Quintet : Themes & Variations [Paperback]

Jean Mallinson (Author), Sue Nevill (Author), Eileen Kernaghan (Author), Pam Galloway (Author), Clelie Rich (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Ekstasis ed; 1 edition (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1896860257
• ISBN-13: 978-1896860251
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,810,430 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew on a dairy farm outside Grindrod, B.C., Canada, population 600. A solitary child, I worked my way
several times through the family bookshelves -- Greek myths, Jack London, G.A Henty's ripping yarns, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Book of the Month Club bodice rippers. And then one day I came across my uncle's musty collection of Weird Tales and Thrilling Wonder Stories. While my contemporaries read Nancy Drew,I was lost in the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Jack Vance: tales of vanished civilizations, fabulous cities of antiquity, wars and wizardry at the end of time. The moment I stumbled across those yellowing pulp magazines, my future career was decided.

My first published story, written when I was eleven, was a rousing tale about a boy trapper in the north woods. It earned me a byline, a half--page illustration, and a cheque for $12.65.

My first published SF story, "Starcult' (written after a twenty year hiatus) sold to Galaxy magazine. My next two or three stories accumulated so many rejection slips that in despair I decided to write a novel. Remembering my early love affair with lost civilizations, I wrote the first of my "Grey Isles" trilogy, a bronze age fantasy called Journey to Aprilioth. That one, and the next two in the series, Songs from the Drowned Lands and The Sarsen Witch, sold to Ace Books and appeared during the eighties.

Along the way I co-authored a writer's handbook for the pacific northwest, and a non-fiction book on reincarnation and past life experience, Walking After Midnight. Out of the research into Walking After Midnight came my first young adult fantasy, Dance of the Snow Dragon, set in 18th century Bhutan, and based on Tibetan Buddhist mythology. An adult spin-off, "Dragon-Rain", later appeared in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Ninth Annual Collection.

My young adult fantasy The Snow Queen, is a reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale. It gives the story a feminist twist, and incorporates northern shamanism and some elements of the Finnish myth cycle, the Kalevala. The Snow Queen won an Aurora Award for the best English language Canadian novel, and was shortlisted for the Canadian Library Association's Children's Book of the Year award. It was followed in 2004 by The Alchemist's Daughter, an historical YA fantasy set in Elizabethan England. My latest adult fantasy is Winter on the Plain of Ghosts: a novel of Mohenjo-daro. Set in the prehistoric Indus Valley, it's an homage to those fabulous cities of antiquity that held me spellbound so many decades ago.

Wild Talent, set in London and Paris circa 1888-89, is my most recent YA historical fantasy, released in 2008. Madame Blavatsky, William Butler Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Alexandra David Neel all make guest appearances.

What else? I've published fiction and poetry in a variety of magazines and anthologies, both mainstream and speculative, in the U.S. and Canada. I've been a member of a five-woman poetry group called Quintet, and in 1998 we published our first collection, Quintet: Themes and Variations. Some of those poems also appear in my speculative poetry collection Tales From the Holograph Woods (Wattle & Daub Books 2009). I also belong to The Lonely Cry -- a group of west coast SF and fantasy writers who have banded together to promote our work by whatever means we can devise. I conduct two long-established writing workshops in the Vancouver BC area, and for twelve years I ran a used bookstore with my husband Pat. We have three grown children and four grandchildren, and live in New Westminster B.C. (next door to Vancouver) with an eccentric cat.


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5.0 out of 5 stars Links, October 15, 1998

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This review is from: Quintet : Themes & Variations (Paperback)

 October 13, 1998 For those into quick reviews: This is the best anthology I have read in ten years, perhaps closer to twenty. From the jacket copy, "Each section of the book takes its impulse from a particular theme, and these themes are linked within the manuscript in a renga-like fashion." After reading the book, I went back to a book (Renga: A CHAIN OF POEMS) which Octavio Paz and three others did in 1971 which seemed an analog, of sorts. Aside from the chain aspect, the books have little in common, but, as usual, Paz' introductory essay is valuable: The element of combination consists in the making of a poem by a group of poets; following a circular order, each poet in succession writes his stanza in turn, and his intervention is repeated several times. It is a movement of rotation, which little by little, delineates the text, from which neither calculation nor chance I will go further: It is a movement in whichis excluded. " calculation prepares for the appearance of chance. I underline that the renga is not a combination of signs, but a combination of makers of signs: of poets. At another point, Paz, obliquely suggests that the linking is a westernization of an eastern idea, despite his own version of the convention. QUINTET, given both themes and variations, is perhaps closer to western Baroque music than the original concept of renga. Enough yap about theory. Let a mid-book selection speak as synecdoche: "If Only If only I had a name like Born-With-a-Tooth. If only I, too, could enjoy a remarkable Indian summer. If only my diary could replace my life. If only my diary were not replacing my life. If only I lived between the lines of a pastoral poem. If only I lived between the lines of any poem. If only I could pull myself up by my bootstraps. If only I had bootstraps. If only I could understand the deep structure of my computer, of myself, my children. If only I could remember the meaning of ‛strange attractor.' If only most of the men I love were not dead white males. If only God were watching me. If only God were not watching me. If only I could remember Indo-European roots. If only postmodernism would go away. If only ism would go away. If only I had written , La chaire est triste, hélas, et j'‛ai lu tous les livres. If only an angel would appar to me as one did to Caedmon and command, 'Sing me something.' If only I knew how Sir Thomas More really pronounced 'custard.' If only I could be mad and eloquent like Kit Smart-but then I'd be put away, as he was. If only I could write "‛Heighho', yawned one day King Francis"and not be thought precious and archaic. If only there were some way to end and open-ended poem." -Jean Mallinson J. Michael Yates