Marly Youmans's Blog, page 129

Two weeks from pub date

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

Winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction

Mercer University Press, 2012


I have updated the page for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. (The Events page has also been updated.) Since pub date is now two weeks away, pre-pub discounts at the big online venues will be ending soon as books begin to arrive at the indies and chains. More interviews (

The Brontë Sisters as publishing power-dolls!

In taking a small vacation from various and sundry hideous financial documents that I must peruse and fill out, I found this. No doubt (for your own weird or stressed reasons) you need a zany culture-mocking break as much as I did. So here you go:

Tribulation Tuesday

WOE and FIERY TRIALS
Alas, I shall spend the day on thorny financial documents (the sort of thing one does at this time of the year.)  Picture me with hair on end, the tips smoldering, eyes crossed, my mouth moving with faint cries of anguish.

and JOY
Snow's melting. Grackles are marching around the back porch, occasionally stabbing at Susquehanna's dogfood. Aconites are face up and snowdrops

Riding the rails with Pip Tattnall, no. 3

It's The Palace at 2:25 a.m., and I must go to sleep--just uploaded a post and then promptly got word from Finnish-Canadian artist Marja-Leena Rathje that her post on A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is up. So please go and see her piece of the launch interview--she asked an interesting question about the title!

Thank you, Marja-Leena. And now, since she is on the other side of continent

Gaps and generation

The launch posts for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (several up already) have made me reflect on what I've said above the book being in part a kind of "filling of gaps" in family stories--not literally, but in a kind of search for wholeness or completion, even if it is not accurate to a family history.

I remembered Tolkien's use of philology and how that worked in a similar manner for

Marly talks to Richard Dawkins

Faux-talk no. 2



   BATTER my heart, three,
person'd God; for you

   As yet but knocke,
breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

   That I may rise, and
stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend

   Your force to breake,
blowe, burn and make me new.

     --John
Donne*



My first talk of
this peculiar sort was with Seth Godin. I enjoyed it so much that I have
decided to seize Richard Dawkins for my next! (

Riding the rails with Pip Tattnall, no. 2

Another piece of the launch interview for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage can be found--it's going to be a bit like a scavenger hunt--at Mole's burrow. Dale Favier asked me an interesting question about the origin of the novel and the Depression, and I have responded with a basket of family eels, slippery bits of stories and mysteries (illegitimacy, runaways, Southern racial mixing)

The Desert is not a setting

Contemplating the death of Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius a.k.a. Gir and how he said that encountering the desert in Mexico cracked open his soul...


"...An inner desert, into which each one of us must one day venture. It is a void; an empty space for solitude and testing." --Frère Ivan



"But now, in its utmost desolation, I began at last to understand its attraction. It was the awful scale of the

Riding the rails with Pip Tattnall: no. 1

The first piece of my one-and-many interview for the March 30th book launch of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is up at Hannah Stephenson's grand blog, The Storialist. The interview will be strewn, like a dismantled Osiris, around the world, and to see and read all one has to travel and pick up the pieces. Why? Because it's a traveling book set in the Depression, and protagonist Pip

Very High Romance

You know, I just tumbled into a site where I read the most dreadful, laughable bit of a novel--all full of grammar mistakes and European counts and barons and crazy syntax and misspellings and lovely young girls and jewels and passionate flingings-about. Then I read a statement by the author, all about her joy in making stories and the stored-up treasure in her heart, and I was so, so touched