my facebook friends who have new books and Etsy shops, so I'm just going to pop a few selections from facebook lists in here... I'll take out the more private comments and leave information and links. Several of these Etsy shops are for relatives (a mother, a daughter) of a writer friend.

If you're looking for something more like my usual posts, slide down to the prior one. But if you're looking to shop, here are some links where you can directly support individual craftspeople, artists, and writers--enjoy!

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  Katie Hoerth My mom has the most awesome Etsy shop ever http://www.etsy.com/shop/Raidersofthelostart

  
  

  Raidersofthelostart

  
  

  www.etsy.com

  
  

  Welcome and have a look around, looking for just the right book leave a message I am sure I can find it for you, Vintage Altered Books

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  Marly Youmans So bookish!

  December 6 at 9:52pm · Like · 1
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  Mamie Lewis Potter http://www.etsy.com/shop/RockpileBindery

  
  

  RockpileBindery

  
  

  www.etsy.com

  
  

  For more info about custom orders, bookbinding classes in Western Massachusetts, and news, please visit my website and blog:

  December 6 at 9:53pm via mobile · Unlike · 1 · Remove Preview
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  Georgia Urbano Raysman 

  
  

  A Nantucket Shopping Experience Online

  
  

  www.nantucketchronicle.com

  December 6 at 11:02pm · Unlike · 1 · the Nantucket Chronicle Marketplace, where we feature only local,Nantucket artists and artisans: http://www.nantucketchronicle.com/nantucket-marketplace
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  Lynn Hardaker 

  
  

  BeneathTheBracken

  
  

  www.etsy.com

  
  

  Welcome to Beneath The Bracken. These collages reflect my love of story and tokens of the past. Something as simple as a faded letter, an

  December 7 at 5:52am · Unlike · 1 · 
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    Sharon Short One Square Inch of Alaska (Penguin Plume 2013.) Book club or upmarket fiction. "A lovely uplifting read--you'll love it." (Essentials Magazine.)

    December 8 at 10:29am via mobile · Unlike · 1
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    Margaret Mackinnon The Invented Child, winner of the 2011 Gerald Cable Book Award:http://www.amazon.com/Invente.../dp/1878851624/ref=sr_1_1...
    

    
    

    The Invented Child (Gerald Cable Book Award)

    www.amazon.com
    

    Poetry. "In THE INVENTED CHILD, Margaret Mackinnon can say of a tiny child's app...See More 

    December 8 at 5:22pm · Edited · Unlike · 2 · 
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    Robbi Nester Balance (White Violet Press, 2012). People can message me here [facebook] and I'll tell them how to order from me. [Note: Poetry chapbook that would be a good choice for a devotee of yoga!]
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      Elaine Neil Orr A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa, literary/historical fiction. Starred Library Journal Review. "A cathartic epic filled with physical and intellectual adventure bordered by psychological drama."

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        Elaine Neil Orr Oh, the link: http://www.amazon.com/Different-Sun-Novel.../dp/0425261301
        

        
        

        A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa

        www.amazon.com
        

        IN 1853, NEWLY MARRIED EMMA BOWMAN ARRIVES IN AFRICA AND STEPS INTO A WORLD OF U...
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      Sharon Short http://www.amazon.com/.../0452298768/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap... Also, I love your friends' Etsy pages! Beautiful items...
      

      
      

      My One Square Inch of Alaska: A Novel

      www.amazon.com
      

      A pair of siblings escapes—along with a Siberian Husky—the strictures of their 1...See More