Science trumps magical thinking: there was a reason the Incas called their mercury mine ‘la mina de los muertos,’ the mine of the dead. Building a life and a community upon principles that ignore such realities is doomed to fail. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
Eliza Factor’s first novel, ‘The Mercury Fountain,’ explores what happens when a life driven by ideology confronts implacable truths of science and human nature. It also shows how leaders can inflict damage by neglecting the real needs of real people. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
In 1964, at the age of 39, Flannery O’Connor died from complications of lupus. She had lived with this autoimmune disease for 14 years, primarily confined to her mother’s farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, ‘Flannery’ will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
Flannery O’Connor’s brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
When Beverly and I got together in 1992, and I moved to be with her in the little round house she’d built in the middle of 20 acres of woods near Amity, I found myself immersed in a natural setting that I responded to with all my being. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
I feel that I’m a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it’s the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression – these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves. Floyd Skloot Read Quote
