Thoughts on Holding a New Book (A Cynthia Post)

First -- wow, so handsome!

Brilliant colours, striking design. Book sits well in the hand. Interior design very clean, clear. No typos visible. Table of contents -- looks to me like a curious bunch of story titles. Acknowledgments -- warm feelings about all those good people in my life. Roses, roses all the way. . . .

Second -- but so small! The English Stories is tiny.

Under my desk there's a big plastic tub file full of notes (pigs, NFB, hedgeteachers, how glass fails, minor Victorian poets), notebooks and notebooks, handwritten drafts, country and city maps, yellow lined pads thick with quotations (Bible, Eliot, Wodehouse, Shakespeare), a pack of index cards on the history of Ireland, computer printouts, correspondence with magazine editors, printouts of emails, schoolgirls' stories, reminders about Henry VIII and Anglicanism, letters to and from English friends, litmags that originally published some of the stories, 1950s women's mags and Punch and The Countryman, handwritten paragraphs taped together with computer-printed bits, newsletters from Canadian and English schools, more drafts, more drafts, more.

And that's only one box. There's also a file drawer for English Stories, and another box.

A bunch of years are compressed into this little book, too, for the first story appeared in Event in 1993. Quite a long time, in one life.

What to say?

Here's the new book, and I'm happy.