Friends with Etsy shops, 1

As I have a number of friends with Etsy shops, and many people are shopping for Christmas gifts, I have decided to do a few posts featuring Etsy. Here is the first.

Rustic Beaded Earrings - Cthulhu Earrings
Bead and metal assemblage, millefiori 
polymer clay, vintage black lace scraps, 
and oxidized Hoops

Richelle Hawks at Shipwreck Dandy for one-of-a-kind necklaces and earrings
Current coupon: 20% off, with code SHOPEARLY. Apply when prompted at checkout.

Shipwreck Dandy also has a blog here.

Aspens near Hjalmsstaoaa (pastel)

Beth Adams at Studio Cassandra for affordable prints, watercolors, pastels, paintings...

Half the work is currently on a special sale.

Elizabeth Adams is also the publisher of Phoenicia Publishing, where you can find beautiful books (including a book of mine) and music:

From now until December 16, paperback editions of all our full-length poetry books will be on sale for the price of $12.00 rather than the usual $13.95. Hardback editions of Thaliad and Ancient Lights are also offered at $23.00 instead of $26. The sale price will be applied when you visit the e-store, or any Amazon.com site; for customers in the UK or Europe, the sale prices have been converted to local currency.

Titles included are:
Thaliad : paper and hardcover
70 Faces: Torah Poems
Angels & Beasts
Ancient Lights : paper and hardcover
Mercy Island
Brilliant Coroners

Beth is also a professional artist, graphic designer, and writer, and she blogs at The Cassandra Pages, where she writes about the process of making art, travel, Montreal and upstate New York, writing, and more.

Grainne and Diarmuid print with Celtic interlace.

Shirl Sazinski at The Art of Shirl Sazinski.

$10 prints and bookmark sets for Christmas...

Shirl Sazinski is a young illustrator and writer working with mythological subjects, particularly Norse, Celtic, and Greek legends. She studied screenwriting and film at SCAD and Hollins, and she opened up shop at Etsy this year. You can find more about her at her website.

Catherwood, again...

Photograph by Paul Digby: seedhead of a hearts a-bustin',
taken on my mother's mountaintop in Cullowhee, NC, August 2013.

So glad that Sienna Latham followed me on twitter today and left me a link to her lovely, long review of Catherwood.  One of the magic things about the internet is that a mid-list book once considered out of print and "done" keeps getting attention, almost twenty years after first publication (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.)

Another thing is that authors can put books back into circulation through ebooks. But what I'm most pleased about is that Catherwood is coming back as a paperback from Mercer University Press. When a book comes back out of print because a publisher wants the reprint, it's always a good sign.

Currently in print are A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head, and The Throne of Psyche (see tabs above.) Forthcoming are Glimmerglass and Maze of Blood. Perhaps I'll do an in-print post since it's that book-nabbing time of year . . .

a commonplace from eastrod

I've already noted this on twitter and facebook, so I suppose it's already an old tale, given the scorching storytelling pace of the internet, but there's an interesting new books blog underway from one R. T., someone I encountered first on critic D. G. Myers's book blog, and later via novelist Scott G. F. Bailey and . . . here. He is especially keen on Flannery O'Connor, but seems to have a wide range of concerns. Why don't you pop by and help him launch? He's posting frequently and has lots of questions!

Aphoristic morning

Makoto Fujimura's Dark Shalom, 2012

This morning I feel like bundling all my thoughts into tiny packages--perhaps I shall place them under a metaphysical tree, and hope they are not simply waste of breath! Aphorism too often becomes Polonial, and adds nothing to the accumulated thoughts of the world. Perhaps it is now impossible to add an aphorism that has not been conveyed already in other words.

I don't try in words to be better than some other writer; I try to be better than I am, to increase what is me. 

Surely it is just as sad to achieve only the expected and conventional--that thing we too often like because it is comfortable--as to do nothing with a gift in the realms of art. 

Poems without joy in sound are dead leaves that will never dance in the wind. 

The problem with much criticism of the novel and poetry in the past century is that it attempted to replace art, not realizing that art is an experience that cannot be replaced. 

Each of us is a secret that cannot be revealed; the portrayal of character in its ideal gives a sense of person and mystery. 

An artist of any sort needs the understanding of what he or she can do, joined with a yearning desire to topple over that boundary--and the next, and the next. 

After hearing many words in various orders read by many poets, I found myself longing for mystery.  

The element most often missing in our arts is the sense of abundant life. 

Even a ruined shack is a chamber of mystery if people have lived and died there.

Well, that was an interesting exercise. Evidently I find mystery to be more important than any other element this morning...