From the Introduction to Finding the Lost Country: The Life of William Gay
“Some folks dwell in the shadow realms of the creative imagination, where synchronicity is as common as day and night, as sunlight and moonglow. William Gay and J.M. White are anomalies. There is no rational explaining of their lives, of their works. The self-educated William Gay became a master of the Southern Gothic novel. The erudite J.M White did graduate study in Phenomenology at Duquesne University, holds an M.A. in philosophy from Vanderbilt, and is the author of eighteen books of poetry, essays, and biographies. The story of how Gay and White became friends and then White discovered, edited and published Gay’s lost manuscripts is real literary magic, a thing of mysterious beauty FINDING THE LOST COUNTRY: The Life of William Gay by J.M. White, written in an accessible conversational style, is storytelling at its best, a gift, a masterpiece.”
—Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate
Francine by Joe Taylor
Francine by Joe Taylor is the story of the illegitimate daughter of René Descartes and Helena Jans van der Strom, a bookseller’s maid. At the age of five Francine died from scarlet fever. Descartes was devastated. Just two years later, he provided Helena with a dowry so she might marry a tavern owner, and one year after that he remained so obsessed with Francine that he created an automaton resembling her. Automatons were something in the air at the time, and they fascinated Europe with flute-playing and harp-plucking homunculi. Descartes carried this automaton around with him for four additional years, but when he loaded his “Francine” onto a boat that underwent a long and terrific storm, the sailors connected “Francine” with witchcraft and threw the automaton overboard. Taylor’s imagining is that she had been covertly alive, and that her sinking into the sea and her seeming death by drowning offered her freedom to live many centuries until our present time.
—From Livingston Press
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