Release date: April 16, 2019
Subgenre: Magical Realism, Women's Fiction
About Gillyflower:
Boston, 1984. Even in a world without cell phones, messages come through
loud and clear if one is listening. When thirty-something Nora Forrest
travels to Manhattan to see a Broadway play starring her idol, an aging
Irish actor named Hugh Sheenan, she doesn't know whether what happens in
the theater that night should be credited to witchcraft, extrasensory
perception, synchronicity, or simple accident―and she knows that many
people would tell her nothing had happened at all. Told through the
voices of four people, Gillyflower is a story about intersections
and connections―real, imaginary, seized, and eluded. It's a book about
everyday magic, crystalline memory, and the details that flow through
time and space like an electrified mist. It's a detective story, a love
story, and a coming-of-age story―for the never really young and for the
almost old.
Excerpt:
It was a picture of the inside of a theater, seen from a
vantage-point somewhere in the upper rear, with a stage full of
actors well-lit in the front, and a tall, thin male actor at the
front of the stage with a peculiar look on his face. A shaft
or beam of light, like something one sees in those Roman Catholic
holy cards that nuns give out to children for good behavior in
school (I’d gotten a few in my time), led from the actor's dark
eyes to something in the front rows of the audience. The
detail was most unusual: the whole of the thing was executed
in an elegant array of tiny, finely-drawn lines, so that unless one
looked closely it seemed to have a palpable texture—one felt as
though it would be a bit rough to the touch. Most of the
drawing was simply black on white, but the beam of light was a soft
golden color and, as I mentioned, the man's eyes, though black,
seemed to have a color all their own.
So deeply was I in communion with this strange drawing that Hugh' s
unexpected entry into the kitchen gave me rather a start. He
was wearing an old, fuzzy, grey bathrobe, had an unattractive
greyish-blue stubble on his chin, and his eyes were sunken deeply
enough into his face so that he looked about a hundred and three
years old. He seemed cheerful enough in
spite of that, however, and considering that the hour was well
before noon, I thought he seemed very cheerful indeed. He
smiled at me and barked one word: "Coffee," then plopped down at
the table next to me, leaned over almost backwards, and
acrobatically lit his cigarette in its holder by turning on the
stove. I did not argue about the coffee for once, I was that
surprised to see him, and got up to fix him a mug.
"And what have we here, old boy?" he asked, picking up the drawing
and trying to focus his bleary eyes upon it. "Dabbling in the
arts, are we, Leon? I have always wondered what it was one
did in these early hours, but I must say you'd be the last silly
bastard I'd suspect of
finger-painting. HOLD ON!" At that Hugh jumped from
the chair, threw the drawing across the room as if it had burned
him, and turned upon me with a hateful eye. He was indeed
fully awakened.
“For God's sake, Leon! Where did that thing come from?" he
roared. I was flabbergasted.
"It came just this morning in the post," I told him, ''And I was
just taking a little look-see at it when you came in.”
Hugh retrieved the drawing, set it up again against the teapot, and
sat down gazing at it with his head in his hands. His
cigarette had fallen to his lap and was starting a hole
there. I took it away to the sink. He continued
to stare at the picture, muttering foul words and bending a spoon
in his hands. I took the spoon away.
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About Diane Wald:
Diane Wald was born in Paterson, NJ, and has lived in Massachusetts
since 1972. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. She has published more than 250 poems in literary
magazines since 1966. She spent two years on a fellowship at the
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has been awarded the
Grolier Poetry Prize, The Denny Award, The Open Voice Award, and
the Anne Halley Award. She also received a state grant from the
Massachusetts Council on the Arts. She has published five chapbooks
and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. Her
book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her second
book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002. WONDERBENDER, her third collection, was published by 1913 Press. She lives
outside of Boston with her husband, Carey Reid, and their
charismatic cats.
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