Marly Youmans's Blog, page 147




A Publishers Weekly Top Ten
SF, Fantasy, and Horror Pick for the Fall.
Pub date: September 6



GHOSTS

The ghost story has a great tradition that twines together the literary and the speculative, those often-battling or sneering-at-each-other genres.  No matter what sort of writer one is, the job of taking a hoary old device like the ghost and making it work the current



Feathering clouds over Glimmerglass.


Joyous calligraphy of the air


July 4th celebration at Lakefront Park


Tourists with balloons...
later on in the dark there were fire balloons.


The village band


Tourists with "Indian Hunter" bronze
by John Quincy Adams Ward


A patriotic jellyfish hovering over the lake
and reflected in its waters.


Newlywed

"Balanced Rock" courtesy of Steven Ritts of Tempe, AZ
and sxc.hu.

SHARP-EDGED & HARD

"To have an audience, you must care about a reader: that statistical non-entity who must purchase your book, read your poems, and be moved enough to remember or even memorize a line or two. So much contemporary poetry seems written for the void, for no one at all— like spam email, it is merely sent out by

Cover image by Sophie Gengembre Anderson, 1823 - 1903
 "Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending,
With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending,
Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things" --Charles Ede


Thanks to editor and poet Karen Kelsay Davies for asking for a new poem and some reprints for her e-zine, Victorian Violet. The journal has a lot of interesting-looking

I could post a mysterious picture and not explain it one bit.

I could muse about the poems of Bei Dao, as I am reading them and will review for Oyster Boy. I could tell you how he transformed moonlight into grains of wheat that were people.

I could bemoan Sunday's simultaneous uprising from tub and toilet that flowed into the one room in the house that has to be carpeted--and my life with

Meri Wells by the fireplace.



Clive Hicks-Jenkins with a Meri Wells friend.



The gallery by night...



Leaving Meri Wells
Welsh poppies by star- and porch-light.


And when I return to Ty Isaf,
a Meri Wells "bishop"
stands by my bed.


Meri Wells is everywhere at Ty Isaf.
Here's the guardian of the paddock...



...or else the guardian of the garden below.

The owner of a crafts gallery in North Carolina has prodded me to get moving on the Wales Album; she wants to see more pottery... So off we go to Wales once more. Be sure and click to make the images larger if you want to catch Jack in the garden or glimpse poppies and bluebells.



Meri Wells with me and cups and the feet of Peter Wakelin.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins behind my little camera.
The barn

Still laboring on yesterday's flood... Back tomorrow! Please hop about on older posts for today...

This is part of the underpainting for "Touched,"
the painting that adorns the hardcover jacket
and paperback cover of The Throne of Psyche.
If you look at the book image below, you'll see
the designers made an interesting change.

It's a lovely, cool Saturday evening with the birds starting up the twittering machine. I'm a bit sleepy, thanks to waking up to another poem in the night . . . So

I enjoy going to Marja-Leena's site and think you would too.

Yesterday artist Marja-Leena Rathje wrote me a letter and asked about the truth of a post from a website she visits—it's a useful site about books from Finland. The post argued various things: that women writers are judged and marketed by age and by looks; that the "old" and "ugly" have trouble finding publishers and agents; that