My collection of never-seen-before poems, I am not a fish, has been accepted for publication. I’ll give you more news as it occurs, but I thought I would share the initial buzz. Yes, it’s still a buzz when this kind of thing happens…
“Lupa is the story of two fearless fighters, two She-Wolves, perhaps the avatars of the same wandering spirit, whose destinies become aligned through the mirror of time and dream. The set of the two plots, none other than the Eternal City, casts its many shadows and symbols on both stories.
I came upon this book quite by accident, while perusing the poetry section of a blogging site. The author’s compelling poetry made me very curious about what her blog announced as her first novel and, indeed, I was not disappointed.
Marie Marshall’s sharp writing has a wolfish brutality to it that masterfully shape-shifts to raw emotion in Lupa‘s fighting scenes.
Unlike Hesse’s Harry Haller, the main characters not only accept but seek out the totemic wolf within.”
It’s interesting and demanding. The current task is the penultimate read-through of the first volume of The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. The final selection process is complete, all the selected sonnets have been included, the Preface and the Introduction have been written. Now the time has arrived for us – the editorial team – to go through the final draft with a fine-toothed comb to see if we can spot any typographical errors. As we are an international panel, we have been warned not to correct British/American/Canadian English, so Associate Editor A has to do us the favor of leaving ‘neighbour’ as it stands, and Associate Editor B has to do us the favour of leaving ‘neighbor’ as it stands! Once we have completed this task (which we have to do by the middle of November) we will await the Master Copy, and we will proof-read that. We hope that the next copy we have to read after that will be the printed copy!
Being an editor or part of an editorial team does bring kudos with it, but let no one imagine it’s a sinecure
… and they did! A consequence of being published is that one becomes an object of interest and attention. In the past week I have given two interviews, one of which was to a magazine which has interviewed such writers as Minette Walters and Bernard Cornwell, so I’m in fine company. I’ll give you more news as it happens.
At last my first novel Lupa is published. It was taken up by an independent publisher in South Africa who offered me a commercial contract. It feels as though the novel has had a long gestation period – it was my first work of full-length fiction and I completed it in 2004, and so it is in some senses a ‘young’ work. I have doggedly resisted the temptation to self-publish or even to accept an ‘author-subsidised’ deal. To my mind conventional publication does still confer legitimacy on a written work. This is not to say that there are not some excellent self-published works out there, nor that conventional publishing exclusively promotes works of great literary merit. We can all point to the exceptions. Nevertheless – I have to tell you – this feels good!
At present the book is available in print or in Kindle form via Amazon. My SA publisher is currently struggling with the problems of printing in both SA and the UK, so a bookshop launch in either country is not imminent. But as so much of the book trade is now on-line Lupa will actually be available internationally before it hits its domestic markets! Who knows – it may end up being printed in China.
Another aspect of being taken on by an ‘indie’ publisher is that such a lot of the publicity and marketing will have to be do-it-yourself. I am going to have to plug it via this site, via social networking, and so on, hoping that people who say they like my writing will actually prove it with a purchase, will recommend it to friends, will write favourable reviews, and so on. Over to you, I guess!
I would like to thank my agent, my publisher, my friends Lucy (who insisted that I wrote this book in the first place) and Joey (who gave it its first critical read-through back in 2004) and everyone who has made this possible for me.
(c) Kathy Bentley
There are several things I like about Decanto magazine, apart from the fact that the editor often selects poems by me for inclusion (see the current issue). The first is that it is more like an anthology than a magazine – in fact it describes itself as a ‘Magazine/Anthology’ and its fifty-five-so-far issues must add up to an anthological library of some content and force. The second is that its editorial policy is one that lifts away the Chinese walls between the various modes of poetical expression; thus one might find a sonnet on the same page as a piece of experimental modern poetry, is if to say that ‘there is only poetry’ and that the divisions between formal/free, product/process, whatever/whatever are too artificial to matter much. The third is that the poetry is always of a high quality. As a whole, Decanto makes it clear to the reader that it is produced by someone who loves poetry, and that’s fine by me!
I have three pieces in the latest Shot Glass Journal, which styles itself ‘An Online Journal of Short Poetry’. My pieces are jisei – essentially poems written in the imminence of death – and are in the form of ‘4-5-4’ haiku.
In the pipeline is more publication news, but I am going to hold it all back until it actually happens.
Marie Marshall 