![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
Please link your nominations page if telling us what to do about your nomination - thank you! Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened. (You can find your own nominations at this link; keep in mind this gives you an 'Edit' screen where you can't actually submit any edits, but if you delete /edit, that's the page we're looking for.)
If we've processed any of your nominations and something doesn't look right, please comment (with your nominations page) to tell us about the problem and how you think it should be corrected. Questions are welcome.
It’s been a while since I’ve put one of these up here, so, here you go. It’s a doozy. I hope you have a fabulous weekend.
— JS
I promise to post something not related to the new book next week!
Yes, it's true: News releases still exist, and authors still release them. Where they fly after that--it's hard to tell. Some authors might find this template useful; if anyone wants to, feel free to send this off to the media/social media/internet thingy/newsletter/skywriting airplane of your choice.
NEWS RELEASE
Albion Authors Write the Haunted History of Noble County
An Albion couple steps into the supernatural with their new book, Haunted Noble County, Indiana.
Published by The History Press, the book is part of its Haunted America series, and comes out on August 12th. Mark R. Hunter and Emily Hunter spent over a year researching the book, and collected stories from many sources, including eyewitnesses.
“Every area has ghost stories,” Mark explains. “We just put them together and added pictures.”
Some of the stories are well known to locals, including the legend of Spook Hill, which inspired a famous poem by Indiana’s former State Poet Laureate. Others stem from events from Noble County’s history, such as the hanging of a horse thief and accused murderer at Diamond Hill, near Ligonier. Still others were told directly to the Hunters, including their favorite: “The Thing In the Basement”.
Do the authors believe?
“I’ve seen a few things,” Mark admits, “and I keep an open mind. But most of the people we talked to directly are absolutely convinced they saw something supernatural, and we respect that.”
They were also able to dispel some rumored hauntings, and in a few cases were disappointed to find no stories at all. “Look at the Noble County Old Jail Museum,” Mark says. “How could a place that atmospheric not be haunted? But we found no ghost stories there.”
Photo by Mark R. Hunter, who had a lucky lighting day. |
Many of the stories they did find were from normal homes, but historical hauntings include places such as the former Kneipp Springs Sanitarium in Rome City, The Strand Theater in Kendallville, and the former Noble County Asylum near Albion.
The resulting book, Haunted Noble County, Indiana, is available on the Arcadia Publishing website, the Hunters’ social media sites, their website at www.markrhunter.com, and various retail locations around Noble County.
It’s not the Hunters’ first foray into local history. Together they produced the books Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So with the Albion Fire Department; Images of America: Albion and Noble County; and Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving at All.
Mark R. Hunter is also the author, with Emily’s help, of two humor books: Slightly Off the Mark: The Unpublished Columns, and More Slightly Off the Mark: Why I Hate Cats, and Other Lies. He also has three published books set in Noble County: the novels Coming Attractions, Storm Chaser and its sequel, The Notorious Ian Grant, as well as a related short story collection, Storm Squalls. His young adult adventure, The No-Campfire Girls, is set in southern Indiana. Another novel, Radio Red, is set in Michigan.
Mark is a 911 dispatcher and volunteer firefighter in Albion, and Emily is a trail guide at the Pokagon State Park Saddle Barn. He blogs at https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/ or substack.com/@markrhunter, and can be found hanging out on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter/.
Note to Media: Mark and Emily are available for questions and interviews, and can be contacted through the website at www.markrhunter.com.
Seriously. Fuck these fascists. Join a No Kings protest on October 18 and stand up for our rights and our democracy.
Greek mythology is a mythos that is full of despair, anguish, and characters that can’t seem to a catch a break. Author Seamus Sullivan brings us some of these familiar ancient characters in his debut novel, Daedalus is Dead. Follow along to see how Sullivan’s relationship to his son contributed to the inspiration of this classic myth retelling.
SEAMUS SULLIVAN:
Years ago, when I first tried to write about Daedalus in the form of a ponderous and contraction-free short story, Maria Dahvana Headley gave me some characteristically thoughtful line edits, and one note in particular stayed with me. She had gone back into my draft and added contractions, explaining that a lot of writers instinctively reach for âI amâ rather than âIâmâ when writing something set in antiquity, but at the expense of distancing the story from the reader. Contractions allow for intimacy, and intimacy is what the story demands.
Years later, I tried to write about Daedalus again. I had become a parent, and the first year of my sonâs life overlapped with the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a brutal police crackdown on protests, the January 6th insurrection, and other delights. I was deeply angry with men, with a society built to accommodate the worst impulses of men, and with myself for being part of it. With Headleyâs note at the back of my mind, I framed the story as Daedalusâs direct address to his late son, Icarus. Iâd worked in this mode before, a parent directly addressing their child. There was an assumption in there somewhere that any kid born in the present day would, before long, start observing the world and demanding that the adults explain themselves.
For me, Greek mythologyâs appeal has always had something to do with grandeur, with the glory and tragedy of an imagined past, sure, but also with scale and awe and durability. Maybe thatâs just how it feels when you read the stuff as a kid. Writing in the Mary Renault style wouldnât work for me â I didnât have the skill or the eye for anthropological detail to pull that off, and anyway there was no point in pretending I wasnât doing the literary equivalent of shaking my fist at the world immediately outside my window. So most of my narrationâs intimacy came from my own day-to-day, which largely consisted of carrying an inquisitive baby around and explaining things to him, and for the grandeur I went back to Homer.
Emily Wilsonâs Odyssey translation had been out for a few years by then, so I went over passages from that and from my older, Stanley Lombardo Iliad translation. Those helped with the details of how royal households worked (slave labor and all), what funeral rites were like, and a general idea of how to convey that sense of grandeur in vernacular-friendly language that would pull readers into this imagined version of a bronze age society. Wilsonâs Odyssey introduction was a great resource for social context and for how composition and performance of Homeric verse might have worked. In the spring of last year I got to see Wilson perform the opening lines of The Iliad for a packed New York Public Library audience, in the original Greek, with enviable gusto; I came away with a deeper appreciation for the artistry and energy that kept these texts alive, in performance and print, for millennia.
Magpie-like, I accumulated images and ideas from other sources. Much of the opening chapter, describing the escape from Crete and the fall of Icarus, comes from Ovid. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an intensely affecting depiction of a motherâs search for her child, has a haunting image of an older woman seeking work at the village well as a nursemaid, and this influenced my back story for Naucrate, Daedalusâs wife and Icarusâs mother. (Naucrate has a name and a job description, household slave, in Pseudo-Apollodorus, but we donât have much surviving information on her character beyond that.) I learned about an old tradition of reluctance to mention the king of the underworld by name, referring to him only through indirect titles, and worked that into the book as well. While Daedalus, the character, has an extremely dry sense of humor, I did my best to put some jokes in, because there are jokes and boasts and coarse insults in Homer, and because I find people do crack jokes when theyâre under constant stress.
All this research made the book genuinely fun to write, even though itâs a book about things in the world that make me intensely sad and angry. I did my best to make the book fun to read as well. Only an egomaniac would seriously entertain the hope that his work will stick around as long as Homeric verse, but I do like to think about the comfort and collective enjoyment that audiences would have found in hearing very old myths performed and retold centuries ago, including the many, many versions of those myths that havenât survived into the present day. If my own version can provide some of that enjoyment for you, if we can both shake our heads, together, at the terror and grotesquerie and grandeur of the world we inhabit right now, Iâll feel like I did my job.Â
Daedalus is Dead:Â Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-a-Million|Powell’s
Read an excerpt.