CONGRATULATIONS EMILY!!!!!

Announcing 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards Semi-Finalist Results
Judging Results in 64 National Categories and Outstanding Book of the Year Categories
we’re listed under 7, Short Story Fiction

On May 3, Shady Lane Press hosted Central Florida literati at a private gala marking the launch of Short Houses With Wide Porches, a poetry collection by Kerouac House alum Christopher Watkins. The event, at the beautiful home of Summer Rodman and Steven McCall, raised over $5,000 for the project, which hosts emerging writers from all over the world for three-month, expense-paid residencies, and promotes the literary legacy of Jack Kerouac, one of America’s most iconic writers.

By the way … Chris’s book is fantastic! (You can buy it here: www.shadylanepress.com) Chris is also an accomplished singer/songwriter. You can learn more about him here: www.preacherboy.com 

Anyone in the New York area should definitely check out his upcoming book launch June 3rd at The Bowery Poetry Club. http://www.bowerypoetry.com/Event/41932

The books are in and they look great! Get yours now by clicking on the link at the top of the page. Christopher Watkins will be in Orlando for his book launch at Urban Think! in downtown Orlando May 2nd. He’s going to read from Short Houses With Wide Porches and play us a few songs from his “other” life as a singer/songwriter. You won’t want to miss this!

Check out what these fine poets had to say:

“The poems of Christopher Watkins are, at once, tender, shrewdly observed and enormously vital. This is a first collection that has the stamp of authenticity, of life fully lived and fully written.”

Baron Wormser (former Poet Laureate of Maine, a Guggenheim Grant recipient, and the author of many award-winning collections of poetry, including his New & Selected due from Sarabande Books in May of 2008)

“In the poems of this debut collection, Christopher Watkins carries on the tradition of the man in whose house many of them were written, stalking the moment and playing it out like a musician on three vintage typewriters, always attuned to the clear vibration that sounds unmistakably when craft accompanies spontaneity. Here are poems both tender and wild, ‘moist as rotting leaves,/ dank as garbage,/ ripe with life.”

Jeffrey Harrison (author of four full-length books of poetry, including The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.)

“Send a blues traveler down to live in Jack Kerouac’s house in Florida, let him compose on his ’28 Underwood and tack dithyrambic hymns to the wall while Monk and Parker hold court, invite Bessie Smith, Han-Shan, and William Matthews in at the end of the day, imagine discourse-sparks and music-flares rising into the tinderbox night, and then imagine that those mad laments and ecstatic songs are coming from one voice, and that voice is talking to you quietly and thoughtfully, and all that superabundant life has been channeled into the fine excess of his music. The poems of Christopher Watkins are astonishing.”

Ted Deppe (author of three books of poetry, Children of the Air (Alice James Books), The Wanderer King (Alice James) and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Books, Ireland). His work has appeared in many journals, including Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Ploughshares. Ted has received a Pushcart Prize and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT, the Poets House in Donegal, Ireland, and Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.)

Darlyn Finch’s Red Wax Rose is quickly becoming Shady Lane Press’s “Little Book that Could.” Just got word that Garrison Keillor will be reading Darlyn’s poem:  ”I {Heart}My Wife,” on The Writer’s Almanac, Thursday, June 21. Check your local NPR listings for times. The poem will also appear on The Writer’s Almanac website and daily e-mail. For a complete list of stations and broadcast times, click here: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/stations/list.php

Congratulations Darlyn! Way to create a buzz!

Leslie Halpern of the online magazine Suite101 had this to say about Red Wax Rose:

This entertaining collection may prove especially inspiring for Southern women, although it includes slices-of-life to which we can all relate. — Leslie Halpern, Suite 101

http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/book_review_red_wax_rose

People who know poetry are singing the praises of Darlyn Finch and Red Wax Rose. Check out the latest, from poet/creative non-fiction luminary Molly Peacock: 

“Darlyn has a candid, clear, direct free verse writing style that communicates easily to audiences about a woman’s roles as daughter, wife, lover, and mother. With humor and forthright opinions, she creates a voice that declares, questions, wonders, and remembers, using metaphor and telling detail to evoke narrative situations.”

– Molly Peacock, poet, former president, Poetry Society of America, founder of Poetry In Motion, an initiative to put poetry on subways and buses throughout North America.

The Critic’s Pen

Reviewed by Peggy Miller, Senior Editor, February 2007

“Here is a delightful find, an appealing combination of simple, dark and wise…”

These works are open-eyed to life’s tenderness and sadness—and the intersection of tenderness and sadness, which is the source of power in Finch’s writing.

A native Floridian, Finch was the recent writer in residence at Kerouac House in Orlando. Many Americans these days relocate often, but Finch lives in the midst of her history. In the poem “Hometown” she writes, “There are ghosts in the sanctuary,/ and our hometown is a place/ where we visit family/ alone/ on opposite ends of town.”

“I {Heart} My Wife” is perhaps my favorite poem here. The voice of the poem imagines that the wife placed that bumper sticker on the truck herself, a message to “all women like me” who stop behind the truck, “who she surely knows are sitting/ at every red light/ in every town/ wishing they could one day be/ someone’s/ very best thing.”

Finch’s writing is so fresh that it is as though she finds her reawakening on the pages of this collection, tracing difficult times and emerging cleansed and delightful. Lighthearted, she sings, “I wanna be a big-boned gal…”

Finch defines a moment of finding comfort within herself in “Mirror Mirror.” In childhood she learned painfully that she must be modest and humble—must not love her reflection in the mirror too much. But years have given her wrinkles around her eyes, and she has come to love her reflection again. The poem concludes, “and I/ kissed her there in the mirror/ kissed her right on the lips/ kissed her fogging and smudging the mirror.”

Because of Finch’s direct and intimate voice, because of her easy style, you come away from this book feeling as though you know the author as a close friend, one who can give good counsel when you need it.

–Peggy Miller 2/07

Other Press:

2/15/2007 Comments: (0) ARTS & CULTURE TO GO Darlyn Finch The setting should be as memorable as the words when writer Darlyn Finch reads from her newly published book, Red Wax Rose (Shady Lane Press), on the patio of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, under the stars and/or clouds. For a taste, here’s the poem that gave the book its title. After the Burning i am the red wax rose after the melting i am the blackened wick no light is left no warmth i am the last puff of breath stirring these ashes even the smoke is still A Florida-born native, Finch has a rich history with Winter Park. She graduated with an English major and a writing minor from Rollins and worked as editor of the school’s literary journal, Brushing. After Rollins she continued her writerly ambitions by attending graduate school at Spalding University in Louisville, Ky. She still maintains sunscribbles.com, which keeps the Central Florida writing community in close contact. Currently, Finch is staying at the Jack Kerouac House in College Park and she is proud to be the first Orlandoan accepted to stay at the writers’ residence. She’ll be there rent-free through February 2007. The residence, once the hearth of Kerouac and his mother, now serves as a place for writers to get away from it all and concentrate on writing. (8 p.m. Saturday at Jack Kerouac Project House; 6:30 p.m. Monday at Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park; www.darlynfinch.com) — Issac Stolzenbach