How to use this Page

I suppose, as with books, there can only be one single beginning to a blog post. The problem here is that I don't know which beginning to choose.

I could start with my introduction to Elizabeth Hand, through my friend Collen Mondoor—Read Illyria, Colleen whispered, and I did. I wrote of it here.

My appreciation for that book and its author fueled a friendship with Liz, so much so that once, too long ago, this Maine-besotted writer traveled all the way to Philly on book tour and spent some time with me. We walked the parking lot of a strip mall on a rainy day. Up and back. Up and back. The rain in our hair. It could have gone on all day.

Then Liz went back to her world and I to mine. I knew that she was working on a book that mattered deeply to her—a book that had her hero, Arthur Rimbaud, at its heart. I knew that she was studying the man, translating his poetry, finding a way to make this French poet of the late 19th century come alive (this young genius declared a genius by the genius Patti Smith) for teen readers today. I knew about the project, but mostly what Liz and I began to write of then were our lives off the pages—hers in her rural world, mine in suburbia. Lives. This is what we spoke about.

So here is another beginning. A week or so ago, a padded envelope appeared at my front door—a gift from the Viking editor Sharyn November. We'd been talking about books that matter. I was naming titles, she was naming titles, we were having the kind of conversation two lovers of books have; it was that simple. Here, in this envelope, were books that Sharyn loved. There, in the mix, was Elizabeth Hand, her Rimbaud book, Radiant Days.

Which I finished reading this morning—a smile on my face. For Liz has done it, found a way to tell this story about a renegade poet of the 1870s and a 1978 painter, also renegade, who has dropped out of Corcoran to find her way. She's armed herself with cans of spray paint.

Time melts for these two characters. They meet—and Liz makes it believable. Washington, DC, and Paris bend, and the scenes are impeccably drawn, believable. Uniting the two is a former rock star named Ted Kampfert, a homeless guitarist who says, among so much else, "Magic isn't something you do. It's something you make. And if you don't make something and leave it behind, it's not just that it's gone. You're gone."

This book, Liz Hand, is magic made.

Here is Merle, musing on the wonder of this otherworldly collision with Arthur Rimbaud:

I wasn't sure what had changed—if Arthur's presence had somehow altered the sidewalks and back alleys around us, the way his poem had shaken something loose inside of me, something I couldn't articulate and maybe couldn't even paint: not so much a different way of seeing the world as a different way of feeling it. Maybe because when I was with him, I didn't need to explain who I was; maybe because he seemed even more out of place in the streets of Georgetown than I was. With him, I felt the way I did when I gazed at The Temptation of Saint Anthony—as though the world held a secret that I was on the verge of discovering. 

Here is part of the world they inhabit, during their one glorious burning night:

Behind the Dumpster a narrow alley wound between an overgrown hedge and a brick wall, so encrusted with ivy it was like burrowing into a green tunnel. Moonlight seeped through the tangled branches overhead, and there was a pallid yellow glow from the upper windows of a nearby row house. After twenty feet or so the alley widened into a tiny courtyard surrounded by buildings in varying stages of decay. Cracked flagstones covered the ground, along with dead leaves and several plastic chairs that had blown over. Small tables were pushed against the rear of a warehouse, its windows boarded shut. A tattered CLOSED sign flapped from a door chained with a padlock.

Note: I might have also launched this blog post with the news that I had been holding, in my hands, another graffiti novel. I don't know how many of them there are, but Merle, Liz's contemporary character, has herself a mean tag (Radiant Days) and glorious command of color and meaning. I wished, as I read Liz's powerful graffiti passages, that my Ada (of Going Over) could time warp and meet Liz's Merle. That they could stand together and talk about art and about the people who are missing from their lives.

Because, in meeting Merle, I know that I am also meeting, anew, Liz Hand—a brilliant woman whose life has been seeped in art and Rimbaud and who makes unusual and therefore lasting books because she (and this is rare) can.

Add a Comment

Novelist Nnedi Okorafor has won the World Fantasy Award for her novel, Who Fears Death.

Author Jeff VanderMeer described the book: “[The novel] is a powerful combination of science fiction, fantasy, African folklore, and stark realism. It tells the story of Onyesonwu, a woman of extraordinary powers in a post-apocalyptic West Africa, a world of perils and mysteries, of lost technologies and brutal wars. Onyesonwu’s name means “Who fears death?”, and her birth is the result of rape used as a weapon in battle; this legacy affects the woman she becomes, and the novel portrays her education as a sorceress and her quest to bring order and peace to her life and world.”

The announcement was made at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego. We’ve included the other award winners below…

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Add a Comment

and that means I'll actually get to meet—live and in person—this writer with whom I've had such a wonderful, honest, intelligent virtual conversation since I first read Illyria last August.  My thanks to Colleen Mondor, who raved about Liz's immaculate sentences to begin with and opened Liz's world to mine.

Liz travels far and wide, both physically and in her own imagination, and she's coming to Philadelphia as a keynoter.  I'm thinking I'll take this colorful lady to Chanticleer, pictured above, if she'll let me.

How colorful is Liz Hand, you wonder? Well, consider this.  She's giving her talk for the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. Her topic? Norwegian Black Metal music. With brilliant friends like this, I defy anyone to call me boring or, say, stuffy.

(smiles)

Display Comments Add a Comment

I spent much of the weekend preparing for my long morning at The Baldwin School, where I will today be talking about, reading from, and building exercises on the shoulders of Wordsworth and Mary Oliver, Sei Shonagon, Rilke, Neruda, Sandra Cisneros, Marilyn Nelson, and Gerald Stern, among others.  I never conduct the same workshop twice, don't give the same talk over again, and while my husband will be the first to remind me of how terribly inefficient all that is, I know no other way.  No two students or group of students are the same.  It matters, I think, that we actively lean in their direction.

The students pictured above were girls I met during my spring trip to Wisconsin for the unforgettable Fox Cities Book Festival.  I was thinking about them earlier this morning, as I explored Figment.com, a new site designed to enable the young to "share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors."  How cool, might I ask you, is this?  I know dozens of young big-dreaming, risk-taking blogger/writers whose work should grace this site and whose insights could power it forward.  You know who you all are.... and you know that I love you.  Take a spin through Figment and let me know what you think.

And while you're at it, spend some time at Chasing Ray today, because Colleen Mondor has assembled a bang-up interview with one of my very favorite writers/people, Elizabeth Hand.  I wouldn't know Liz if it weren't for Colleen.  I wouldn't know a lot of things, were it not for Colleen.  But listen to Liz talk, for example, about the beautiful big rawness of teens, the "thrilling and often perilous" process of self-discovery for young artists.  I was cooing just this weekend about how happy the Johnny Depp-Patti Smith interview in Vanity Fair made me.  Substance! I declared, I danced.  Substance! I shout again today. 

Display Comments Add a Comment

Because Lilian Nattel is a very brilliant author and reader, I trust her, and when she sang the praises of Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze back in late June, I knew I'd be reading the book sooner than later.  And when the dear and deep and perpetually risk-taking Elizabeth Hand wrote (long before the National Book Award list had been unveiled) that I absolutely had to read Just Kids by Patti Smith (she'd reviewed it for the Washington Post), I said, All right, Liz.  I will.

Yesterday, released for the afternoon from client work, I headed to the Chester County Book & Music Company, which is another version of paradise on earth.  We're talking an indie book store here that feels a city block deep, and those who work there stack their favorite reads up and down end shelves.  I get lost there, and I don't mind one bit. 

This afternoon, I board a plane.  Smith's coming with me.  So is Foulds.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Elizabeth Hand was always a cut-above writer. One need only take a tour of her web site, where she posts journal entries from her 16th year, for proof.  What can you say about yourself when you are sixteen etc. years old and the world is either terribly hard or wonderfully simple on account of the world 'love'? she wrote then.  It was less like building a house than colonizing an island, this freakish, lovely, marvelous atoll that rose from the gray wasteland of St. Brendan's High School like some extravagant Atlantis we'd willed into being, she writes now, in Illyria.  All of our previous alliances and identities were tossed aside—jock, freak, egghead, cheerleader, anonymous.

Illyria introduces cousins, Maddy and Rogan, born on the same day and young teens when the story begins in 1970s Yonkers.  Left mostly to their own devices, indispensable to one another, predisposed to theatrics and magic, they know no bounds, this Maddy and Rogan.  They live life at its most urgent.  When they are cast in a high school production of "Twelfth Night," they are brilliant together and wild together, feral and dangerous and suddenly, in the eyes of their extended clan, in need of taming.  Their love affair is doomed and desperate.  Its vestiges will haunt Maddy for the rest of her life.

And, indeed, Maddy tells this story from the perspective of well on—from all those years later, when the intimate details are yet fresh and vivid, but the how-this-story-ends is well-known, too.  Many things will strike a reader about Illyria—its unapologetic intelligence, its unashamed incest, its nearly supernatural force—but perhaps it is the novel's point of view that struck me with greatest impact, the sense that Hand is writing out of the vulnerable, present need to make sense of a time and a place at once mystical and rooted in brand and street names.  Fog floats across the gorgeous cover and fog floats throughout the book, but never at the expense of a clenching specificity. It happened, but it couldn't have.  It was, but it isn't.  It's now because then is always now.  All of that is here.

One can always tell the difference between a story that beckoned an author—suggested itself, teased—and one that demanded.  Illyria made demands on Hand.  She answered them, resolutely.

Display Comments Add a Comment

The moment I saw the lovely cover for Elizabeth Hand's Illyria, I knew I had to ask her how it came about. And when I read this review, I knew I had to read it (it's high in the pile!).

Meanwhile, here's Elizabeth with the Cover Story:

"Put simply, I adore this cover. It may be my favorite, from anything I've ever written. It's very different than the artwork for the original UK edition, which had a very small print run and a lovely, Edward Gorey-esque black-and-white pen-and-ink drawing that showed Maddy and Rogan in the attic (pictured after the jump). This one is more romantic and dreamlike. I find it very easy to imagine myself in those boots and that cape...

Add a Comment