Some trips are easier to communicate from than others, and as previously expressed, I find it very difficult to work on trains.
Last week, I rode from New Orleans to NYC, a two-day trip (in a roomette!). I stared out the window almost the entire time, and made these notes.
They form two lengthy (linked) threads on Twitter, but I will edit them for elegance soon.
However, if you prefer a little more brevity, Travelogues contains 9 substantially shorter train journeys:
I’m very pleased to announce that Brain Jar Press is publishing my next little book Travelogues: vignettes from trains in motion this October 2020 — and it is now available for preorders!
Travelogues is a chapbook which began as a series of threads of descriptions of scenes as they passed by train windows. Now they are collected together into a series of vignettes (many thanks are due to Peter M. Ball for his editing and impetus!).
How can people work on trains? Read on trains? There is so much happening outside!
With these words, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-nominated artist Kathleen Jennings opens the door to a graceful, nuanced world of travel vignettes. With an affinity for words that’s equal to her celebrated artwork, Jennings captures the passing landscape with an illustrator’s eye for detail and a poet’s command of rich language and startling metaphors.
Originally published over the span of three years while travelling across Massachusetts, New York State, and England, Travelogues collects Kathleen’s travel vignettes together for the first time. Each of these nine journeys is infused with wonder and rich, unfamiliar landscapes, and those who climb aboard will forever look at train travel with new eyes.
And the first quote is in — from the excellent CSE Cooney.
Travelogues: Vignettes From Trains in Motion is a poet’s plunge into an oil-slickered, shadow-hung, ivy-clung alternate reality. Jennings’ world is deeply familiar and ultimately alien: a world minutely observed, in fast forward, warped by fairy lenses. Her reflections are relentless, ecstatic, declamatory, are illuminated motion. This whole metaphorical journey-by-rails is a fantasia, a phantasm, at times wistful, at others muscular and machine-like, with the occasional wry aside about the terribleness of the coffee. “Hello, book!” I want to shout. “I know you! And yet, I have never met your like.” Let’s never get to Salisbury. Let this train ride never end.
– C. S. E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans: Stories
All pre-order details are on the Brain Jar Press website: Travelogues is now available for digital pre-orders at the usual online places. Print pre-orders are open through Brain Jar Press’s website (including reasonable US postage). Print pre-orders through other websites should be available within the week, subject to systems updating.
Kathleen Jennings 