Works in Process--Books to Come

I have the corner appliqué to finish on these new 1857 Album blocks from Sentimental Stitches. I will do the embroidery on all of the blocks when the blocks are all finished. I am so enjoying these blocks.

Since making my William Shakespeare portrait I want to make more poet portrait quilts. Next up is Edgar Allan Poe. He was quite a craftsman as a writer. You can read how he wrote The Raven in his Philosophy of Composition here.

I want to drape a 'purple curtain' over the quilt because of the beautiful lines in the Raven: "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain/Thrilled me-- filled me, with fantastic terror never felt before."

Little Hazel by Esther Alui is sadly being neglected. I failed at machine piecing this block and started hand sewing it. I dislike hand sewing (although I like hand appliqué--go figure) and this is as far as I have gotten...a quarter of a block.

I finally started hand quilting my Austen Family Album by Barbara Brackman, finished a year ago. I expect it will take me a year of quilting to finish!

Quilt Books news:

I will be reviewing Suzie Parron's Following the Barn Quilt Trail from Ohio U Press! They are sending me the book. Perfect timing since last month Suzi was at my quilt guild and I took her workshop.

I have Bill Volckening's new book Modern Roots--Today's Quilts from Yesterday's Inspiration from C&T Publications to review. Bill has an amazing quilt collection. You can see his quilts shared on his blog Wonkyworld.

And the Schiffer Publication's books Inspired By The National Parks and Hmong Story Cloths are on my NetGally shelf.

Also, my review of Thomas Knauer's The Quilt Design Coloring Book will come out in August.

Fiction & Nonfiction

I was happy when St. Martin's Press reached out to offer me Lisa Scottoline's new book Damaged. Apparently they liked my review of Corrupted shared on Amazon. Having lived in Philly for 15 years my hubby and I appreciate Scottoline's books for the setting and enjoy her characters and stories.

I am currently reading Mad Enchantment about Monet and his water lily series and the novel Lucky Boy through NetGalley, and from Blogging for Books The Apache War.

Scheduled reviews to come include the Antarctic love story My Last Continent by Midge Raymond; David Abram's Iraqi war novel Fobbit; the Taming of the Shrew re-imagined in the Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler; Larry Tye's new biography of Bobby Kennedy; an exploration of race in Absalom's Daughters by Suzanne Feldman;  Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert; Rae Meadow's Dust Bowl novel I Will Send Rain; the time spanning Mr. Eternity by Aaron Thier; first published in 1864 The Female Detective; The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore (soon to be a movie); The Illustrated Book of Sayings from around the world; and Tara Clancy's memoir The Clancys of Queens.

My NetGalley shelf also holds Victoria:The Queen by Julia Baird; Candace Millard's Hero of the Empire about Churchill during the Boer War; Alice Hoffman's Faithful; The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City by Margaret Creighton about Buffalo, NY during the 1901 Pan American Exhibition; and The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinbourough called "A beautiful book, honestly told" by Neil Gaiman.

Whew! 

New Quilt Idea & 1857 Blocks & Nancy Meets Author of Station Eleven

I loved making William Shakespeare so much I want to do another portrait. I am thinking about fabrics for Edgar Allen Poe.

Last night I attended a talk and Q&A with Emily St. John Mandel whose novel Station Eleven is the 2016 Michigan Reads book. I read her novel last year and again last month for my local book club. Read my review here.

Mandel's presentation was thoughtful and revealing. She walked through how her decision to write Literary Fiction with a strong plot and crime element leading to her being considered a Noir genre writer. To avoid being typecast she wanted to write a novel that was completely different. Her first thought was to write about actors. She also wanted to write about the awesome wonder of our world--the technology that we take for granted. She decided to set up the loss of modern marvels due to a pandemic and traced her research back to ancient Rome when soldiers brought smallpox back to Italy, devastating the population. As it did to the Native American of North America during the earliest days of exploration.

Mandel had first visited Northern Michigan on a book tour to Traverse City and thereafter made excuses to return. The novel is set in the upper section of Michigan's lower peninsula, where the traveling Symphony stays close to the fresh water of the Great Lakes.

I loved the second reading of Station Eleven. I think I helped my book club appreciate some of the themes and messages of the book.

I have completed two more 1857 Album blocks, mostly finished another, and have the fourth ready to appliqué. I also need to add some embroidered details on the bird in the cherry tree.

What is it?

nearly done

ready to go

An Antarctic Mystery by Jules Verne

No doubt the following narrative will be received with entire incredulity, but I think it well that the public should be put in possession of the facts narrated in “An Antarctic Mystery.” The public is free to believe them or not, at its good pleasure.

Thus begins Jeorling's narrative of An Antarctic Mystery.

I follow Garrison Keiler's A Writers Almanac and learned that Sunday, February 8,  was the birthday of Jules Verne. I had read Verne as a kid but have not read him since I was perhaps 13. It was about time to revisit Verne.

I checked around for free e-books and came across An Antarctic Mystery. Being a sucker for polar exploration stories I settled on reading it.


I was happily surprised to learn that it was based on Edgar Allen Poe's 1837 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, using the story and characters in a kind of 1897 version of fan fiction.

Pym was inspired by a news story of a ship that sank. The subtitle is tells it all: Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the America Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group o Islands in the Eight-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Father South to Which that Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.

Verne imagines the captain of the Grampus has a brother who searches for him, and several characters whose deaths were erroneously reported. It would help to read Poe's novel first, but if you don't (I had not read Pym since I was in junior high) Verne offers enough information for the reader to understand the story.

Captain Guy's ship has come into port. American Jeorling is weary of the Desolation Islands and wants to board with the Grampus to get out of town. Guy won't agree to taking him on until he learns that Jeorling is from Connecticut and was familiar with Pym's narrative. Jeorling believes Poe's novel is fiction, although Poe in the novel refers to the story as a history. Guy argues it is fact.

"Captain! Why, that story is due to the powerful imagination of our great poet. It is a pure invention.”
“So, then, you don’t believe it, Mr. Jeorling?” said the captain, shrugging his shoulders three times.
“Neither I nor any other person believes it, Captain Guy, and you are the first I have heard maintain that it was anything but a mere romance.”
“Listen to me, then, Mr. Jeorling, for although this ‘romance’—as you call it—appeared only last year, it is none the less a reality. Although eleven years have elapsed since the facts occurred, they are none the less true, and we still await the ‘word’ of an enigma which will perhaps never be solved.”

It takes a while for Jeorling to change his mind, but he becomes as ardently monomaniacal about finding Pym and Len Guy as the captain. That way lies...shipwreck, mutiny, death, and lurid discoveries. I won't give away the story.

So then it was all true? Edgar Poe’s work was that of an historian, not a writer of romance?

I had great fun reading this book. I remembered my love of Verne's Journey To The Center of The Earth as a kid. The science is inaccurate, sure. The South Pole was not reached until 1911, so Verne in 1897 could imagine a polar world where summer reached 34 degrees and open water ran trough the continent of Antarctica. There is a dramatic rescue of a man overboard. No one would actually jump into the Antarctic sea, or could survive it. Critters and birds abound.


There is racial prejudice typical of Verne's time. The mysterious and heroic 'half-bred' from Indiana is very strange in physic and seemingly impervious to the elements. He has super sharp vision and a gruesome secret. The black cook's teeth shine white, and he is not very intelligent--typical of his race. (Poe's racism is also evident in Pym.)

I sped through the book in two sittings and enjoyed it very much. I loved the idea of Verne's writing a sequel to Poe's book.

To read about Poe's story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Narrative_of_Arthur_Gordon_Pym_of_Nantucket
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2149/2149-h/2149-h.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/24/arthur-gordon-pym-nantucket-edgar-allan-poe-100-novels

To read about Verne's story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Antarctic_Mystery
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10339/10339-h/10339-h.htm

My Grandfather's Edgar Allen Poe

I discovered the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe when I was eleven or twelve. My Grandfather Lynne O. Ramer had a 1904 Commemorative set of the works of Edgar Allan Poe which he had purchased in his college days in the 1920s.

I borrowed those books over and over until Gramps just gave them to me. I most loved the poems, especially The Raven.

"And the silken, sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before..."

Such wonderful language! Such words!

It is hard to imagine my grandfather--a church deacon, engineer, and mathematics professor-- reading Poe. His college library included Vanity Fair by Thackeray and The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Hugo, The Last of the Mohicans by Cooper, essays by Emerson and poetry by Lowell and Wordworth. Poe seems to be a wild card in this library.

When I was older Gramps lent me books of historical fiction (Kenneth Roberts), non-fiction (Arch Merrill's books about early New York State history; I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang) science (Velikovsky's pseudo science book Worlds in Collision); and politics (The Political Plague of America a self published book by someone he knew and which he highly edited in the book). I never knew him to read poetry or fantastic stories.

Strange tales and the macabre' were not new to me. I'd grown up on "Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" television shows! I had seen Hitchcock movies; when my folks went to the drive-in movies I was supposed to be asleep in the back of the car but instead saw "The Birds", "Marnie", and "The Amazing Shrinking Man". (Yes I did have nightmares after viewing these movies.)

I read the stories of terror and horror and the early detective stories. But it was the poems I returned to most often, and this volume shows the most wear of all the set.

 .

Over the next years he gave me a number of books to read. I borrowed 101 Famous Poems so often he also gave it to me. I previously have blogged about at
http://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2013/09/one-hundred-and-one-famous-poems.html

Eventually I inherited most of Gramp's college books, each with his own book mark. As an orphan boy working his way through college he would have had to sacrifice to find the money to buy his precious books.  I always loved his bookmark.

Some great info about Poe and The Raven can be found at
http://knowingpoe.thinkport.org/writer/annotated.asp
and
http://www.poedecoder.com/essays/raven/

A fun but through article on all aspects of The Raven: http://www.shmoop.com/the-raven/

An article that explains why Poe chose to use the pseudonym Quarles when he published The Raven
can be found at http://www.jstor.org/stable/27533122?seq=1

The complete poems of Edgar Allen Poe can be found
at http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/poeraven/poeraven.html

The end of Volume IX  has advertisements including this one for Funk & Wagner's revised and enlarged English Synonyms, Antonyms and Prepositions, "Exquisitely bound in full crushed Levant, gilt edges, hand tooled, raised bands, boxed for $10":

The Wonder of Words!

Have you ever fully realized the wonder and witchery of words? A single word can be a blessing or a curse, an incantation or a prayer, a blow or a caress. And the study of words is thrilling! Thousands of men and women who daily use the English language get no further than a stinted vocabulary, when a little study would soon give them mastery of a vocabulary that would express countless shades of meaning.

That copywriter was right about the power of words. And Poe's poetry is a wonderful example.