Celestial Blue Skies

Thursday, April 10, 2014

It isn't often that I get to visit Creole homes in southwest Louisiana and just listen. I like to tell my friends here in Europe, that New Orleans is a city of tribes who are more or less friendly to one another. Within the black community there are tribes with complex differences, within the white community there are tribes. But the tribe I love the most is the tribe of the heart. Ms. Collins is surely part of that.Celestial Blue Skies is a book of the heart. It describes a Creole family in southwest Louisiana some few years ago, with the authority of an insider. I found myself peering through watery eyes a number of times. Truthful books touch you that way.

Gordon Walmsley

author of Daisy, The Alchemical Adventures of a New Orleans Hermaphrodite

editor of The Copenhagen Review (www.copenhagenreview.com)

Gordan Walmsley, an internationally acclaimed poet, is author the new poetically constructed novel, Daisy, The Alchemical Adventures of a New Orleans Hermaphrodite, published in October, 2013 in Denmark as a limited edition. The book, written partially in prose, partially in verse, has been described by Lee Froehlich, Managing Editor of Playboy, as the "undaisiest of daisys." Gordon grew up in New Orleans ane was graduated from Princeton University and Tulane Law School and has been writing poetry ever since. His latest book of poems Echoes of a River, Poems of New Orleans and Beyond, was published in Ireland by Salmon. The Irish Times wrote: “Walmsley’sspirit of compassion and empathy shines through the pages. The shorter echo poems that are placed like waves in the volume lend a visual interpretative layer that helps the collection in imparting more complex readings ("something can arise / from a wave that falls / among the sounding words". Gordan is married to a Dane and has been living in Denmark for many years. Apart from writing poetry, he edits www.copenhagenreview.com which features a span of excellent writers from relatively unknown aspirants to Nobel Prize winners. He has translated a number of poets from German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, including Tomas Tranströmer, Inger Christiansen and Katarina Frostenson.

Taken from the website: http://www.wordsandmusic.org/Author_Faculty.html

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Maggie Perrodin-Collins

I was born and raised under the clear blue skies of Loreauville, Louisiana. I majored in English at the University of Louisiana and later earned a Master’s degree from the University of New Orleans where I earned the title Educational Diagnostician. I have two boys and a wonderful husband. An excerpt of my novel was published in Louisiana Cultural Vistas. Celestial Blue Skies which was once titled The Curse of the Mulatto was a 2009 finalist finalist for the worldwide William Faulkner William Wisdom writing contest. It also placed as a finalist in the same 2011 competition as Celestial Blue Skies. I am a Center for Black Literature fellow.

Celestial Blue Skies Synopsis

Celestial Blue Skies is a coming of age story about young biracial Celeste who lives in poverty with her mentally ill mother, her grandmother, Maymay, her Aunt Bumblebee, her Uncle T-Red, her three sisters, and her cousins. Celeste learns how to fend for herself and her sisters at a young age while also fighting rumors about her mother, Tut, a sleepy one traffic- light Southwestern Louisiana town. Her mother Tut wants to leave all of them and live with a man she finds working in the sugarcane fields. Maymay fears that Celeste will end up like her mother. Will Celeste end up like her mother, or will she redeem her family from hoodoo and the Curse of the Mulatto? Will she find love herself with someone with a culture just as exotic as hers?