Fracas! Ruckus! Brouhaha!

Vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

Dear Slate,

What a lot of grief you are getting for publishing an article about how adults ought to be embarrassed to read children's books. ("Against YA" by Ruth Graham.) I guess maybe that was the point, as it is so often the point in these days. To get attention. To cause a commotion, a hullaballoo, a hoo-ha. To make a sort of paparazzi fuss, all lightbulbs and yelling and jeering. I'm a bit tired of the ruckus, you hear?

A long time ago C. S. Lewis told us that "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest." Likewise, Maurice Sendak made it clear that it was whether books were good that mattered. And as to fantasy and fantasizing being for children, he said, "I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young."

I agree with Lewis and Sendak. Ages and genres make no difference at all. Being packed with energy and life counts the most when it comes to a book, not some idea of audience age and kind or mode. I read the Alice books when I was five, and I am still reading them today. Stand where two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and take the way with the nooks for reading and the stones for skipping and the books without labels, without ages. Hey, it'll make all the difference.

Good cheer,
Marly

P. S. To somewhat change the subject, I don't like the idea that grownups desire to read weak, thin, smarmy books. And that's where the real criticism is hidden, I think--in the idea that some people are content with such books, whether they are written for toddlers, young adults, or grownups. And the writer assumes that children's books are, indeed, lesser, and that an adult could not have a rich experience reading them. Carroll. Sendak. L'Engle. Those are a few of many arguments against that thought.

P. S. So you don't think I'm being mean to her, here's another article by Ruth Graham--a highly sensible proposal that suggests that maybe we've dropped something we should pick up again, revised for our own day.

Notes on my recent books, no. 2

In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse----though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time.  --Lee Smith

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.

Tweedly-jolly for Glimmerglass!

I'm busy writing a guest blog post and then must do some ornery tasks that are singing my name in gutturals and shrills... So just for fun, here's a bit of welcome for Glimmerglass from the editor of Books and Culture:

2. John Wilson ‏@jwilson1812  21h

   Having read it at a previous stage, I already know it will be one of my favorite books of the year @marlyyoumans

    View conversation

   •  Reply 
   •  Retweeted 
   •  Favorited 
3. John Wilson ‏@jwilson1812  21h

   Major new arrival from Mercer Univ. Press: galley of Glimmerglass, new novel by @marlyyoumans

   Expand

   •  Reply 
   •  Retweeted 
   •  Favorited 
4. 22h
5. 
   

In sun and rain--

Illustration by Galen Dara

It's a melancholy day, as child no. 2 heads back to Vermont with her godparents, and the house is quiet. Outside the rain is falling, fine and gentle, sometimes in the sunshine. It all seems so appropriate to the date. As we grow older, more and more dates in our lives have a special, often secret meaning, sometimes connected with something beautiful, sometimes connected with events that wound. May 20th and June 3rd are linked in my mind, two of my dates, the latter a date from several years before my birth. Yet they have remained important all my life. The closest I've come to writing about what they mean in prose is the reprinted story here. And there's a related interview here.