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"moonstruck" ©the enchanted easel 2014

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It’s been a while since I updated! Time to do so, and I’ll begin with a Halloween piece I worked on recently. The main piece and closeups are below. I can always add and tweak, but there is a time to call an illustration “Done!” Happy Halloween, everyone!

 

 

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©the enchanted easel 2014

"moonstruck" ©the enchanted easel 2014

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©the enchanted easel 2014

©the enchanted easel 2014

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I have to say I love patterns, so when asked to do a halloween illustration, all I could think about  was  the scenario and patterns. So here is my offering, the ghosts are friendly and handing out treats to the little treat or treaters.
With patterns... Read the rest of this post

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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lian Law on Marcelo Figueras’s Kamchatka that came out from Black Cat/Grove Press back last year.

Lian Law was an intern and in my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class last semester, which is when she wrote this review. (And yes, we are that far behind in running all of these.)

Marcelo was actually in Rochester for an event last spring in connection with PEN World Voices. You can watch the full event below, or skip forward to see the reading and interview with Marcelo:

And here’s the opening of Lian’s review:

Kamchatka: a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East. However, to the ten-year-old narrator in Marcelo Figueras’s novel Kamchatka, it represents much more. It is a territory to be conquered in his favorite game of Risk, it is “a paradox, a kingdom of extremes, a contradiction in terms,” and it is the last thing his father ever says to him.

Kamchatka is Marcelo Figueras’s English novel debut, translated by Frank Wynne. A novelist and screenwriter, Figueras has published several other books including El espía del tiempo, La batalla del calentamiento, and Aquarium. He was born in Argentina in 1962 and similar to the narrator of Kamchatka, he was a young child at the start of the Argentina’s Dirty War in 1976.

Kamchatka chronicles the life of a young boy during this time of political instability and its suffocating climate of fear and violence. When he, his brother, and his parents, are suddenly forced to flee to a safe house, they must assume new identities. The boy renames himself “Harry,” after his hero and famous escape artist Harry Houdini while his five-year-old brother rechristens himself “Simón,” after Simon Templar in the TV show The Saint (although Harry continues to refer to him by his nickname, the “Midget.” Despite all the disruptions, fear and sudden disappearances of friends and family members, Figueras’s main goal is not to write another somber novel about the Dirty War.

Click here to read the entire review.

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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Carley Parsons on Niccolo Ammaniti’s Me and You, which is translated from the Italian by Kylee Doust and available from Black Cat.

Carley Parsons was one of my interns last semester, and has previously interned at Syracuse University Press and Random House. She’s graduating this spring and hoping to find a job in publishing. (HINT.)

Black Cat has published three of Ammaniti’s novels, including I’ll Steal You Away, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Here’s the opening of Carley’s review:

Outcast for his seemingly baseless anger issues, fourteen-year-old Lorenzo Cumi lies to his worried mother about being invited on a ski trip with the ‘in-crowd’ in order to ease her concerns about him. After seeing how happy and relieved it makes her, Lorenzo can’t bring himself to tell her the truth—“I retreated in defeat, feeling like I had committed a murder.” Beginning with a twenty-four-year old Lorenzo unfolding a letter from his half-sister Olivia in a coffee-shop, the rest of the novella, gives a flashback account of how, ten years earlier, he took the opportunity provided by the lie to hide out in a neglected cellar attached to his family’s apartment building, where he is temporarily freed from the paranoid judgments of the adult world.

The teen-angst, adolescent narrative is not unchartered territory for Italian author Niccolò Ammaniti, whose past novels include I’m Not Scared, a coming-of-age and suspense hybrid narrative, translated into thirty-five languages, and As God Commands, which received Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega. Born in Rome in 1966 to a professor of developmental psychopathology, Ammaniti is often praised for his psychological lucidity and is known for exploring relationships between generation-gapped characters.

Click here to read the full review.

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Two nights ago, just after I'd slipped the steaks onto their plates, a gold-dipped wine glass tumbled from a top cabinet shelf, just like that.  I hadn't touched it.

The glass, the gold, scattered to all ends of the kitchen and out into the hall.  I spent a long time collecting the pieces, and then yesterday, illuminated by the spot of sun that wedges through the front door, I discovered that the shards had multiplied overnight; they were still there, still bristling with danger.

I was thinking of that shattered glass early this morning as I finished reading Shards, the debut novel by Ismet Prcic.  I bought this book because I know Lauren Wein, its editor.  I bought it because others have expressed their astonishment.  I bought it because it has the word "propulsive" in the jacket copy.  I like that word.  It doesn't belong to me or my work, it may not ever, but it absolutely belongs to Prcic and Shards.

My word, where to begin?  First, as I noted here in a previous post, you're not going to find many sentences in any book, anywhere, like the sentences you find here.  One after the other after the other.  Prcic makes use of preposterous and somehow dead-on analogies and allusions, profanities and profundities.  He celebrates the hieroglyphs of punctuational tics, smears words, elevates typefaces, deploys footnotes, diary entries, memoirisms, blasphemy, theater, treachery, vulgarisms, and you know what?  It works.  It's not cute.  It's not invention for invention's sake.  It's not ponderous:  Prcic needs every thing that language surrenders to tell his heartbreaking, rude, surprisingly compassionate, and still violent story about a Bosnian refuge who is trying to make sense of his new life in southern California.  What did Prcic (for indeed, that is the character's name) leave behind?  Who did he leave behind?  At what cost, his own survival?

I could write a mile-long review and fail at explaining this book.  Frankly, I think any reviewer would feel the same way, or should.  There's an easy explanation for this lack of explanation:  this book cannot be explained.  It is to be experienced.  Sentence by sentence, scene by scene.  I quoted a favorite early passage in that blog post of the other day.  Here I'll quote another:

Movies don't do it justice—that's all I'm going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town, in between three of the busiest cafes and a little bit to the right of the popcorn vendor in the midst of hundreds of citizens who are pretending that everything is okay, that the war is winding down.  But I didn't know that yet.

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Because I can't find the right photograph, because maybe this is the right photograph—these birds leaving but also going toward.  Because "time," Marcelo Figueras writes in his masterful Kamchatka, "is weird."  Because time bends, and when we are reading novels like this one—so rich with knowing, and yet so vulnerable—time doesn't exist at all.

The year is 1976, the place is Buenos Aires, and there is a family on the run from the military now in power.  A ten-year-old boy is telling this story, but not really—it is the ten-year-old remembered by a later self looking back, by a man who writes, early in these pages:

Every day, life gives us an intimation of this.  We sense that, inside us, every 'we' we once were (and will be?) coexists:  the innocent self-absorbed child, the sensual young man generous to a fault, the adult, feet planted firmly on the ground yet still clinging to his illusions, and finally we are the old man who knows that gold is just another metal; as his eyesight fails he has acquired vision

So that we meet the family as the boy recalls his family—the sensationally imperfect and wholly loving mother who abruptly pulls her children from school; the father who joins them at a safe house outside the city; the brother Midget; the comrade Lucas; the surviving grandparents.  It's just a family and they're just living—trying to keep the toads from committing suicide in the pool, playing killer games of Risk at night, mixing up their chocolate milk, watching nostalgic movies, and staying, always, one step ahead of those who hope to disappear them.  You know how this story ends within the very first line of the book:  "The last thing papa said to me, the last word from his lips, was 'Kamchatka.'"  But Figueras writes with such excellent authority that we are soon hoping against hope (as a ten year old boy hopes against hope) that fate will spare this family, that Houdini magic will keep them safe.

How can I share, in this small space, the brilliant texture of this book—the biology, history, and language lessons that Figueras weaves in through devastatingly beautiful domestic scenes, the big riffs on life, the insistence on love?  I felt as if I were watching some of my favorite movies of all time, "My Father's Glory" and "My Mother's Castle."  I wanted to stop time, but I can't stop time, and even so, it took me several days to read to the end.

Kamchatka was first published in 2003; its author is both a screenwriter and a novelist, and indeed this book appeared on the silver screen some nine years ago.  Black Cat is bringing the book out sometime this spring for American audiences.


You're going to thank them for that.

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I was standing right here, on the edge of an old cemetery, watching the sun light up the earth, when Laura Geringer's final notes on YOU ARE MY ONLY buzzed in on my phone.  I read them through.  I looked back up.  The sun had rearranged itself, and yet the day was bright. 

I began this book three years ago, inspired by the legends of urban explorers and by the haunting stories I had heard about a Philadelphia asylum known as Byberry.  I was encouraged to keep writing by the magnificent Lauren Wein, of Black Cat/Grove, and by my sustaining agent, Amy Rennert.  I was helped to think harder by memorable conversations with Marjorie Braman of Holt.  And after Laura Geringer (Egmont USA) read the book, I reimagined characters into their younger selves and watched to see what might happen.

What happened, in the end, was light.

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The above is my image for the Illustration For Kids fall '10 postcard. Like Holli, I ended up doing a witch. This was created in Painter 11 using the digital watercolors.

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When witches familiars, get too familiar with the equipment.

The Illustration Friday word for the week is spooky.

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I confess to being a bit of a self-control freak ... which probably explains my need to focus on detail in most of my drawings. But every once in a while even I get tired of holding it all in, and I want to just let it all out and scribble away manically. Which is exactly what I ended up doing here. Found this photo that I had taken of a scrawny black cat posing on a wall just outside the village and it was perfect. The first few layers are just wild, pretty directionless lines of graphite (I used a very soft pencil which I don't normally do either) and, once I'd satisfied the urge to play loose, I finally refined the whole thing on the final two layers.

It's definitely not up there on my list of best drawings and sketches but as far as therapy goes, it turned out perfectly. Cheers.

Black Cat cards & matching gifts at Floating Lemons at Zazzle

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Just doing a little catching up. I figure going back as far as three themes should cover me.

This was based on a great caption I happened to read on the back of an ALF boxed-set. Under "superstitions" it read, "A black cat with a high-powered rifle crosses my path."
Hope y'all digs! Comments welcome.

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If you have an American Express card, please consider voting for DonorsChoose.org through The Members Project. DonorsChoose.org is an organization where educators get money for trips, supplies, classes, etc. for their classrooms.

To learn more about this organization and to find out how you can help DonorsChoose win $5,000,000 to give to classrooms throughout the USA Please Click HERE.

Charles Best, educational visionary, visits Ms. Shubitz’ class

A few months ago, The Extended Day Girls, and their teachers Stacey Shubitz and Christina Rodriguez, were guests on Book Bites for Kids. They talked about their new book Deal With It. Ms. Shubitz obtained money from donorschoose.org so the girls could publish their book.

Charles Best donorschoose.org Extended Day Girls Stacey ShubitzCharles Best donorschoose.org Extended Day Girls Stacey ShubitzCharles Best, donorschoose.org, Extended Day Girls, Stacey Shubitz

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