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An interactive media kit to promote Sydney Lea's fourth collection of lyrical essays.
Citation preview
What’s the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long
a new essay collection from Sydney Lea
coming fall 2015
The fourth essay collection from one of our time’s most ac-
complished authors, What’s the Story? is the kind of collection
readers will treasure as a handbook of human wisdom.
In brief yet poignant and lyrical essays with titles from “Ad-
olescence” and “Forgiveness” to “The Beast in the Jungle”
and “American Dream”, Lea reflects on his life experiences in
search of discords and overlaps between the world as he has
perceived it and the so-called “real” world.
Annie Proulx has called Lea’s work “so good it hurts to read,”;
to Ron Carlson it is “substantial and gracious…something
with the long reach of other eras.” But Lea’s own words, when
speaking of his younger self in “Adolescence”, can sum up the
value of What’s the Story?:
Sydney Lea is Vermont’s 2011-2015 Poet Laureate. He has published numerous books in multiple genres, among them Pursuit of a Wound, a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He is the founder of New England Review and has been award-ed Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Gug-genheim fellowships; he has taught at Darthmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Ver-mont, and Middlebury colleges, as well as at Switzerland’s Franklin College and Budapest’s National Hungarian University. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have ap-peared in The New Yorker, The Atlan-tic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than fifty anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, and he is active both in community literacy efforts and in environmental conservation. Read more at sydneylea.net.
“He’d never have prophesied these after-moments, which
would wait for ages, and then come at him in a rush. So far
from resenting them, he’d come to cherish his elders for
having trodden certain paths before him…When his daugh-
ters and sons were little, when they nattered or fumed, he
needed—as he couldn’t have guessed, either, those decades
ago—to pray for some animating reference. He needs it to
this day: some flash, some silvery flume.”
Media kit for What’s the Story?, by Sydney Lea — coming fall 2015 from Green Writers Press
SAMPLED MEDIA
An excerpt of Lea’s interview with Im-age Journal
Image: You play the harmonica, specifically the blues harp. What is it about the blues—or music in general—that feeds you as a writer?
Lea: Now it’s been a long time since I took that harp out of its drawer. I don’t even sing (or “shout”) the blues any-more in public. I think of myself really as a long-time fan of blues and blues-based music—especially the jazz of the late bop, Monk-Rollins-Coltrane-Davis-Roach-Adderley Brothers era—rather than as a practitioner.…
Image: Besides music, what other experiences or influences served to shape you into a writer and not something else?
Lea: My profoundest influences have not, I think, been lit-erary in the sense that an academician might use the term. Oh yes, there’s Wordsworth and Keats and Dickinson and perhaps above all Frost, and I don’t for a moment want to pretend that these voices have, even when not evidently, been crucial to shaping my own. But the voices I hear in my head every day are ones I started hearing at the dawn of memory: those of old woodsmen and women in upper New England …
An excerpt of Lea’s interview with The Dooryard
The Dooryard: How do you find your poetry translates to a performative medium? Does its meaning evolve over performances?
Lea: My sort of poetry, I hope, like my model Robert Frost’s, is easy to enter into. By this (I also hope) I don’t mean it’s simplistic. Lord knows Frost’s was not! It’s that I trust I’m clear in a poem as to who’s talking, to whom, and why.…
The Dooryard: You’ve published in many genres, including a novel. Do you anticipate writing another long work of fiction?
Lea: I have been approaching and avoiding and approach-ing and avoiding the sequel to that first novel ever since 1997. I have a draft, I know its weaknesses, and I think I know what to do about them.
So it’s hard to say where the avoidance comes from.…
Radio & Public Appearances
— Interview on Write the Book with Shelagh Shapiro
— Interview on The Student Operated Press with Judyth Piazza
Lea at the New York State Writers Institute in 2013
Lea at the Burlington Book Festival in 2012
Media kit for What’s the Story?, by Sydney Lea — coming fall 2015 from Green Writers Press
ContactSydney Lea
www.sydneylea.net [email protected]
Publisher of What’s the Story?greenwriterspress.com