fan art & podcasts & stuff

My niece Emma recently re-read Summer and Bird and made some art in response to it. Honestly if there is a better writing-related happiness than someone making something as a response to something you made, I don't know what it is.

Her beautiful version of the lovely back cover of the book.

This other one is a drawing of the inside of the red house, which is one of my favorite parts of the book. She even got the vines on the wall. HAPPINESS.

and the gray rag rug! SIgh.

Okay, in other news. We Cabinet curators celebrated publication day with the #sharescary hashtag on Twitter--heard many fears and many creepy stories, and prizes are now flying out all over the world to participants. Two of mine are postcards with a custom scary story. Yeah NOW you wish you'd played.

There is also an ongoing giveaway at Cynthia Letich Smith's Cynsations blog -- get one chance to win a copy of the Cabinet of Curiosities just by commenting, or get four chances by leaving a 100-word scary story written to the prompt "visitors." That post also includes a really first class photo of my cat Adam, looking appalled, and one of Stefan reclined upon candy. Contest ends Sunday June 8!

Finally and perhaps most gloriously: we're doing a Cabinet of Curiosities podcast every week this month. The first episode is Claire Legrand reading her marvelous story "The Tin Man's Price"--you can listen to or download it here. Or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. Stefan Bachmann composed eerie and splendid music for this thing, so you MUST give it a listen.

That's it I think! Thanks all, and thanks, Emma.

birds in cages and a happy star

Cannot believe I forgot to post here about on of my favorite Cabinet stories I've written in a while, plus some happy news.

Drawing by William Kentridge,

The Cabinet story is called "Ariel" (which is a tiny private . . . not joke, exactly: what do you call a private joke that's serious?). Our theme is birds this month, and I'd recently been obsessively web-stalking the artist William Kentridge, so my story was inspired by one of his drawings for a production design for The Magic Flute.  

So that. But then the happy star is that The Curiosity Cabinet--which began as this crazy little web-project, just for fun--besides now having a pretty glorious jacket and illustrations (Greenwillow did a gorgeous job with the package), also has a Kirkus star. Six hundred hurrays to THAT.

To celebrate publication, we've got a lot going on, including a 36-day countdown in which we tweet a line from one of the stories each day, do several giveaways, and more stuff currently top secret. Stefan Bachmann is doing a quite splendid world giveaway right now, so if you're interested in winning all kinds of books, check that out.

 Book comes out May 27, 2014, in hardback and paperback, so just GET READY.

windy day

Not today so much, but a couple of days ago, when I wrote my latest Cabinet story, it was crazy windy--a speaking wind, you know, the kind that mutters and howls and woooos. And our Cabinet theme for March is wind (I know, original right?). IT WAS A SIGN.

My story is a perversion of that strange and lovely George Macdonald classic, At the Back of the North Wind. As a child I read that book over and over. I wanted more books like that, dense and rich and not always fully parseable, at least to me as a child.

Not everyone feels that way of course, as a child or an adult. I wonder if that longing for the unparseable, for gorgeous spots of opacity and ambiguity, is inherent or learned or what. Either way, I'm always so glad when I find someone else who feels the way I do. Secret Society of Negative Capability y'all!

This week's Cabinet story is PLENTY parseable and straightforward, believe me. Poor Ruby, adopted as the new Diamond by a North Wind driven mad by loss. That's not gonna end well.

no one but me

Our February theme for the Cabinet of Curiosities is envy, and I wrote a little version of the goose that laid the golden egg, I guess--only it's told in a quite strange voice that I have good reason to suspect no one likes but me (it pays off though! I mean if you keep reading--the voice is strange for a reason, at least).

That's not a hint to come tell me YOU liked it--though please feel free!--because for some reason it really is fine. It's just hilarious to me that I like it SO MUCH. I keep re-reading the story and loving it, fully aware that I am the only person on this green earth doing that.

Which came first? Are you KIDDING me?

Anyway. I just think it's funny, how much you can make something you love that no one else does. I guess that sounds a bit tragic, but I don't mean it tragically; it's sort of funny and nice, what whack-jobs we all are, with our own little treasured insanities.

Working on a tricky revision of my second book these days--maybe that's why it's on my mind? Sometimes it's hard to trust that something you like will have appeal to anyone outside of your own head. But you have to trust, I think, 'cause once you start trying to guess what people will like, then all the eggs are broken, and all the chickens run away.

cold, oh cold

Between holiday prep and festivities, and a trip to New York City, I've been neglecting this place more than usual. My apologies, o handful of visitors!

First: at the Cabinet of Curiosities website, our December stories are about winter and snow. I wrote most of mine on a plane to NYC, and it felt like I was dreaming awake in that airplane way you do sometimes. So I am not sure the story makes the greatest sense (or DOES IT? paging Dr Jung). But it's definitely cold and snowy. It's about a boy whose father forgets to pick him up after orchestra practice one snowy night, and the strange man he meets walking home, who asks him to him to choose between--as the story title says--"Diamonds and Dimes."

Speaking of cold and snow, New York was crazily festive with both. Especially our last day there, Central Park went full-on Winter Wonderland. A few photos below.

Have a sweet and hopeful holiday--hope in the darkness is the point of Christmas, I think, so if you're feeling a bit of darkness, it's okay. Just peek around for the light.

Central Park, fresh snow.

Central Park looking west.

Rose petals under the new ice over the lake in Central Park.

The walk up to the Cloisters, looking over the Hudson River.

burn it down

A smorgasbord, as these monthly posts tend to be.

Fir0002/Flagstaffotos. No idea what that means but Wikimedia Commons asked me to put it there.

We're doing scary fire stories this month at the Cabinet of Curiosities, and mine, called "The Bone-Fire," went up this week. Immodestly (or maybe irrelevantly) I say I found it unsettling to write. See what you think.

That's Jason Phelps, who's marvelous in this, and me.

Also -- I'm in a terrific play called There Is A Happiness That Morning Is, by Mickle Maher, produced by Capital T Theatre. It's been going so well (the Austin Chronicle review for one called it "a bizarre, brilliant play that is capable of reordering your brain a bit") that we've extended it one more weekend, through November 23. We've also added a pay-what-you-can industry night this Tuesday November 19. It's at the central-Austin-located Hyde Park Theatre. Tickets here or call 512-479-7529.

Also! This deserves a whole, thoughtful, not smogasbordy post, but -- you should go read Anne Ursu's blog post "On Gender and Boys Read Panels" -- it's really good, and brought some issues to the surface for me that I didn't realize I had so many big feelings about. (Also if you haven't read her beautiful book Breadcrumbs, do that right away. She has a brand new one out, too, called The Real Boy.)

masks make you do things

For Austria and its neighbors, this is a CHRISTMAS mask. This guy takes care of the naughty kids by dragging them to hell. So, you know: Merry Christmas!

I think they possibly do make you do things, masks. I am very interested in masks--Keith Johnstone's chapter on masks in his brilliant book Impro has really stuck in my head in the many years since I first read it.

Anyway, I explored this a bit in my latest Cabinet of Curiosities story, which is called "What the Mask Wants," and which is creepy. 

I have always wanted to work with masks in a theatrical sense, but I've never gotten to (yet). Still, any role you take on is a kind of mask, and I've taken on a good one I think in Capital T Theatre's production of There is a Happiness that Morning is by Mickle Maher. It's about two English professors who accidentally have sex in front of their students (long story!) after reading a poem by William Blake. When the play opens, they're supposed to be apologizing to their classes, and one will, and one very much won't. It's tremendously funny and also quite thoughtful--about Blake, about marriage, and about how we bounce back and forth between "everything's so beautiful!" and "we live in HELL" and how the more we do that, the farther we get from "that slow sea and shore inside of us: that strand forever calm and wide where we might wade, breathe, and linger, fusing life with the Real." 

So it runs October 24-November 16, 2013 at Hyde Park Theatre, and you should come! 

gorgeous cover is gorgeous

The Cabinet of Curiosities had its big cover reveal (COVER REVEAL! I like saying that, I feel like a magician)  over at The Book Smugglers. The cover, see below, is flipping gorgeous, with art by Alexander Jansson.

But just because you can see the cover here, you should still go to Book Smugglers because there is also a fairly amazing (we immodestly feel) giveaway that includes signed books from all four of us AND a $50 IndieBound gift card, which you can use to buy even more books! It is RAINING BOOKS, if you enter this thing. So go enter!

And admire the cover: 

better not oversleep or your dolls grow teeth

 . . .  or so goes one of the cautionary rhymes in my new Cabinet story, "Nursery Rhymes." In it, an unfortunate little girl not unlike my own wee rambly distractable self-when-young comes across a book which is not, but might as well be, titled "How To Develop an Anxiety Disorder -- in Easy Rhymes!"

In other news, I just got back from Portland, Oregon, where I went to see some of the TBA (Time-Based Art) Festival. I didn't have as much luck with the festival as I'd hoped, but Portland is glorious, all lush and wet and garden-studded. I visited my old college, Reed, for the first time in decades, which was straaange:

Reed College, looking extra-collegiate.

and the nearby Rhododendron Garden: 

Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden. Glorious much?

and the Japanese Garden: 

The Portland Japanese Gardens. I haven't altered this photo, the color is just always this saturated in Portland, maybe because of the clouds? 

 . . . and more gardens, and Forest Park, which is AMAZING, a giant FOREST more or less in midtown.  And I saw random splendid Portlandish sights like this one:

Shot through the window of some office on a walk home. 

But now I'm home in Austin and seem to have brought some rain and gray with me, which we needed desperately, so I feel very clever. 

danced to pieces

Not me. I wish, but I am a pretty dreadful dancer, except in my mind.

A green ukulele is a joy forever.

No: I mean the fairy tale "The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces," which was one of my favorites when I was a kid. This month at the Cabinet of Curiosities we're doing fairy tale retellings, so I did that one, and it came out all raging and Sylvia Plathish which is perhaps unexpected in a middle grade story! But I think it would be ghastly to be a fairy tale princess.

It posted today so what are you waiting for? Go read it. 

In other news, ermmm, oh! over at the Enchanted Inkpot today, I also interviewed Ellen Booraem about her new book Texting the Underworld. It's a splendid book that manages to be funny about subjects like childhood anxiety and, actually, death itself. You can win a copy of the book there, too.  

And . . . it is very hot here in Austin, Texas. Like we-are-ready-to-shoot-ourselves hot. 

And . . . I got a ukulele, for some reason. It's green! In six months I will regale you all with a halting but sincere version of "You Are My Sunshine, My Only [pause to change chords] Sunshine."