Moonlight Requisition

Blogger? Tumbler? Enjoy chatting on some sort of social media? Interested in hosting one smallish question (yours) and some information about A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Mercer University Press, winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction) in time for the March 30th book launch?

The idea is for one large interview to appear (cut up in pieces like Osiris--to be eventually collected like Osiris as well), sprinkled here and there over the web. To put it another way (without that troublesome Osiris), your question will appear in three ways: on your blog, along with my answer; here, as a question only but pointing to your blog; and lastly as an item in a round-up Table-of-Contents post (also linking to your blog.)

Confused yet?

Along with the piece of an interview, I'll ask you to post some information about the book--an image, some comments, some information.  Note: you don't have to be an author or have a blog that focuses primarily on books. In fact, I think the idea of having launch posts on all sorts of blogs is a fun idea.

Write me at smaragdineknot [AT] gmail.com for The Complete Skinny on The Great Blog Pilferage. Or, less sweetly, An Infestation of Blogs. Or Major Palace Annexation. (I hope for major, rather than minor--one never knows with takeovers.) Or whatever it shall be named.

Update, late March 4th:  So far I have three visual artists, a novelist, two poets, and one historian signed up. And I've already answered two questions. Come play!

The Open Secret Society of the Poets

As James Thomson is best known as the author of the poem, "The City of Dreadful Night," he surprises me with his essay, "Open Secret Societies," with its praise for heroes, poets, and saints. The last quarter of his life must have been terribly depressive, as he was insomniac and increasingly isolated by alcoholism and melancholy. But he was youthful when the essay was written, and evidently he and life together had yet to make him the most despairing of the Victorians.

The Floating Press, Ltd. ebook edition

Here he is on the Society of Poets, and his romance of transfiguring words is a long way from the poetry and poets who have trooped in after Modernism:


There is the Open Secret Society of the Poets. These are they who feel that the universe is one mighty harmony of beauty and joy; and who are continually listening to the rhythms and cadences of the eternal music whose orchestra comprises all things from the shells to the stars; all beings from the worm to man, all sounds from the voice of the little bird to the voice of the great ocean; and who are able partially to reproduce these rhythms and cadences in the language of men. In all these imitative songs of theirs is a latent undertone, in which the whole infinite harmony of the whole lies furled; and the fine ears catch this undertone, and convey it to the soul, wherein the furled music unfurls to its primordial infinity, expanding with rapturous pulses and agitating with awful thunders this soul which has been skull-bound, so that it is dissolved and borne away beyond consciousness, and becomes as a living wave in a shoreless ocean. If, however these their poems be read silently in books, instead of being heard chanted by the human voice, then for the eye which has vision an underlight stirs, and quickens among the letters which grow translucent and throb with light; and this mysterious splendour entering by the eyes into the soul fills it with spheric illumination, and like the mysterious music swells to infinity, consuming with quick fire all the bonds and dungeon-walls of the soul, dazing it out of consciousness and dissolving it in a shoreless ocean of light.         
        --James Thomson (1834-82), aka Bysshe Vanolis, aka James Thomson (B. V.)

Wroth Redux, with chickens--

Cockerel courtesy of sxc.hu
and Philip MacKenzie of London

Approximately one year ago I (the mild-mannered, the peaceable, the tactful) committed a fulmination, a fume, and a fuss entitled Wroth, Wroth with Ted Hughes. It had to do with chickens and old ladies and lovelessness. You may want to rush over and read it all over again (because naturally you have read it once, being all up on matters of chickens and old ladies--and you want love. Don't we all!)

Anyway that little fuse of a post kept burning until it ignited a little bonfire. Jeremiah Douglas has written a very interesting response called "An Unfortunately Collected Poem by Ted Hughes." Whereas I dashed off an impetuous and perhaps feather-brained response, he has connected my little fluster to issues of ethics, good and evil, and good and bad poetry. And in doing so, he has said some very interesting things, and not just about Ted Hughes and chickens.

Hard to pin--

PIN-POST TABLE OF CONTENTS
Being rather fat, it needs one!
TO PIN

On the classification of this creature, Marly Youmans

A NEW 'PIN'

A fresh classification for the same

UPDATE ON THE ADDY FOR THE THRONE OF PSYCHE

More news about the Gold Award Addy

Golden butterfly--"gilded butterfly on a needle"
courtesy of sxc.hu and Karen Steiner of Austria.

TO PIN
In honor of Elsa Louise, let's change it to: IMPOSSIBLE TO PIN

For publishers and reviewers and booksellers, the writer needs to be pinned down.  It's helpful to sort and place him in a box with others of the same kind. It's helpful when placing the book on a shelf in a bookstore or on a search list in an online shop.

Some of us are hard to pin. Keep putting different pins in us, and we may turn out to be all holes: invisible to the naked eye. And that is true even though, from the inside of the writer, all the work seems to flow from the very same fount and to have a kind of seamlessness. Try and catch a butterfly? It can all go the beautiful, destructive way of Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful."

For a long time I was called a poet. Then I was titled "literary writer." When I set a  novel in the past, I was suddenly "historical novelist" to some--to more when I did it again. Then I further messed up the box of labels by writing a couple of books especially for my daughter and so publishing a Southern fantasy that was marketed to children, and then another marketed to young adults, although both were reviewed as crossover books that adults would enjoy. 

That's another mixed category. My adult novels tend to be mentioned as crossover books for bright teens. My children's books tend to be mentioned as crossover books for (also-bright, I am sure!) adults.

Meanwhile my poetry veers from lyric to monologue to narrative to epic. My 2011 collection, The Throne of Psyche, moves from a long blank verse narrative to a wealth of shorter forms. And what about the short stories, which might puzzle a labeler as well, being set in present or past and called realist or irrealist, depending on the story and the reader?

My upcoming books are equally mixed: a picaresque tale set during the Depression era (my ninth book and winner of The Ferrol Sams Award, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, now available as a pre-order); a novel that tells the awkward coming-of-age and destruction of a pulp writer, leaning on the facts of one such writer's life (Maze of Blood) and interspersing the story with fantastic faux-pulp passages; a story of a artist's rebirth in mid-life and pursuit of the muse, twisted together with a sort of dream journey/vision (Glimmerglass); an epic poem, post-apocalyptic (Thaliad); a collection of formal poems, many of them intensely "green" and mythic (The Foliate Head.) I'm working on revising a manuscript of poems called The Book of the Red King; oddly, the stories of the Fool and the King feel in some curious way like the most autobiographical thing I have ever done. (I am, of course, not the King--whose identity is various and unpinned--but the Fool.) I'm not much interested in autobiography unless it can be wholly transformed.

What kind of butterfly am I, flitting in the one bright meadow?  

Morpho peleides courtesy of Rudy Tiben of the Netherlands
and sxc.hu--I picked a morpho because one of the characters
in The Book of the Red King is linked to a blue morpho.

A NEW 'PIN'

Today I'm rather pleased to find myself in a whole new category. At this point, it seems that I am destined to be collected in many ways and so to be a collector of categories! When I have been pinned in a sufficient number of categories, perhaps I will have a kind of roundness in the world's eyes. It's hard to pin what is round.

If you hop over to Hellnotes, you can see that I have now been collected in a new box: "25 Women Horror Writers You Probably Haven't Heard of (But Should Know)." I am described like this:  "award-winning author Marly Youmans has a decidedly more darkly fantastical vibe to her than 'traditional' horror but has produced some of the most beautiful dark fiction." I like it; it sounds positively Hawthornean.

Certainly my two books marketed to children/young adults are rife with shadow, and a number of anthologized stories and others in magazines have a dark, fantastic tint as well. I'm quite pleased to be in some good company and also to venture nearer to a new set of readers. I even have meaningful linkages to several writers on the list, as I narrated Kathe Koja's essay on the maquettes of Clive Hicks-Jenkins for a film when I was in Wales last spring, and Catherynne Valente wrote an introduction for my forest tale, Val/Orson. So thanks to Hellnotes and to Darkeva, who snagged me as part of her collection.

UPDATE on AN ADDY FOR THE THRONE OF PSYCHE

Earlier I posted about the Addy Gold Award for The Throne of Psyche. If you would like to see the full list of Addy awards for Burt and Burt and Mercer, hop here.  The design team and Mercer now go onto regionals and, one hopes, nationals--they managed to beat out more than 50,000 other designs to place, so that's exciting!

If you would like to see how Clive Hicks-Jenkins, painter of "Touched," responded, jump here. You'll also see responses from some of Clive's real-life friends and e-friends, including the painting's owner.