Bluebeard's Castle - Softcover

Sagan, Miriam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1732650136 ISBN 13: 9781732650138

Publisher: Red Mountain Press, 2019

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry. "'I did love my father for many years,' Miriam Sagan writes on the first page of BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE, an engaging and probing account of her relationship to her father, a man she calls 'an eccentric misanthrope,' whose 'tantrums were notorious.' Sagan examines her father's impact on her in prose as balanced and amusing as the 'two equal length lists' she made of everything she hated and everything she loved about him, and in lyrical, mystical poems. The 'cache of memory' she draws from includes learning young to converse with a father who disdained small talk in favor of anthropology and Freudian psychology, and the gangsterish family culture centered on the garment business her father inherited and then left in mid-life (and where, as a girl she selected a new coat each season). The sections that consider her own close call with death in her early 20s, from what may have been swine flu, and the fact that her father's intervention probably saved her life, as well as her descriptions of his disintegration the two years before he died, delve deep. If, as Sagan posits, their relationship was a 'koan,' that she could never solve, her depiction of it is nuanced and riveting."--Carol Moldaw

About this title

About the Author

Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 published books, including BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE (Red Mountain Press, 2019), A HUNDRED CUPS OF COFFEE (Tres Chicas Books, 2019), Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon), which won the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, LOVE & DEATH: GREATEST HITS (Tres Chicas Books, 2011), GOSSIP (Tres Chicas Books, 2007), JUST OUTSIDE THE FRAME (Tres Chicas Books, 2005), THE WIDOW'S CAT (Ahsahta Press, 2002) and AEGEAN DOORWAY (Zephyr, 1984). She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2016. Her blog, Miriam's Well, has 1500 daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew's Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland's Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. She is recently returned from Kura Studio, Itoshima, Japan, where she was working on text installations as part of the creative team "Maternal Mitochndria." Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor's award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.

Edition details

• Publisher: Red Mountain Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1732650136
• ISBN 13: 9781732650138
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 114