Marly Youmans's Blog, page 165

Yolanda Sharpe, "Urban Fragments" + news

Life is all 21st century busy-ness at the moment: an astonishing excess of homework and major projects from the middle school, sports, and many deadlines for me. I am ready for Thanksgiving vacation already. An occasional nap would be handy.Yesterday Yolanda Sharpe gave me a tour of her encaustics show, Urban Fragments, at Mullen Gallery at SUNY-Oneonta. I was surprised at what a large, generous

Souvenir: Phil and "Val/Orson"

My kind friend Philip Lee Williams, novelist and memoir writer and poet, is retiring from the little world of blogging. Now I snitch a souvenir before his blog trembles and wavers and vanishes into the aether. This is a post he wrote about Val/Orson, and I--naturally!--value his words. Tinged by friendship, they are generous and sweet. You can tell the end is a bit dated because I have not

flap copy, "The Throne of Psyche"

*****Pub date: April, 2011Here is that braggart thing, the flap copy of a book:In The Throne of Psyche, Marly Youmans sweeps back and forth between what is human and what is other, binding the two together or crossing the thresholds between them. A prize-winning writer of stories and novels, she pursues tales both otherworldly and earthy with passion and formal power in this eighth book, her

Thanks, Daphne Lee: Ingledove surfacing

A full-fledged review that comes along five years after first publication is always surprising: to get such a thing is encouraging.It also ought to be encouraging to readers: suggesting that there are books worth reading beyond the ones that publishers decide on for us. Is it still a mystery to many readers that publishers essentially decide what books we read by giving those books "a push,"

Hicks-Jenkins 60th-birthday retrospective

I've been working on a delicious project for Clive Hicks-Jenkins: pieces related to Clive's angels, annunciations, prophets, and saints, to be published in a volume honoring Clive's 60th birthday in 2011. The occasion will be not just his birthday but a major retrospective exhibition at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. I'm afraid that I have rioted through his pictures with much

Chocolate-covered grasshopper

Playwright Lynn Siefert has given me the most quirky assessment of my poetry and fiction that I have ever received: "I like your writing so much because it's a mix of delicacy and and darkness. Like a chocolate covered grasshopper. Once you get to the dark part it's too late because you've been seduced by the delectable part."Grasshopper courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/ and Thomas Pate of Florida.

Poems in Mezzo Cammin

In the flurry of summer events, I forgot to mention my latest Mezzo Cammin poems--remiss of me, since the magazine has been good to me. And I love being asked for work because most of the time I am entirely too lazy (the charitable make call it "too busy") to send out poems. It is something that I've always disliked doing, and one great thing about the internet is the abolition of business

Booklife: Writing and my daughter

"Fool," said my Muse to me, "Look in thy heart and write!" --Sir Philip SidneyA peep inside the heart:http://www.booklifenow.com/2010/08/re... are off because the astonishing Jeremy L. C. Jones does so much work for this site, I'd rather he get any love that comes along!

Zagajewski: Minimalism vs. drama

In "Self-Portrait, Not Without Doubts," you mention "those writers who sometimes bother you: some so modest, minimal, and underread, that you want to call out--hey, friends, courage, life is beautiful, the world is rich and full of history." Is this something you feel vis-à-vis other writers?Yes, though I won't give you any names. What I have in mind here is minimalism in literature. Unlike

Tickled

One of the student writers at Hollins won The Shirley Henn Award for Creative Writing (at least I think that's the one) at The Francelia Butler conference. And it was for a story we burnished a bit this summer, so that was pleasant for me. Her name: Tracy Roberts. The story: "Head-on." She lives on a mountain with her husband and a wandering goat, and she is charming and a good writer. And now