Mari in the Margins, by Rebecca Gomez

Mari in the Margins: a novel in verse by Rebecca J. Gomez

Bandersnatch Books, release May 2024

So what in the world is a 64 year old man doing reading a book aimed, ostensibly at a middle school audience?

Why, supporting a newer friend and fellow writer, Rebecca Gomez!

That said, even this old man found “Mari in the Margins” a delightful read, and easily one I will push toward my grandkids when they come of age. All the more because I expect my two existing granddaughters (one, one year old, the other still in the bump) to be creative geniuses… As are children in general!

That is the very strength of Mari in the Margins---it takes universal kidhood concern (who am I ---and how can I shine as a creative artist) then fans a message of hope:  “You can do this.”

The story comes with all the hooks.  Mari is a middle-child in her middle-years in a large bicultural family.  (Which in turn adds lots of narrative color.) She keeps a journal. She is looking for her place both inside the family and at school.  A teacher and uncle recognize her skills as a poet, but she is riddled with uncertainty, writer's block, and bound by demands of family.

Now step the the stage, a poetry contest, a little sister (with needs), a best friend, and then a newer friend and potential threat to her established best friend relationship.  Now add to that middle school tension over boys, family dynamics, appendicitis, a sib with a broken leg, and a barf joke or two.  (Gomez keeps the story real to the demographic, without going full on gross.)

All of which made for a lively read, which--with the contest, kept me engaged to the very end.

But the real magic of Mari in the Margins is the author's style, wherein Gomez writes in verse (which oddly doesn't feel like verse) -- at least not the stuffy, labored kind.  Gomez sprinkles the book with sonnets, limericks, rhymed couplets and other forms of overt poetry, but more often treats the reader to fluid prose with lite embellishment, including doodles by the author. It makes for speedy consumption, and young readers are systematically baptized in poetic language and look. They will find themselves thinking (and struggling) like poets. Indeed, they may even grow with Mari as she works through daily life to find her themes.

Beyond that, Gomez pulls the illusion of writing and speaking much like a twelve-year old might, but never would.  I.e. No middle school girl is going to write Mari In the Margins. It takes a skilled middle-aged writer with a clear grasp of form (and adolescent drama) to take on the mantle of our protagonist.  (Now I wonder how much of  this rings true to the author's early life.)

As for me, I was made happy! At this age my reading tends to the heavy and complex. It was refreshing to find innocence and family goodness. I even feel encouraged to write. Or draw!


--

Find out more about Mari and Bandersnatch, HERE

Eremo: by Jeff Johnson and John Van Deusen

Jeff Johnson and John Van Deusen  

Album: Eremo  Release: 2/2024
Genre: Ambient “New Age” in the loose tradition of Philip Glass

Quick spin:
Veteran Celtic-Cinematic key-man Jeff Johnson has teamed with post-punk, neofolk troubadour and keyman John Van Deusen to create a 29 minute “audio-visual” dive into hallowed space, and wide-awake lucid dreaming.

Based on the title (Eremo, Italian for Refuge or Hermitage) and a thought-shaping video by Johnson, I start my audio-visual trek in a forest grotto. I am in a mossy enclave, surrounded by living things. Second listen, I loosen up, visualizing swelling copper-lime seas at sunset. Now I am on to manta rays gliding through Aurora Borealis.

Bridge:
I have walked with Jeff Johnson through numerous collaborations. As a rule, it is easy to tell who is Jeff, and who is non-Jeff. Jeff plays keys, others play violin or flute, guitar. sax, or voice. But now that we have another key man, how do we tell the two apart?

First listen, I am hearing hallmark Jeff… then I hear a most peculiar sound. Jeff has always layered his work, but this subterranean sound is more like scraping paper--Like noise. Then I remember a song by John (because I love John too) that collapses into pure noise.

My guess -- John is responsible for not only peculiar textural elements, but a greater push into audio oddness, like those thudding threshold sounds that make my ears feel like I am driving with one window down.

(Am I right?)

Long Play
When I was a kid, our seventh grade Music teacher introduced us to audio “Mimesis” --- the concept of music imitating or suggesting real world sounds. These sounds might include birdsong, animal cries, trains, explosions, footsteps—anything that makes noise.

And so it is that I came to hear Flight of the Bumblebee, the Grand Canyon Suite (with its donkey clops, wind generators, and thundering cymbals) or the gently rising sun of Morning Mood from the Peer Gynt Suite. (I don't know, does the rising sun have a sound?)





For people less familiar with ambient music, Eremo may stretch their very definition of what music is. How do we speak of a composition that is lean of note, chord and beat --- built on swaths of prismatic sound? Or ---how do we speak of a sound that seems to be like many sounds at once, ever changing.


Eremo is not without grounding elements. Johnson and Van Deusen employ sporadic piano and organ, together with birds, bells, and chimes--heartbeats, buzzers, rustling leaves, garbled tape, seeping water, bubbling pots, green noise, and plenty of space.

Forgive me in that I do not know the right word, but I figure that if 4/4 time signals a brisk steady pace, then Eremo must be built on something akin to 9/10 time. (Is there such a thing?) The entire composition pulses to the rhythm of a long breath. I can literally keep time, breathing in and out…slowly, like I do for the doctor, or when sampling the fragrance of a primal forest.





Inasmuch as both Johnson and Van Deusen are students of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I should not be surprised if they intend Eremo to be suggestive of spiritual realities. But how does an instrumentalist suggest the realm of spirit in sound? Is it the sound of wind or silence or implied light? All I know is that when I listen to this music I come away with a sense of Divine Cohabitation.

God is near. Present. In the mix.

Which does sound peculiar. But I figure: I am in the world. The world (to some extent) is in me. The world is in God (in whom we live and move and have our being.) Indeed God not only holds the Cosmos in his hand, He sustains it, working in and through it.

All of which may sound perfectly lovely---with a twist.

When unleashed by Eremo, I envision not only beautiful things like welling seas and fanning light, I also imagine weird and creepy things, like paramecia and slime mold, jittering atoms, oily light and descending fog. But if God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, he owns too, the centipedes beneath a thousand rocks.  By the time I get to Stage Seven (the final movement) I envision killer whales and angels streaming overhead across a canopy of stars.


Final Note
I hope this doesn't deflate Jeff or John but I have found a new use for Eremo. I can listen to Eremo with headphones, enthralled--turning each layer of sound on my ears... OR, I can play the thing on my low-fi phone by my bed at night - and be knocked out by the second movement.




And so it goes, the sounds of Eremo have become my inner track, by day and night.



Eremo on Jeff Johnson's BandCamp with added links to video

and for marvels from Van Deusen, click HEAR:)