Miscellanea: July

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What I really appreciate about a blog is the opportunity to play — by which I mean, change things around if one likes, experiment, be of this mind for a while, or that look, and when it seems necessary, refresh it.

So, a year after beginning an author blog in an attempt to separate out my identity as an author from my other ramblings, I’ve decided to bring myself into just one web place again — here.  If you’re interested, I offer an explanation in my last post there, but the short version is, it began to feel too complicated to be divided. (I don’t know what one does with abandoned sites, however; do I let the content there grow old and faded in the passing online weather, or do I remove it from public view?) Continue reading →

How do you flex your writing muscles?

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Great news that writer Mavis Gallant’s private journals will be edited and published, though not so great that we may have to wait until 2014 to read them! A teaser set of excerpts from 1952 appears in the July 9 issue of The New Yorker, where Gallant also published more than 100 stories over her lifetime. I’ve not yet seen the issue (the copy someone bought at my request from a bookstore across town yesterday turned out to be the July 2 issue!), but teaser bits from that teaser set have appeared here and there on Facebook statuses and in blog posts (such as this lovely one by Janice Gray over at Richard Gilbert’s blog Narrative), all enough to make it clear how full of personality, wonderful writing, and compelling detail the published journals will be. A 1959 treasure quoted by editor Steven Barclay is an example. Continue reading →

Cover love

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Authors don’t always love the covers their books are put behind, for ultimately the cover is the publisher’s decision. But it’s easy for me to say I like the one given This Hidden Thing. Thanks to designer Karen Allen at CMU Press for that, but huge thanks as well to Agatha Doerksen, who granted permission to use a detail from her painting, “Seasoned Offerings” (1998).

I would like you to see the entire painting! And here it is, below, sans its plain wood frame, and here too, something about the painting via the artist’s statement about work she was doing in that period: Continue reading →