Greer Gilman's Blog, page 46

Printer's devilry

Kerning game.

Latest score:  94.  (I once got it perfect, but only once.)

Ooh.  I've only just found the other games.

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"...and the ale it was lively"

Martin & Eliza Carthy did a glorious father-and-daughter set at Johnny D's, mostly from their recent album.  She is so much like her mother now, authority and warmth and wit; and her dad is all mischief and eyebrows, and spare mastery.  "Coal, not fireworks," says one review:  yes.

I told him afterward that every time I see him he plays fewer notes to more purpose, and he gave that two thumbs up.

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Ashes buds

But green in greener world I wake
And lighter of the dark I make.
In my coming I do leave;
Death of dying I bereave.

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Cloud in paper!

I danced in the hallway.  Small Beer has kept that perfect Kathleen Jennings
cover, now with a Tiptree banner.  Out next month.

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Wrestling the numinous

The tiny but celebrated Vericon will be this weekend in the Yard, with splendid guests.  I'm on two panels:  Wrestling the Numinous (Saturday, 11 am) and The Joys and Perils of Writing Short (Sunday, 11 am).  And I'm hoping for a quiet cup of tea with friends.

If you're in the neighborhood, come play with us!

It was March today, windy and astoundingly blue.  The Spring is rising, like Atlantis in reverse.  Or like a sleeper:  see, her eyes move quickly.  There are birds now in her dreams.  The snow is ragged now, outworn.  Here and there, a shoulder or a hip of grass shows through.  Persephone wakes.

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Great Bear

My old friend gyzki has died.   He was an absolute sweetheart, a mensch:  kind, witty, a lover of saga and a teller of tales, a man who rejoiced in language.  Learning was play to him.  He came of the sort of family that had a VW van called Tarquinius Superbus.  That sort of family coalesced about him, a household and a hall of friends.  Even now, in my first grief, his memory is a joy.  Long long ago, I played the Sibyl to his seeker in a game of quest.  Only yesterday, it seems, I read a modest Peter Quince to his glorious Bottom the Weaver.

"Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will do any man's heart good to hear me; I will roar, that I will make the duke say 'Let him roar again, let him roar again.'"

My deepest sympathies to Carol, his lifelong dear companion and wife; to his children, all his family, and to all his many many friends.

I hope he's met up with Sir Terry on the road.  They'd enjoy each other's company immensely.

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"The Grave's a fine and private place..."

John Boys, Dean of Canterbury, at work as I try to be.  I love St. Jerome's Catwing on the table.
Also Left Nautilus, groping after Truth.

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"Just give me your hand and we will wend our way..."

Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press announces:

I’m pleased to note that the first paperback edition of Greer Gilman’s amazing, immersive, enchanting, mind boggling, fever-inducing, death-defying literary tightrope walk, Tiptree Award winner Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales has gone to press and will be published in April of this year.

Greer will be reading and taking questions at the mighty Porter Square Books on April 21st at 7 pm along with one of her amazing first readers, Sonya Taaffe, who will be celebrating the publication of her own latest book, Ghost Signs, a collection of 36 poems and one story, published by our friends at Aqueduct Press.

Should you read Cloud & Ashes? Here is one reader’s response:

“Cloud & Ashes is not a book for every reader; but it is a book for every human. (It’s also a book for every library that desires to be worthy of that appellation.) There might seem to be a contradiction in those words, and there might well be, were every human to read. But to my, mind reading is an effort that exists outside its own exercise; that is when we read, it may feel like an internal, unshared, indeed unsharable experience. But that is not, I think the case. When we read, we go to the place where writing comes from, and in so doing, I think we leave something of ourselves behind as readers. Greer Gilman found whatever it is that is left behind, she has captured it in her net of words and managed to write it down and get it published. That is a herculean feat. It may only happen once in her lifetime or in ours. But it’s happened here and now. What you do with it is up to you. For eternity, as it happens.”

—Rick Kleffel

And Ghost Signs?:

Sonya Taaffe writes hauntingly of edgelands. Her poetic world lies on both banks of the Acheron, which may be crossed both ways. In Ghost Signs, she writes of uncompleted lives, of the lingering and commingling of the dead with us, the living. Where we meet are borderlands, uncertain spaces: in a saltmarsh, in the mud of trenches, in the realm of numbers, on the edge of sleep. There is darkness; but the journey is upward, into light. A transcendent book.

—Greer Gilman

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Blasted heath

Is anyone interested in a pair of tickets to this King Lear tonight at 7 at the Regal Fenway? Colm Feore as the King; Stephen Ouimette (Oliver from Slings & Arrows)! As the Fool.

My regretful friends cannot come.

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Antiphonal

Sonya Taaffe and I will be reading at Porter Square Books on April 21, to celebrate her gorgeous new collection, Ghost Signs, and the reappearance of my Persephone myth, Cloud & Ashes, in paperback.

There will be spring.

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