Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

R iding down to the Weymouth Center on Saturday, I heard two bits of news from Press 53 publisher Kevin Morgan Watson. One, that he was not going to publish any more novels or memoirs, so that he could focus on short story collections (his first love) and poetry. I'm happy he's making this move, even though it means I'll be back in the hunt for a publisher and/or agent for my next Southern/crime novel Backwater , now in the writing - because short fiction deserves its champion. The other bit of news is that Darlin' Neal, author of Rattlesnakes and the Moon from Press 53, will be back soon with another collection of short fiction. I love Rattlesnakes , an unflinching look into the lives of blue-collar woman that take us into the truck stops and trailer parks, but doesn't showing women at the hardscrabble end of things as simply victims. Her heartbreaking stories of the road and hard times are set in small places of the South and West. In “Lafayette,” a woman...

I ran into this "app" at the Books by Women site. It only took me a couple of hours to put it together, using photos that I had taken along with videos from the site and a public domain image. Pretty slick! I only did the free 30-second one, but you can upgrade to a longer paid video. For authors with small presses, this seems like a nice option. Check it out!

PERPETUAL FOLLY: The Year in Books — the Best of 2011 : Although I read a lot of books in 2011, I certainly didn’t read all that were published in 2011, and I didn’t read exclusively books tha...

For my Facebook friends who wanted to see the Parisian sonnet I mentioned... The poem appeared in the latest issue of the International Poetry Review, one dedicated to contemporary poetry from Romania. Since 1975, this fine publication has been bringing together poetry from around the globe, in the original language and in translation, as well as poetry from English-speaking realms. Mark Smith-Soto edits this journal, with the able assistance of a number of associate, consulting, and guest editors. The journal is published out of UNC-Greensboro. A two-issue subscription is $12. For more information about the magazine, visit this webpage. S o - this sonnet - based on a December stay in an apartment in the Second Arrondissement, a place of amazing contrasts and a low incidence of tourists! 2 nd Honeymoon Moonlight on watered cobbles of Montorgueil: limp endive, aging coquilles , cigarettes bob down the gutter . “My feet,” I plead, hobble past cave et bou...

Poetry, Wordsworth said, is emotion recollected in tranquility. For a definition of "tranquility," see the W eymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. Home to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame and home base for the North Carolina Poetry Society , Weymouth Center has a busy calendar of chamber music, garden events, and lectures. Those occupy the ground floor and the surrounding terraces and gardens. But for a writer, Weymouth is upstairs. The second floor of the historic home - actually two homes joined together, plus - has several rooms for writers to just write. Nothing else. Just write. I joined the elect earlier this month, when I spent five days at the Southern Pines center. North Carolina writers have completed more than 600 residencies there - if all were as productive as mine, then we have Weymouth to thank for many, many books. I sat at my desk in the Paul Green room, overlooking the gardens with their bare architectural trees and winter-blooming...

My old home places were all in the mountains. My childhood was spent in the Southern Tier of New York State, in the rolling hill-region called the Allegheny Plateau. I grew up in a gaunt farmhouse that housed a treasure - a home library of oddly assorted volumes. Narrow   books of Poe and Longfellow, volumes of Stevenson, Emerson, Shakespeare.   During the summers I ran happily wild on our seven acres, but in the winter I read, and can see how those books influenced my later writing – stories in which the homely and comforting were permeated by the strange and troubling. I can see the books in that dim room, among the old furniture and stored clothing. Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles , with the dairylands so like my own home region, but overlying ancient and bloody history. Gene Stratton’s A Girl of the Limberlost , with a solitary teenager lured by the swamp and its exotic creatures, learning also about poverty and madness and violence. Hawthorne’s gloomy...

Our State magazine is one of the gems of North Carolina - a state magazine that is chock-full of information and entertainment. I was so pleased to see Blood Clay get  such a nice notice there. Blood Clay by Valerie Nieman | Our State Magazine