The Wide Awake Loons is now an Audio Book

The Wide Awake Loons is now an audio book at Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

Promo codes are available for the free book at Audible. To obtain one, go to the Wide Awake Loons Facebook page, please like it, and press the Send Message button. There you can ask for the promo code.   

Here is a handy link that takes you to the book and a sample of it at Audible.

 

I had to wonder why I chose The Wide Awake Loons as my first audio book. It was a favorite book to write but it did have an unusual spectrum of voices. At ACX where books can be turned into audiobooks, I was surprised to receive more auditions the first week than expected. It was hard to choose between them.

I felt very fortunate to have Aven Shore as narrator since she has more than sixty audio books to her credit. She lives in Canada where loons can be as familiar as they are in Maine and Minnesota. At her blog  , she gives useful information about the narration process. While working on The Wide Awake Loons, she wrote:

“It’s a delightful dual POV story, of a little girl at her parents’ cottage, trying to get her canoe permissions extended, and the loon couple raising their loonlings on the lake in the wildlife community. Sometimes, their stories intersect! Dramatic, sensitive, well-written, FUNNY, and realistic. This author knows her loons.

I’m having a ball voicing all the characters - the dramatis persona includes the regal and superior loons, Chip Chap the chipmunk, Spotted Croak the mink toad, the gulls, the pine siskins, and more.”

An audio book seems like quite a challenge for performance stamina. As a flute player, I know the difference between playing Bach solo and playing flute parts in an ensemble. Take a deep breath because there are few breaks. I am impressed at the ability it requires to change voice between different characters and the narrator's. It seems similar to a ventriloquist's talent. Anyway, I would not attempt narration of my own books.

I began to read after listening to Peter Rabbit repeatedly and eventually pointing at the words as they were said. Teachers and students read aloud as listeners follow text. But when it comes to longer stories, chapter books, and novels, children have to leap into reading all alone. At school, teachers might read aloud a longer book but it has to please the crowd. An audio book can be a personal choice and it can also be a reading method where progress does not feel intimidating.

When I think of the advent of the children's novel, I visualize a hearth and family members sitting around it, the way they sat around a television later on, one of them reading aloud. This would account for the difficulty of the 19th century juvenile novel and the fine plotting that made it family entertainment. If a child didn't understand a word, they could ask. Discussion probably aided comprehension. With an audio book, a child can follow an e-book or paperback, read along or dip in and out. To me, this all provides an enjoyable learning experience, and one with options. Or there is just the enhancement of the dramatic voice enlivening the story.

3 literary journals: Ginosko, Animal, and The Courtship of Winds

An illuminating experience of being published in a literary journal is how I become more familiar with that journal and its contributors. A plethora of lit mags, now on the internet, present quite a dilemma if a person chooses to read new writers. With more publication, I've enjoyed a wider range of journals. These are my recent publications and reads.

Ginosko is a semi-annual litzine based in California since 2002. I have six poems in their Summer 2018 issue, #21. This is a big issue, about 250 pages that can be viewed online . A definition for this Greek word ginosko, "The recognition of truth from experience", tells my absorption in reading.

A short story about a lawyer and his wife, “Two Secrets” by Norbert Kovacs, really hit the spot this last month. I also savored "On a Sweet River" by Elizabeth Buechner Morris, about a young Guatemalan, and "Assembly Heart” by Laura Valeri where an inner reality is told to the paranormal. Doug Mathewson's short shorts expressed the vitality of today's West.

James Grabill's poetry uses scientific imagery in a flowing style that gives sense to his themes. The strong thoughts in Jonathan Jones' poetry are rendered with interesting sound patterns.

There is so much more in this issue to peruse for readers of varied tastes.

Animal:A Beast of a Literary Magazine has, since 2012, been publishing monthly creative work about human encounters with animals, “on the divide between wild and domestic.” My short story “The Recluse and the Raccon” was published last May.

The reading, I found, was at that edge, providing unusual insights into our interface with the natural world, and unique from the personal perspective. I was drawn to a short story about octopuses by Brigitte McCray and how they affected a musician's decisions while she lived in Greece. There are stunning and disturbing images of box turtles in traffic - non-fiction by Allan Stein - and cougars - fiction by Heather Durham. Judith Roney maintains surreality in her poem, “Bird in a Brick House.”

Upcoming for me is The Courtship of Winds publishing two poems. William V. Ray, the editor, has re-launched this bi-annual literary journal to digital. His contributors come from fascinating backgrounds which are reflected in the poetry there. I also savored the fiction in the last issue, especially Denise Kline's moving and ominous story about Ali, a young herder who crosses the Mediterranean as a refugee.

At The Courtship of Winds, Ray provides statistics about digital literary journals and readers. I keep lists and then want to branch out again, discovering reading and opportunity that was once confined to small press print and fully stocked bookstores.

One of my ideas about literary work is that it handles the news that couldn't be published as news. While I like highly imagined work, I still appreciate a work of literature for giving the sense that it really happened. In a time when people can press a few buttons and see hard facts or false accounts about the globe they live on, reading convincing details from inner or personal angles often provides another tether.

A cat, T. S. Eliot, and rare literary journals

My eighteen-year-old cat Claudine died recently. A tortie tabby or tortoise shell tabby, I had called her the Welsh Terrier Cat because her markings were similar to a dog breed I would like. She often sat near me when I wrote rough drafts. Despite kidney disease, she was spry up to three days before her end.

Claudine in 2018 with scratch paper

Watching her, I opened up poetry I hadn't read in years – T. S. Eliot's “Four Quartets.” The poet who provided lyrics for the musical Cats felt like good company.

Being involved with new journals and new poets, I probably don't read poets that fascinated me in college often enough. I had a seminar on T. S. Eliot however I read his “Four Quartets” again during a winter break. Lines from it stayed with me for years. The first stanza beginning with “Time present and time past/ are both present in time future,/And time future contained in time past” had a philosophical content that spoke to me when I had separated from home and my earlier years.

Four decades later, I found the poetry not only philosophical and written in a style that mirrored the deco era, but more understandable in its confrontation with time. It was about waiting and suggested a possible undiscovered dimension, pointing to physics. The flourishes and sudden everyday images in these contemplations, even though cats were not mentioned as they were in “Prufrock”, had a feline solemnity.

I had written an observation about Claudine and included that as the third section of a long poem, an after thought. Later on, I felt the linkage was weak so I revised the poem with only the two sections. I had a fragment, a revision project because there were a few lines I couldn't discard.

In this mood, I was reminded of the summer's best finds for my internet used bookstore. I obtained a number of The Dial back issues at a library sale. The Dial was the main literary magazine during the 1920's, during my favorite era of literature. No, I did not find the issue that first published T. S. Eliot's “The Wasteland”, darn. But I have issues with “London Letters” from T. S. Eliot, letters to The Dial about the literary scene in England.

The eight issues I still have contain an array of writers and artists still extant in our literary memory. I immediately read a poem by James Joyce, “A Memoir of the Players”, which describes a stage kiss. I'd read Chamber Music, a thin book of Joyce's poetry which reminded me of Stephen Dedalus's villanelle in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This poem was different!

In the issues I have are poems by E. E. Cummings before he committed his name to lower case, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Sterling North, and Hart Crane. There's fiction by Thomas Mann and A. E. Coppard, essays by Virginia Woolf and Liam O'Flaherty, and a long piece by William Butler Yeats in which he seems to feel obliged to explain his work relationship with Oscar Wilde. An essay by Maxim Gorki is titled “About Murderers” and also refers to the cinema. There is art by Picasso, Kahlil Gibran, Rodin, Georgia O'Keefe, and Jean Cocteau.

Sanguine Drawing by Picasso in The Dial

 

The Flagpole (First Painting) by Georgia O'Keefe in The Dial

I don't know what it means for an artist to have a photograph of a work put in a journal. The value a famous writer's first publication or first printing of a literary piece is something I can better appreciate as in a gallery. For some, it might be beyond value, like the first memories of a person or a  pet after you've spent years with them.

A response on child separation

Reading about children being separated from their families at U.S. borders, I was stunned to learn that the U.S. was the only country in the United Nations who had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This was noted by the spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani, when she was interviewed on that commission's criticism of the U.S.'s recent actions.

c Vitma1978 / Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

Other articles told of the numbers of children already moved to Michigan and Chicago where they were to be given to foster parents. The other night, I saw network news coverage of a temporary holding building where, for some reason, the faces of the children and their caregivers could not be photographed.

The United States maintained that there might be false claims of parentage, that some adults were using children in order to gain entrance into the U.S. I couldn't understand why DNA tests weren't administered before a child was forcibly taken and admitted to a plan for food, shelter, transportation, and foster care. An individual can obtain a paternity test for about $70. At any rate, if the child was taken by an adult that wasn't its parent, then the child is someone else's, not the possession of the U.S.

c Blojfo / Dreamstine Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

In a country where children are afraid of sitting in schools because of violence, and where abuse by foster parents is a real factor, this all seems pretty atrocious. 

 

The United States probably has had the highest statistics for their own children being separated from parents because of divorce and foster care. Whatever the advantage of this contemporary shift, the fact of separation remains. Perhaps people in the U.S. are in a routine of callousness towards the feelings of children. 

Children are separated from parents when foster care is the decision. This seems premature if a child was indeed kidnapped, and without looking for their real parent or parents.

I fail to understand why the U.S. does not work with other nations in establishing the identities of people seeking entrance into the U.S. Because those people lived somewhere else, it would seem that the native nation should be involved.

 

My book Tug of the Wishbone, set out to explore the longterm affects of divorce for its protagonist and how they changed perceptions about relationships and family life. An adult book, the first chapters centered on specific events, skipping time from one chapter to the next, until Maureen was a teenager. I did not want to dwell on her childhood, but to give enough of it for an underpinning to the main story. 

 

In one early chapter, Maureen refers to scenes of separation from her father. Because I wanted to show how a child of divorce survives, I didn't want to milk the trauma. This was because of my own feelings about child characters in an adult novel. I attempted to write her into the story as the character she really was. The problems were adult so I chose to concentrate on the active scenes with her family at the outset. The fact is, a younger child has little power and is usually not the hinge of the family scene, especially when larger issues reign. Such a child might not be thinking of themselves. They don't know what to think.

c Paha_l /Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

I preferred a Dickens handling of the child in an adult novel. Although I wrote from Maureen's point-of-view, I depicted the family and neighborhood scenes in a dramatic way instead of a narrative way. This fit with the idea of the novel, to show a child-of-divorce in relationship. When Maureen thought like an adult, the book shifted into her individual story with more of her interior. If there was a lasting trauma from divorce, then I decided to explore how that came out later on.

Life goes on. The story of child separation is gripping and the scenes important. The next problem is that children get past trauma and they survive as they can. They won't be coddled because of a past experience with agony, and they might deal with expectations that cannot be tailored for them as individuals, especially with displacement. Lucky children have parents who plan for them and provide an undisputed home. Unlucky children have to be heroic, too often, in order to be happy.

Reminding me of Russian literature

What are these maps?

They represent readers of this blog during the last months. I looked at my blog stats and saw that a large proportion of its readers were in Russia. When this first happened, I thought it a fluke. A blog last fall contained an excerpt from Tug of the Wishbone. Maureen, the protagonist, discussed Russia with a boyfriend who traveled there.

My book, The Swan Bonnet, has characters with mixed heritage. I arrived at that from the history of Russians in Alaska.

How interesting, was my initial reaction, to be read where there is a high standard for published writing. Though I couldn't think of any Russian women authors in that history.

The subject of Russian literature really gets me going.

Modern Library edition, from Amazon.com

I read Anna Karenina as an adolescent and afterwards felt that the book set up a formidable standard for adult literature. Thomas Hardy stood up to the adultery, illicit love issue but I began to class many adult books as simply being about adultery. Anna Karenina was a much bigger book than that. It had quite an effect on me, choosing to identify with Kitty in the secondary plot.

I was not so happy with film versions of Anna Karenina. I couldn’t understand why there was sympathy for Count Karenin. At thirteen, my understanding was that the government official Karenin bought the most beautiful young aristocratic woman, Anna, and made her live an austere, loveless existence until she had a son. Nineteenth century literature often challenged the compatibility of the marriage match. It questioned the institution’s integrity.

Lately, I was involved with a discussion among Facebook writers about tense. We agreed that writers these days usually write in one tense and that the present tense throughout a book could feel uncomfortable. I furnished an example from Tolstoy, his long short story, The Snowstorm, in which he moved from past to present tense in a natural way and to step up the pace during a very long sleigh ride. Dickens also used this technique, evident in the first chapters of Our Mutual Friend, where it gave immediacy in a dining room with many characters. Why these techniques are not used so much among authors today could point to the difference between the old masters and other authors, we concluded at the discussion.

Crime and Punishment, I think, was the most compelling book I ever read. However, some years ago a freshman composition student took me off-course, asking if I had read The Brothers Karamozov. She was so enthralled with it. I began reading the book and couldn’t get involved. Just before the 2016 election, I picked it up again from my used book stock. The elder Karamozov, repeatedly referred to as a buffoon, caught me this time. I struggled with the book because I felt that Dostoyevsky didn’t have the editing that he had for Crime and Punishment. It was worth the struggle. 

The Brothers Karamozov, International Collectors Edition, from Amazon.com

When I felt ennui at the adultery problem in adult novels, I read Cancer Ward. Solzhenitsyn had accomplished a grand Russian novel with that as the setting. Later, I read his short story work, and then looked at The Gulag Archipelago. The pages I read of that book stunned me so much that I put it off for another time.

In the 1980’s, I concluded that Sigrid Undset, author of Kristin Lavransdatter, was the only woman who had written a Russian novel. (Maybe I’ll get some blog readers from Norway now.)

I suppose I have spent more time with Russian literature than with learning about the Cold War.

Walking and writing, especially poetry

My last post, “How environmental themes entered my writing” dealt with fiction. I didn't mention my poetry writing and the “how” often happening from walking or hiking. Environment and poetry seem to have such an obvious relationship that I left it out.

Although I tried many sports, swimming and walking were my regular activities in adult life. Hiking was the term we used then but I found, living in the Twin Cities, that city hiking was stimulating too. Walking around the lakes there was a social exercise. I also liked walking to Lake Calhoun and back, clocking about four miles. In Duluth, the shoreline of a great lake, creeks and woods in the parks, and stands of trees in neighborhoods are in the walking panorama. Working with used books, I've converted to early morning walks when garage or estate sales are within my range.

I've liked seeing gardens and architectures, lawns that were allowed to go wild, the crow supervising the gathering squirrel, the expressiveness of trees, finding the woodpecker making the noise, raccoons, and does with fawns.

Once I began writing regularly, I found that walking both relieved tension and kept the creative breezes flowing. Many famous writers regularly took a morning or an afternoon walk.

These walks, though, made me more of a poet, not just an inspired poet but a poet who feels thematic and then writes more regularly. Walking a few miles opens up the awareness and associations. I tended to see my fiction from an inner view like film. Poetry was that moment a photographer catches except that the poet has their inner awareness and associations, those creative breezes that pick up images like seeds. Writing that draws a parallel, a metaphor. Nature becomes a cohesion of forces, scientific included but not the prevailing attitude.

When the digital camera came along, I often simply stopped, took a picture, and put it on Facebook. It was a moment that seemed unusual and revealing. But writing a poem usually happened within a system, from the soil of  associations. The challenge was to find out whether you made sense to a reader while giving a personal perspective.

Being out-of-doors and becoming a part of that causes a pensive mind to wonder about systems. With poetry, I liked to find parallels for human life. It was a coincidence that I was moving, my apartment emptying except for a couch, when a swarm of monarch butterflies decided to rest in the trees outside the window. It seemed like magic but then it made me more enthusiastic about writing poetry.

Ever since Wordsworth in western culture, after poets began writing on a subject rather than relating a story worthy of a novel or play, nature for the sake of nature came to the forefront. Poets have looked at the environment in a different way, and usually as a system that affects and even directs man.

I've seen in recent journals some superb poetry that, unfortunately, mourns the present situation with environment while it celebrates the naturalistic world. Many of my poems led to an environmental perspective and were published in literary journals, listed on my website. In recent years, I was proud to have poems published in  Review Americana, Cider Press Review, ArLiJo,Wilderness House Literary Review, and The Adirondack Review. Recently, a poem of mine was included in New Poetry from the Midwest 2018, published by New American Press.

Literary journals can focus on regions or what gives a sense of place, the land we live on. I continue to explore them at New Pages.