An update from the editors of The Seasloth Review:
It may be the dog days of August, but here at The Seasloth we have been hard at work and are excited to share some wonderful news.
As many readers know, Lauden McVey was a shining star of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Her novels routinely appear on lists of the best mysteries, and she is widely ranked among the top ten crime writers of the twentieth century. Her masterpiece, Death Comes to Kellings, which we were proud to feature earlier this year, has sold over 3,000 copies worldwide and has recently been translated into Slovak. You can read a review here.
Less well known is that, under the pen name Darcy Andrews, McVey also wrote classic stories for girls. Highly sought after in second-hand bookshops and thrift stores — where lucky readers might occasionally unearth a battered, precious copy at a bargain price — these first editions are now fiercely prized both by legions of nostalgic readers and those eager to explore the genre.
While the first book in the series – Beryl Goes to School is currently being serialized by the inestimable Rattlebag and Rhubarb, we have an even bigger announcement. Megan Juniper, chief editor at Barbecue Books, has just revealed that they will be publishing the first three books in the series. Joanie Offpiste has caught a glimpse of the books in production and is thrilled by the love and attention Barbecue Books is pouring into them.
Offpiste’s essay on the series — which reads the Andrews girls’ boarding-school adventures as a site of unexamined imperial nostalgia, arguing that their tidy hierarchies of prefects, dormitories, and “foreign” and scholarship girls quietly restage the administrative logic of empire even as they profess only to entertain — will be appearing right here at The Seasloth. Expect footnotes.
We are also delighted to bring you a little summer joy from C. Langley Dunwood, who has been enjoying some well-deserved downtime on Cape Cod. She may be on vacation, but her creative energy remains unstoppable. She sent us the gorgeous poem below, and we are honored to showcase it here.
While we eagerly await Fionella Crane’s groundbreaking interview with Dunwood, we can dive into this beautiful meditation on the porous threshold between being and making, where paint, water, body, and memory engage in deep dialogue. The poem interrogates the unstable boundary between representation and reality through recurring imagery of disappearance, failure, and refusal. It is a work that understands that nothing is merely itself. It is rare to encounter such luminous liminality rendered with such quiet, oceanic profundity.
Enjoy.
August: The Beach
The horizon bleeds,
a thin grey seam
far past the swimmers.
You sit with the hat’s soft brim
making shade of your face.
Three brushes stand in the sand
like small flags put down
for a country no one will claim.
The wheel is gone.
Even absence
has its circumference.
The clay, the centered hands,
the patient turning—
all of it belongs
to another season.
August brings its equipment:
the shoulder’s dull complaint,
the canvas chair sinking a little,
the cup holder carrying
a jar of seawater
clouded with paint-wash.
You say you are painting the bay.
But the bay will not stay.
It gathers itself in green-gray folds,
rises, whitens, breaks —
that brief white shock
before the water fractures
and draws back —
then withdraws
as though it has remembered
something it should not
have shown you.
Each wave arrives
bearing the news
of its own disappearance,
a news the water
cannot stop making.
Not foam, exactly,
but the body of the wave
giving up its body.
Leave it, you think.
Leave it for Art.
Instead: the old paints.
Surface cracked.
Their colors muddled
into a kind of weather.
She said to throw them away.
She said some things were finished
even when they still had color in them.
You understood, or almost.
The sea declined
to clarify.
The wind lifts the page.
The wash dries too quickly.
A line appears where you did not mean it.
Another disappears
before you can decide
whether it was true.
Above the water, slate.
Below it, weight.
You mix blue with sand,
with the dampness on your thumb,
with whatever the day
has given you.
It is not the sky’s blue.
It is better
for having failed to be the sky.
It has failed
into another truth.
By noon, cobalt on your thumb
marks the cuticle,
the crease of the hand.
At your feet, the bay redraws
its temporary border.
The black flies circle.
Your wrist burns.
The light is almost unbearable.
All of it goes in:
the ache,
the glare,
the ruined paint,
the water refusing
to settle into a name,
the body’s small weather,
the bay’s refusal
to remain a bay—
though it keeps returning
under that name.
Featured image: Detail from Milton Avery Beach Scene