Marly Youmans's Blog, page 19

I also would like to learn the language of birds.
People in fairy tales sometimes have the luck of it.
(Illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass.)

I've never spoke a second language well, though I'm perfectly willing to give the thing a go when I only have a couple of pages of phrases mastered. So in Cambodian, I spoke a little Khmer / Cambodian, and in Thailand, some Thai. One

An interior illuminationby Clive Hicks-Jenkinsfor my long-poem and epic adventure,Thaliad (Phoenicia Publishing)Amazon reviews: paperbackHardcover only here

Why on earth do I sometimes fiddle around an answer a question on Quora when I could and probably should do a blog post? Who knows? Here's a Quora question I answered a moment ago, perhaps partly because I'm in a good mood and just wrote a

Not the right movie, but the image will do--1959, Castle's The Tingler with Vincent Price.

I've been sorting through boxes of papers, tossing much and often stopping to laugh at some child's drawing or my own notes on a past conversation or an old letter. Here's a note with Nate, my third child, age 5, dated 24 September, 2002. He's almost 21, so I guess that I can quit referring to him as

"The Prince of Egypt and the Sphinx" is up today at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, where you can read poems, share, like--and where you can also find some other poems by me: "I Met My True Love Walking," "Epistle to F. D.," "Icarus, Icarus, Paratrooper," and "Landscape with Icefall." Thank you to editor Christine Klocek-Lim.





















Christine Klocek-Lim shared Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY's 

Matt Haig
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Mar 29 More
Be nice if one day people realised writing fiction was as hard as other art forms. No celebrity says, hey, I'll write a piano quartet for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, or I'll join Cirque du Soleil. Always 'I'll write a novel'. *  **


***



* Tweet of the day.

** Little pleasures of the obscure mid-list writer.

*** “Only if we are

By Source, Fair use,
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

I've never tried screen-writing (probably poems, stories, novels, and some nonfiction are quite enough), but a movie often makes me think about how I would write its story differently, even when it is hung with glittering nominations and awards. For example, The Shape of Water was a stylish, often ravishing-looking piece

Goethe fans: Who translated Mephistopheles' words in Faust Part I Scene 7 (around line 2039?) as "the golden tree of life springs ever green?" Not Kline, Brooks, Taylor, Luke. Am thinking it might be the Douglas Langworthy or some other blank verse version...

From "19th-century farmhouse, Lexsy" by Brian Brown. This is grander than
my grandparents' house, but it is in Lexsy--my grandmother Kate once had
a fistfight with another woman in Lexsy, back when she lived there for a time.
Evidently Kate "Little Bear" was defending one of the children...
I am hoping Brian will not mind if I "borrow" his image, as he once
borrowed from one of my posts to

Nor'easters dumping feet of snow, multiple family ER visits, care for the laid-up, busyness to the Nth power: it has been a monster of a Lent so far. In lieu of a proper post, here's a snip from Glimmerglass, a story about the rebirth of a woman in mid-life, Cynthia Sorrel, who thinks of herself as a failed painter, and set in a version of that semi-mythical village, Cooperstown. Ghosts! Faux

Due to injury and ill health (and a college break!) in my family, I will be off the blog for a bit longer. Enjoy the wild weather as best you can! Visit me in the past via posts or in a book... I'll still be answering email and comments, though perhaps more slowly.
--Marly in the snow heaps