THE HOUSE OF PAPER | Carlos Maria Dominguez

August 14, 2015 Mark Roger Bailey

Highly visual story. I read it in one sitting, closed the back cover satisfied and better for having read it.

Intuition

August 9, 2015 Mark Roger Bailey

Trust your intution . . . it doesn't lie. A sense of otherness can guide us across the frontier of human story possibilities.

TATIANA | Martin Cruz Smith

April 9, 2015 Mark Roger Bailey

Martin Cruz Smith writes novels that consistently engage readers, expand their experience of the world and resonate long afterward.

SKROWERIF | Knate Myers

January 9, 2015 Mark Roger Bailey

Knate Myers is a photographer and artist who creates multimedia experiences with images, motion and music. He is also an accomplished videographer. This piece reminds me of the way Explosions In The Sky's music transports us.

In SKROWERIF, Knate demonstrates that he is at home with metaphor. Don't think about it too much, just enjoy.

Thanks, Knate, for sharing your remarkable work.

... Music used with permission: "An Ocean Tumbled By" - Lowercase Noises http://www.lowercasenoises.com/ http://www.facebook.com/lowercasenoises www.facebook.com/kn8photo

NO GREAT MISCHIEF | Alistair MacLeod

December 7, 2014 Mark Roger Bailey

As I begin to tell this, it is the golden month of September in southwestern Ontario. In the splendid autumn sunshine the bounty of the land is almost overwhelming, as if it is the manifestation of a poem by Keats.

MacLeod’s opening lines had me straight away. I trust him. Like his fellow Canadian, Farley Mowat, he tells it simply. This is a deeply felt, passionately imagined and beautifully written novel.

MacLeod's truth isn’t simple; it is complex, nuanced, seasoned over time to a depth and richness that calls to us in our unguarded moments. And his voice is authentic, like the family myths that knit our experience to the lives of our parents, their parents and those who preceeded them.

He continues in a responsive son-sibling-nephew voice that dutifully cares for imperfect elders without judgement. He cares for his family members and his past, yet never drifts into sentimentality. He doesn’t question his role. He accepts his responsibility to his inherited DNA, his red hair and innate talent for epic songs. He embraces his obligation to his living relations. And he contentedly shoulders his obligations to the future of his clan Chalum Ruaidh.

This novel celebrates writing and one of North America’s and Scotland’s hardy family histories. It will endure.

Call of the Writing

September 21, 2014 Mark Roger Bailey

Imagine how rewarding it could be to have a tradition of sharing the day’s pages with a few fellow writers around the fire as Jack London did early last century at Wolf’s Lair.

He’d read aloud what he had written that day and get real-time reactions from friends. If Buck’s howl resonated in the imaginations of his listeners, then the passage succeeded. Buck’s extraordinary connection with his canine ancestors as he dreamt of freer days in the pages of the manuscript that would become Call of the Wild (published 1903) came alive in the flickering darkness and Jack knew that what compelled him had found its voice; his pen had touched truth that morning. When that happened, imagine his excitement. He had penetrated the universal heart and borrowed a pulse or two of Life.

That arrangement among fellow writers was unusual back then. In today’s publishing market where only ‘finished’ manuscripts are read by agents or editors, much less published, it may be vital to a writer’s survival.

THE CAT'S TABLE | Michael Ondaatje

February 2, 2014 Mark Roger Bailey

Occasionally, writing penetrates the walls we build around ourselves, opens the windows to let sunlight in, and reminds us of who we are, what events shaped us, and hints how we got to this particular place. Michael Ondaatje’s writing does this for me.

Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

This truth, a defining presence in Ondaatje’s writings, is a powerful current in the flow of this novel. The Cat’s Table is understated and life-affirming, with a cast of characters that capture a lifetime of experiences during several weeks at sea.

THE BIRD ARTIST | Howard Norman

September 24, 2013 Mark Roger Bailey

Fabian Vas is a young man with talent and a passion for sketching and painting birds in turn-of-the-century coastal Newfoundland.

His powers of observation are so finely tuned that he rarely needs to describe events. He simply lives them and, in so doing, brings every scene alive. A complex achievement skillfully executed by Howard Norman.

It is written in a stripped-down style that inspires colorful notions and emotions. The characters are vivid, flawed and fun to know.

National Book Award Finalist

The Bird Artist: A Novel

BEYOND THESE WOODS | Mark Roger Bailey

September 17, 2013 Mark Roger Bailey

Announcing the release of my new novel and an exciting new character: Beyond These Woods featuring epidemiologist and rogue scientific gadfly, Dr. Lotte Keene.

Voyager Rewrites What We Know About the Universe

September 12, 2013 Mark Roger Bailey

Like a good blog thread, the Voyager 1 spacecraft keeps surprising us with startling new insights that help us navigate the universe. Scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA announced today that Voyager I has left our solar system and continues to send data about its discoveries back to us. The spacecraft was launched from Earth 36 years ago.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Voyager 1 File

IT'S FINE BY ME | Per Petterson

May 23, 2013 Mark Roger Bailey

True, Lonely, and Uplifting

Rare is the author or his/her work that I can order sight unseen and know. Know that the book will be a permanent presence on my shelf of quality literature, revisited and reread often. Per Petterson’s novels are among the rarest for me.

I promised myself that I would understate these observations about Petterson’s third book, the novel, IT’S FINE BY ME (1992), but I’ve failed already.

With exceptions for love and great ambition, restraint is a desirable quality in most things. Writing, in particular. Petterson’s mastery of restraint shows in his spare use of adjectives, and his refusal to embellish any description of setting or action. He simply writes what is, what happens, period. It’s up to us to figure out the why of it. Just like life. And he does this without affectation or apparent effort, which reinforces his credibility with the reader and simultaneously sets the stage for profound, moving and often tender human insight.

Audun Sletten is Petterson’s 13-year old protagonist in IT’S FINE BY ME, a working-class teen who identifies with Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, and is annoyed by adult hypocrisies, and his sister’s choice of her James Dean wannabe boyfriend. He has outgrown the rules of childhood and is experiencing the contradictions of adulthood as he strives to understand his emerging identity, which is being defined as he responds to the messes that parents, sisters, friends, strangers and co-workers create for themselves. The culture of adulthood is a strange and chaotic bazaar of public selves and private rules that his elders seem to have accommodated in their own failed personal dreams of freedom and success. In this world seen through Audun’s adolescent senses, adulthood is life lived under a succession of truces in which the line between what might be and what is shifts and morphs like light under water.

Previous Reviews of Per Petterson’s works:

IN THE WAKE

OUT STEALING HORSES

A trained librarian, Petterson worked as a bookstore clerk, translator and literary critic before he became a full-time writer. He cites Knut Hamsun and Raymond Carver among his influences.