Dear Readers,
The design of Tatterdemalion is burgeoning like a ripe fruit, but as yet I can share no glimpses with you. Only know that the good people of Unbound are working together with me and Rima to create a thing of immense beauty. There has been talk of cloth binding, gold lettering, a beautiful set-in cover design, endpapers of great magic and enchantment... Oh my! Rima is hard at work on the cover and on hand-lettering for all of the chapter titles, to be ready by the end of June. It is a true gift to work with a team of book-lovers like the excellent folk of Unbound; to feel that the book is truly understood, and that we all have a simliar vision for how it will look and feel and where it will go in the world. Since I finished editing, there is little for me to do at the moment except dream up more and more ornate book-design ideas, and wait with great excitement to see the cover...
In the meantime, I have been—rather to my surprise—writing up a storm of poetry. It's been a long while since I wrote poetry in earnest, which may seem unlikely given the fact that much of my fiction has been (good-naturedly) accused of being poetry in disguise... Well, all I can say is that it feels fantastic. It feels like coming home, like sitting up awake, like hearing for a moment the meaning that lies inside the songs of birds. I blame a spontaneous obsession with W.S. Merwin, an apprenticeship to the mysticism of Rilke, an audiobook by David Whyte, and the voices of all the thrushes in the trees, singing in the end of May.
I've created a space called A Green Language in which to share these poems. It is a beautiful website that I've made to feel like my journals, and it features roughly one new poem a week, sometimes with an accompanying film reading of said poem, sometimes with sketches of plants and animals from my notebooks. If you'd like to have a look at the first poem and a short film I created for it, you can do so here. You will also find the subscription button!
A Green Language is a great way to read pieces of my finished writing on a regular basis, to keep you sated until the arrival of Tatterdemalion! :) I can't promise any specific content, as poems have lives entirely of their own, but know that you will find all sorts of magic and strange wonders in the poems of A Green Language, beggars and wanderers and fools as well as mariposa lilies, summer fogs, elk, redwood trees. And perhaps a glimpse of Lyoobov....
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