I went to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop with Robert Levy back in 2006. He was one of my favorite people there -- there was something so peaceful, accepting, understanding, and intelligent about both this calm young man and his writing, and I felt rather graced by his presence. His novel The Glittering World came out in 2015, and it is so much the same way.
The story is about four friends/lovers who travel from New York to Cape Breton in Canada to sell a house. With them, they bring all their deepest emotions -- from profound devotion to deepest regret to the unrequited longing that haunts most human lives -- and these are sculpted into life by the otherworldly creatures that inhabit the wilderness surrounding them.
There are four sections to the book, each from a point of view from the four characters. I found it a relief that this wasn't a particularly strongly driven plot -- some story lines end up ambiguously unresolved, like our real lives. Too, like our real lives, the horror of this tale derive from the character's own foibles and histories. I liked very much that each section of the book brought each character more and more to life, making both them and the story more interesting -- so that by the time I got to the end, it felt not only riveting, but true.
Well done, my friend. Well done.
Lessons for writers: (Well, the obvious one is that I need to work harder on my own writing. Could I have gotten a novel out in ten years if I had put more effort into it? Yes. Let's make the next ten years work better, shall we? Okay: enough with envy.) But the important lessons for writers here is that our shadows really are our stories. Thank you again, Robert.
This is a wonderful book, so you might read it and visit Robert Levy here.
The story is about four friends/lovers who travel from New York to Cape Breton in Canada to sell a house. With them, they bring all their deepest emotions -- from profound devotion to deepest regret to the unrequited longing that haunts most human lives -- and these are sculpted into life by the otherworldly creatures that inhabit the wilderness surrounding them.
There are four sections to the book, each from a point of view from the four characters. I found it a relief that this wasn't a particularly strongly driven plot -- some story lines end up ambiguously unresolved, like our real lives. Too, like our real lives, the horror of this tale derive from the character's own foibles and histories. I liked very much that each section of the book brought each character more and more to life, making both them and the story more interesting -- so that by the time I got to the end, it felt not only riveting, but true.
Well done, my friend. Well done.
Lessons for writers: (Well, the obvious one is that I need to work harder on my own writing. Could I have gotten a novel out in ten years if I had put more effort into it? Yes. Let's make the next ten years work better, shall we? Okay: enough with envy.) But the important lessons for writers here is that our shadows really are our stories. Thank you again, Robert.
This is a wonderful book, so you might read it and visit Robert Levy here.
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