It’s
P’kaboo Publishing
Sunday! Make sure to visit
P’kaboo.net for all the fresh crispy reads!
Author, Marie Marshall
I’m a middle-aged, Anglo-Scottish author, poet, and editor who likes
her written works to speak for her. When asked for a bio I usually reply
with a version of the famous telegram sent by the artist Balthus:
“NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: MARIE MARSHALL IS AN AUTHOR OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US READ THE BOOKS. REGARDS. M.”
And that’ll have to do! ~ From her
Amazon author page.
Marshall’s the name, writing’s the game. It really is as simple as
that. I don’t talk much about myself – I’m a very private person – I let
my writing speak for me. My basics are this: I’m middle-aged, Scottish
(though born and brought up in England), and have been writing since
2004.
Ah – writing! Now you’re talking! How did it all begin? Let me see…
I’m confused. Maybe that’s something to do with growing old. I’m
trying hard to remember whether it was a friend saying to me “You should
write a novel about a female gladiator,” or saying “I have an idea for a
short story for you to write,” or pointing me to a BBC writing
competition, or my accidentally happening upon an on-line community of
women writing love poetry, or my happening on a blog of erotic stories
and reckoning I could write better…
Author, Marie Marshall. A photo from her Twitter page
Och, help ma boab, I cannae remember. It was one of those anyway…
Here in Scotland I’m best known for my macabre short stories. Since
2008 I have been amongst the winners of the ‘Fearie Tales’ competition
(yes, that’s ‘fearie’ not ‘faerie’) at the
Winter Words festival no fewer than six times – tales such as
Chagrin where an old man remembers a demon lover,
Vae Victis in which horror comes in the night to Rome’s northernmost outpost,
The Place of Safety which blended love with magic and insanity,
On the Platform set in a haunted railway station,
Da Trow i’ da Waa in which old stones are possessed, and
Voices
in which a scientist sets up equipment on a mountaintop to measure
‘random voice phenomenon’. All these and more, by the way, will be
published in a collection soon by
Honeymead Books.
I really want to be known as a novelist. So far I have written four,
three of which have been published. I’ve slightly painted myself into a
corner there, because I have allowed the direction of my novel-writing
to be… hmmm… not quite dictated by others but at the very least
influenced.
That initial suggestion from a friend that I write a novel about a female gladiator – that developed into my first novel
Lupa.
My second novel,
The Everywhen Angels, came about when I
dared to criticise the Harry Potter novels to a group of friends who
were all dedicated fans. They said I would only have the right to make
such criticism if I could myself write a fantasy set in a school. I took
up that challenge, met it head on, and produced a stand-alone novel
that I would say is every bit as good as any by my illustrious
compatriot!
My third,
From My Cold, Undead Hand was a direct response to my publisher’s request for a ‘teen-vampire’ novel, and my fourth,
KWIREBOY vs VAMPIRE, is the sequel to that.
I am writing a fifth novel now, purely of my own devising, written in
an unusual style, with a nod to twentieth-century modernism. I won’t
give you any spoilers, but sometimes I feel, as I write it, that it’s
actually a novel-length prose-poem…
I suppose I am best known, more widely, as a poet, either through my two published collections,
Naked in the sea and
I am not a fish, or more specifically through my regular blogging.
I try to write a fragment of poetry every day, and share it on line.
Some fragments are better than others, of course, but the exercise
itself sharpens my use of language and hones my power of expression.
I have also worked as a poetry editor. I started out, as I said,
writing love poetry with a collection of other women. In the beginning I
wrote what can loosely be described as ‘free verse’, but I soon began
to develop a love of shape and structure, and taught myself to write
formal poetry.
When that had given me a stiff boost of technical power, I returned
to free verse, and to more experimental forms of writing. I tend now to
present my on-line poems in a stark Courier font, as png or jpg images;
this forces me to concentrate on the words rather than any fancy-dan
mixed-media gizmos.
Really, however, I don’t construct any ‘Chinese walls’ between one
sort of writing or writing-related activity and another. My poetry and
my novels are one, my short stories and my articles are one, my
authorship and my editorship are one.
What more do you need to know? Ask me and see what I say!
***
Facebook
Marie Marshall – writer and poet
Twitter
@MairibheagM
http://mairibheag.com/
https://kvennarad.wordpress.com/
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0042G7D4Y
http://www.amazon.fr/-/e/B0042G7D4Y
http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B0042G7D4Y
https://spacewalk101.wordpress.com/
https://ladywotwrites.wordpress.com/
https://lithopoesis.wordpress.com/
https://thezenspace.wordpress.com/
Thanks for popping in to meet Marie. If you love poetry, you will want to follow her blogs!
;-)
Silver Threading
What they say:
