The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris

MacFarlane takes words that were dropped from children's dictionaries and creates poetic anagrams. Words like acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker, fern, heather were replaced with technological terms e.g. "cut and paste."

Conker, the shiny dark nut encased within the green spiky fruit, was used in children's games throughout the British isles. The horse chestnut or "conker" has an odd shape and would be hard to duplicate. Thus, MacFarlane's anagram includes the question, "Cabinet-maker, could you craft me a conker? He decided that neither Cabinet-maker nor King nor engineer could make one.

He calls a dandelion a little "sun-of-the-grass," and a kingfisher a "colour-giver, fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river's quiver."

All of these descriptions are worked beautifully into an anagram stanzas and illustrated with oversized images by Jackie Morris. For "starling," he writes,

Should green-as-moss be mixed with
  blue-of-steel be mixed with gleam-of-gold
     you'd still fall short by far of the--

Tar-bright oil-slick sheen and
    gloss of starling wing.

And if you sampled sneaker-squeaks
   and car alarms and phone ringtones
        you'd still come nowhere near the --

Rooftop riprap street-smart
    hip-hop of starling song.

Let shade clasp coal clasp pitch
    clasp storm clasp witch,
       they'd still be pale beside the --

In-the-dead-of-night-black, cave-black,
  head-cocked, fight-back gleam of starling eye.

Northern lights teaching shoaling fish teaching
   swarming flies teaching clouding ink
        would never learn the --

Ghostly swirling surging whirling melting
   murmuration of starling flock.


The Lost Words is a visual and verbal treat. 

Writer's League of Texas podcast episode 39-- Great first pages and Chapters

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

What makes a good opening page to a novel?

Some really good reminders in Episode #39.

Stacey Swann believes the voice draws readers in and makes readers want to keep listening. The opening gives some sense of who the character is and who they want.

The opening page is a little like a "first date." The first page tells the readers whether the character is someone they want to spend time with.

They also discuss "psychic distance."


In Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, odd details give a creeping, subtle feeling that something's not right.

The novel does a great job cultivating mystery.

https://soundcloud.com/writersleagueoftexas
(Episode 39)

Tony Hoagland

Don’t Tell Anyone

BY TONY HOAGLAND

We had been married for six or seven years

when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me

that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years

into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool

where she does laps every other day.  

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been

concealing anything,

not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,

nor as if we should perform an act of therapy  

right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me,

and I could see her turn her square face up

to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.

For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming

as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret

that it is not all fun

to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology,

to be dipped down

again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate

pleasure you can sometimes find

is the wet kiss

of your own pain.

There goes Kath, at one pm, to swim her twenty-two laps

back and forth in the community pool;

—what discipline she has!

Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,

that will never be read by anyone.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2012)