Literature and Poetry Reviews, Home of the Virtual Poetry Circle
I’m just going to post some images of books you should read to educate yourself about our country’s history.
I’m not going to do any thinking or speaking for you.
Read.
These have languished too long on my TBR list:
There are so many other books that you should read.
The Audiobook Publishers Association says, “26% of the US population has listened to an audiobook in the last 12 months.” And the American Association of Publishers adds, “Digital audiobook revenue rose 32.1% in 2018’s first quarter and audiobooks now earn publishers more than mass market paperbacks.”
Have you ever wondered what it looks like to be an audiobook narrator in action?
I know I have. Today’s guest is Thérèse Plummer and she’s sharing with us some inside videos of narrating books and Yelp reviews.
Let’s start with the Behind the Scenes look at audiobook narration:
Check out Thérèse Plummer as she narrates Yelp reviews:
About the Audiobook Narrator:
by Jody Christopherson
Thérèse Plummer is an actor and award-winning audiobook narrator working in New York City. She has recorded over 350 audio books for various publishers. She won the 2019 Audie Award for her work on the multicast, Sadie by Courtney Summers for Macmillan Audio, was nominated for the Mutlicast Any Man by Amber Tamblyn for Harper Audio and her solo narration for The Rogue Planets Shaken by Lee W. Brainard for Podium Publishing. The American Library Association (ALA) awarded her work on Sourdough by Robin Sloan as part of the 2018 Listen List: Outstanding Audiobook Narration for Adult Listeners.
Thérèse is the voice of Maya Hansen in the Marvel Graphic Motion Comic Ironman Extremis, Dr. Fennel in Pokemon and for various Yu-Gi-Oh characters. Television Guest Star Roles on The Good Wife, Law and Order SVU and the upcoming series Virgin River for Netflix. Visit her on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.
It now has it’s own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.
Leslie, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.
Here’s what we received:
The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner, narrated by Richard Armitage, for review in June.
This program includes a bonus conversation between the author and Kathleen A. Flynn, author of The Jane Austen Project.
Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people band together to attempt something remarkable.
One hundred fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England’s finest novelists. Now, it’s home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate. With the last bit of Austen’s legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen’s home and her legacy. These people – a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others – could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen. As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, some from the recent war, others from more distant tragedies, they rally together to create the Jane Austen Society.
A powerful and moving novel that explores the tragedies and triumphs of life, both large and small, and the universal humanity in us all, Natalie Jenner’s The Jane Austen Society is destined to resonate with listeners for years to come.
What did you receive?
Source: Audible purchase
Audiobook, 19+ hours
I am an Amazon Affiliate
The Outsider by Stephen King, narrated by Will Patton, is superbly narrated as always by Will Patton (he’s one of my go-to narrators for audiobooks). This king novel reads more like a crime novel in the first half after a young boy is discovered in the woods, mutilated and murdered. Terry Maitland, Flint City Little League coach and English teacher, is a pillar of the community, but he’s soon a suspect and arrested in front of the whole town. Detective Ralph Anderson, partially motivated by disgust because his son was once on Maitland’s team, now finds that some of the evidence may contradict, and a solid alibi causes serious doubts.
“Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out. We’re still helping each other.”
The second half of the novel is pure King, a build up of creepy into an underworld of darkness and strange beings that cannot be easily explained and are often ignored because they call too much of reality into question. Have you ever wondered what your doppelgänger would look like? Most of us have, but what if that doppelgänger was just evil….pure evil? You’d probably want to know before you’re arrested for their crimes. The outsider is more than just a man who looks like Maitland, and there are many dark secrets hiding in his flesh.
The Outsider by Stephen King, narrated by Will Patton, is a suspenseful horror novel, with a light horror feel for much of the novel. In the later three or four sections, the craziness ramps up and that’s when you know you’ve entered Stephen King’s world.
RATING: Quatrain
Source: Purchased
Paperback, 128 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate
The Haunted Library: The Ghost Backstage by Dori Hillestad Butler, illustrated by Aurore Damant, is a solid third book in this series in which Kaz is beginning to take lessons from Beckett about different ghost skills, including how to pick up solid objects. He’s not doing very well with his lessons, but Beckett insists that he learn. When Claire provides Kaz with an opportunity to escape his grueling lessons, he jumps at the chance.
One of Claire’s classmates saw a ghost during play rehearsals for Jack and the Beanstalk. Kaz isn’t thrilled with all of the noise at Claire’s elementary school or the rush of kids everywhere, but he soon finds a way to navigate without having solids pass through him and making him feel all weird. Kaz easily eavesdrops on conversations and reports back to Claire, but he seems to forget that her classmates will find it odd that she’s talking to herself all the time.
My daughter loves guessing who the ghost might be in each of these books, whether it’s someone in Kaz’s lost family or a classmate. But one thing is for sure, Kaz is growing stronger as a ghost every book, and we can’t wait to see what new ghostly skills he picks up along the way.
The Haunted Library: The Ghost Backstage by Dori Hillestad Butler, illustrated by Aurore Damant, is a solid mystery with a fun cast of characters. As this is set in the school for the most part, we rarely seek Beckett and Kosmo, the ghost dog. We missed them, but it was good to see Kaz get inspired to take action to help a kid being made fun of by others. We’ll definitely be reading more of these.
RATING: Quatrain
Today’s guest is Vali Benson, author of Blood and Silver, who is hear to talk about her creative writing process as a debut novelist and how she got started on her book. As always, let’s take a look at what the book is about.
Book Synopsis:
What is a twelve year old girl to do when she finds herself in the silver boom town of Tombstone, Arizona, in 1880, and her only home is a brothel and her only parent is a drug-addicted mother? If she is Carissa Beaumont, she outsmarts the evil madam and figures a way out.After tricking the madam, Miss Lucille, into summoning a doctor for her mother, Lisette, she discovers that Miss Lucille has been drugging her. She and the kind doctor make a plan to try to save Lisette by dosing her down on the drug.
Doctor Henderson tells Carissa that the only source for the drug is a Chinese immigrant named China Mary, who lives in Hoptown, at the other end of Tombstone. Carissa has no choice but to go to the powerful woman for help. Many say that China Mary is the one who really controls Tombstone.
China Mary admires Carissa’s brave spirit, and uses her influence to get her a job at the new Grand Hotel, which will free Carissa from her many duties at Miss Lucille’s. She will work along with Mary’s twelve year old niece, Mai-Lin. The two girls become fast friends.
Then, disaster strikes, and the two girls must work together to stay alive.
With a host of colorful characters and meticulous attention to period detail, Blood and Silver is a story of the best and worst of human nature, the passion for survival and the beauty of true friendship.
Period dramas are always interesting, and this one has a lot of dark parts, but also a friendship that I hope survives. Without further ado, please welcome Vali Benson:
Hello! My name is Vali Benson and I just published my first novel. It has been a work in progress for over fifty years. Ever since I can remember, I have had a book in my hand. As a lifelong reader, I often thought, “I could do better than that”. So I decided to do something about it. It still feels funny to say that I am a published author. People have asked me to explain the writing process but I can’t. I don’t think there is a right way or wrong way to write a book. But I do know what works for me.
The first step is to come up with an idea. It must be something that interests you, or that you feel strongly about. No point in picking a subject that you know nothing about. You would have to do far too much research and it still would not sound like you know your subject.
Once when I had severe writers block, a great teacher told me, “Write about what’s in your own backyard.” I took her advice and turned in an award winning essay. That was the inspiration in writing my book; a young adult historical fiction novel called Blood and Silver. The story takes place in Tombstone, Arizona. For thirty years, I have lived in Tucson, Arizona. Tombstone is only forty five minutes down the road, practically in my backyard.
I have been to Tombstone countless times. People are fascinated with Tombstone (not so much after they visit!). Tombstone is not like other “Wild West” tourist towns, like Deadwood or Dodge City. Tombstone has only two blocks of “downtown”. People walk on the original boardwalk (with some repairs) along the main thoroughfare, Allen Street, which was, until
recently, a dirt road.
The population of Tombstone today sits at about thirteen hundred. On the weekends, many of the residents dress up in western garb – as cowboys, sheriffs, frontier gamblers, proper matrons and saloon girls. At first glance, it seems as though this may be a retirement community designated for extras of John Ford films.
However, Tombstone does have one enduring claim to fame – the shoot out at the O.K. Corral. It is called “the most famous thirty seconds in the history of the American west”. The legendary incident is a gunfight that occurred in 1881. The shoot out involved Doc Holiday, Wyatt Earp and two Earp brothers against a gang of outlaws called the Cowboys. Three men
were killed, all of them Cowboys. The Earps and Doc Holiday were already famous in the old west. The gunfight made them infamous.
The real reason people remember Tombstone is because of its enduring place in pop culture due to the twenty or so movies made about the fight. People show up from far and wide and pay a $10 admission fee to look at a dusty, dirty lot behind a run-down barn. At the actual site, people look at mannequins standing where their real life versions stood during that fateful afternoon 139 years ago.
Once I knew the reality of Tombstone today, I wondered how it could have become so famous. I knew about the silver mines, of course, but I had no idea how massive the output was. The profits were mind-boggling. Millionaires were made overnight. The silver created civilization where there was none. At the end of 1877, one hundred inhabitants had found their way to the mines of Tombstone. In 1884, it was a bustling city of fourteen thousand residents. The term “boomtown” was never so appropriate.
Tombstone was the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco in 1884, with over 150 businesses, including 100 saloons, and a thriving red light district. Apparently this arid little tourist trap, only forty five miles from my hometown, was more important than I thought! This information began to spin my inquisitive wheels. I began to wonder what it would have been like to live in this obscure place in 1880. The first step was complete; I had a premise that sparked my interest. Now, it was time for the part of the writing process that gives life to the story, research.
It is all about the research. One needs to look in unusual places, not just the top three Google hits. I love sourcing museums, libraries, newspaper archives, and even historical homes. Don’t rely on your computer only. Everyone can get that information. Not only is it not original, it is not interesting. One tip that I would like to emphasize to a burgeoning writer of historical fiction is to seek out the primary sources whenever possible. If you can work from the original source, it falls on you to interpret the story. This allows you to not have to depend on someone else’s version of the truth.
As a writer of historical fiction, historical accuracy is the most important component of the piece to me. It is even more pivotal than the narrative. I cannot tell you how many times I have quit reading a book that claims to be factual because the information and events are incorrect. It really annoys me! It is also important to realize that research is never ending because you can’t ever learn everything there is to know. At some point, you just have to make up your mind that you have enough to craft the story you want to write. Then start writing! I begin writing using my research as a reference and don’t worry if I have a fully formed concept. I believe in the Jodi Picoult approach, “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page”.
Many writers believe in outlines as a method of organizing and categorizing their research. Outlines don’t work for me. I tend to be too specific. I end up writing the whole story in my outline. What works best for me is to simply write. Just start, and see where it takes you. I flesh out the characters first and I let them take me where they want to go. I often go back and change them, but that’s the beauty of writing. You can do whatever you want with your people, just be sure you wind it up so that it makes sense.
This is why research is so important, because if I can understand the times in which my characters live, I will shape their circumstances and attitudes into the narrative.
As far as my writing habits are concerned, I don’t have many. I just do it. I know that many professional writers say the best method is to treat writing like a regular job with set start and stop times. I’ve tried this and it never feels right. For one thing, when I get on a creative roll, it is nearly impossible for me to stop. Conversely, I cannot force an idea. When I don’t feel like it’s happening, I walk away. I commit a lot of time thinking about my characters. When
inspiration strikes, I will sit down with my glass of sweet iced tea and see how my characters handle the new twist. I know that strong coffee is the traditional nectar of the working writer, but I need my sweet tea. The sweeter the better I say!
When is your story finished? It is finished when you think it is. Before you begin, you will know where you will end up. If you don’t, don’t start. You need to have an idea where you are going. Trust your characters to get you there.
With Blood and Silver, I put my characters through a lot and felt I told the story that I wanted to tell. After all, I need them to rest up for the sequel.
About the Author:
Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.
It now has it’s own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.
Leslie, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.
Here’s what we received:
Day of the Border Guards by Katherine E. Young, which I purchased.
Finalist: 2014 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Day of the Border Guards, the debut collection from Katherine E. Young, is set entirely in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Russian writers Pushkin, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva, and many others wander through these poems, making tea, fighting with their relatives, cursing faithless lovers. Bulgakov’s heroine Margarita describes meeting the Master; Lermontov’s grandmother worries that the young poet is wasting his life. Lady Macbeth is alive and well and living in post-Soviet Georgia. Enemies stalk the margins: hostile warlords, informants, the secret police. A man falls through the ice into a ruptured hot-water pipe, nuclear reactors melt down, an airplane lands on Red Square. Perestroika arrives and departs, like other fashions. A marriage falters. The phone rings in the middle of the night in a Siberian hotel. The corpse of a gypsy king boards a plane for Moscow.
Young, who also translates Russian poetry and prose, has lived and worked in Russia and the Soviet Union off and on since 1981: not surprisingly, then, these poems—originally published in The Carolina Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among others—willfully skip across borders of language, culture, and literary tradition, exploring Russian and North American poetic traditions and celebrating both.
In Search of Warm Breathing Things by Katherine Gekker, which I purchased.
“Is anything common? “ Katherine Gekker asks in her debut collection, In Search of Warm Breathing Things. The answer, in these richly detailed poems, is no. Gekker is a keen observer, able to “unlock the beauty hidden” in the ordinary. An iridescent grackle becomes a symbol of hope, “collarbones shimmer like wings.” Weaving images of the natural world with glimpses of a struggling marriage, Gekker portrays life in all its emotional complexity. “Two bees are fighting or courting — I can’t tell which,” she writes in “…to Cast a Shadow Again.” Yet there are moments of joy, the promise of transformation. “My shift billows, diaphanous…. I can seduce anyone tonight beneath fronds slicing like blades.”
— Ellen Bass
In these pages, Katherine Gekker tackles the emotional truths with “passion, a rutting need to run” line by line, poem by poem. With formal dexterity, an eye for language, and a rueful shake of the head at the human capacity for hope in the face of heartache, the poems of In Search of Warm Breathing Things mark a promising debut.
— Gerry LaFemina, author of The Story of Ash
Katherine Gekker has such a deft and musical touch with language that the most profound and aching moments in this book may catch you by surprise. Then you realize you are in the hands of a master of balance. No matter how dark the material here, the author’s wise and lyrical voice is a kind of assurance, a precious reminder that the beauty all around us is worth celebrating, even as it falls away.
— Rose Solari, author of The Last Girl and A Secret Woman
Beautiful & Full of Monsters by Courtney LeBlanc, which I purchased.
Love isn’t always pretty, yet most of us choose to remain constant in its pursuit. These poems unwrap the mythos of romance with the clairvoyance of a writer who knows the best and worst of relationships inside and out. LeBlanc dares to honestly show us how even when the best of intentions fail, we can always find beauty if we stay true to the monsters in ourselves.
The Sting of It by AJ Odasso, which I purchased.
Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. THE STING OF IT is cradled in classical form and bubbles with luscious language from a bygone era. Fans of Spenser and Donne will find comfort here. But this formal order only just restrains the chaos from Odasso’s own body and past. Their explosive and candid revelations make us aware of our beautiful, mortal grit. Odasso’s ferocious imagery within measured verse reminds us that life is mysterious, painful, and fantastic.
What did you receive?
Source: Purchased
Paperback, 114 pgs.
I am an Amazon Affiliate
Good Bones by Maggie Smith, called “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International, is a gorgeous collection of poems about the transformations that happens in motherhood and how despite the innate need to protect our children, there is no way that mothers can protect children from everything bad in the world. The collection opens with “Weep Up,” in which a young child is crying for the world to awaken — even the birds. This is the reader’s awakening to the life of a mother — connection, a weariness, a protectiveness. In “Sky,” the narrator tries to answer a child’s curiosity about the blueness and expanse of the sky, and in so doing, the narrator envelops us and the child in a comforting embrace: “Think of sky not as blue, not as over,/but as the invisible surround, a soft suit/you wear close to the skin.”
A hawk often glides through the poems, watching the child, guiding the child, and looking out for the child and others as it walks and moves through life. One of my favorite lines is from “The Hawk,” “her notes,//rising easily to him the way an echo/homes to the voice that calls it.//” Smith is a master at describing the indescribable. “Rough Air,” for example, is like “a cat’s tongue/as if the air itself were textured,/as if we could feel its sandpaper/licking our skin.”
One of the most widely shared poem in this collection is “Good Bones”:
Good Bones Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
Imagine how many times as parents we try to tell our children to be nice to others, to give way to others, to see the beauty in the pollution around us, to see the happiness in the darkness, and how to avoid the reality they can see with their own eyes. Are we all realtors, trying to sell them a dump to live in and provide them with false hope that they can change it? This collection is all of the emotions of parenting rolled up into one — the angst, the fear, the worry, the sadness at this is the world they are given, and our desperation to protect them from it.
From At Your Age I Wore a Darkness several sizes too big. It hung on me like a mother's dress. Even now, as we speak, I am stitching a darkness you'll need to unravel, unraveling another you'll need to restitch. What can I give you that you can keep? Once you asked, Does the sky stop? It doesn't stop, it just stops being one thing and starts being another.
Good Bones by Maggie Smith reminds us that while we are that protective hawk watching our children and protecting them from harm, we also can only watch them from afar as they learn to navigate the world on their own. Inevitably, they will fall … they will skin their knees, but we can provide them with the “good bones” they need to protect themselves and journey through the darkness they will eventually find in their lives.
RATING: Cinquain
About the Poet:
Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005). Smith is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, POETRY, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.” Her new book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, a collection of essays and quotes, is forthcoming in October 2020 from One Signal/Simon & Schuster.
Thank you to everyone who entered the Gaithersburg Book Festival High School Poetry Contest!
There were some fantastic poems. Thank you to Shout Mouse and our first round readers. Thanks to Elizabeth Lund, our final judge and her director/producer who helped us put together an official announcement for our first, second, and third place winners, as well as our Fan Favorite.
Congratulations to all of the winners and this year’s fan favorite.
As many of you know, I had been working on the poetry contest for the Gaithersburg Book Festival, which was scheduled for May 16. Sadly, COVID-19 changed all that and many of the spectacular events and discussions leading up to it, as well as the festival, had to be cancelled.
The Festival team, like many others, worked together to create a virtual program for our Festival attendees online. While the program has us socially distant in our homes and watching online, many of the great authors we wanted to see are still talking to us, sharing their books, and so much more.
Please do click on the banner and check out the programming. Or head on over to the Gaithersburg Book Festival YouTube Channel.
Here’s a run down of the program during the weekend, and special stuff happens every weekend:
Featured Programming Over Four Consecutive Weeks, Saturday, May 16 – Sunday, June 14.
This weekend’s events are not to be missed:
TGIF LIVE! at 5:30 pm with Louis Bayard – “Courting Mr. Lincoln.” Bayard writes about the brilliant, melancholic future president and the two people who knew him best: his confidant, Joshua Speed, and the spirited young debutante Mary Todd. In conversation with author Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
Saturday Night Premiere at 7 pm with Jonathan Karl – “Front Row at the Trump Show.” As the Chief White House Correspondent and Chief Washington Correspondent for ABC News and the President of the White House Correspondents Association (2019-2020), Jonathan Karl delivers essential new reporting and surprising insights. He’s known and covered Donald Trump longer than any other White House reporter. In conversation with author and journalist Susan Page.
Sunday Morning Kids at 11 am, LIVE with Adam Gidwitz – “Unicorn Rescue Society #5: The Madre de Aguas of Cuba.” In Cuba, it is believed that a mysterious water serpent–the Madre de aguas–is responsible for providing and protecting the fresh water of the island. But the serpent is missing, and a drought has gripped the island. Uchenna, Elliot, and Professor Fauna fly to Cuba and endeavor to rescue the Madre de aguas.
POETRY ALREADY AVAILABLE: (Bonus Author Presentations)
I hope that you’ll check out the great content. We know this isn’t the same as bringing the community to one place for an entire day of literature and connection, but in these times, this is how we continue to share.
Book Synopsis: