TomeTender Giveaway and Great New Review of THE YEAR OF LOVING
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TomeTender Giveaway and Great New Review of THE YEAR OF LOVING

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TomeTender Giveaway

TomeTender Giveaway!

The wonderful and lively TomeTender Book Blog is hosting a giveaway of 2 eBook copies of THE YEAR OF LOVING! What fun! It ends on November 25.

I really enjoy the reviews on TomeTender–they’re very well-written and thoughtful. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that TomeTender gave THE YEAR OF LOVING 5* and called my novel a “Must Read”!

Also, the Romantic Fanatic Book Blog gave THE YEAR OF LOVING 5*!

Brave One wrote,

Great book with a main character that I’m not sure how she keeps going. A few time in this story I was waiting for her to give up, I think most people would with everything she was dealing with. I liked how the author kept me wondering what now!! Boy she didn’t let me down either. This book has great ups and big downs and yes I cried a few times.  The author makes this like a friend that you taking with and helping on this path. Great story!!

https://twitter.com/tracilslatton/status/798890271069114368

Take a look for yourself, and good luck if you enter the Giveaway!

Arrival, A Beautiful Movie
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Arrival, A Beautiful Movie

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Arrival, a beautiful movie

The movie opens with a reverie about time and memory, set in a scene of love, the love a mother feels for her child, and loss. The images fade. Louise, a professor of languages, goes to her university to teach. The students are mesmerized by news on their laptops: twelve shell-shaped black space ships have landed around the world. This happens with slow and quiet dread, not with bombast. Louise is tapped by the military to try to communicate with the aliens.

There follows a thoughtful, absorbing story about the frustrations inherent in communication. Louise is tasked with finding out where they came from and most importantly, why they’re here. But the aliens’ language isn’t even sound-based–it’s written in smoke. The aliens produce feathery circular symbols.

While Louise is on the makeshift military base set up around a shell in Montana, she experiences memories of her beloved daughter, who has seemingly died of a rare, incurable illness.

The secret to the aliens’ language is its oneness. An entire thought complex can be seen at once; their language doesn’t begin and end over a period of time. In the way that language shapes thought, all time is one for the aliens.

And so Louise is feeling and inhabiting this oneness. The closing question is heartfelt and poignant, and one I’ve pondered: If you knew in advance everything in your life, how it would all play out, would you choose to do it anyway?

Losing a child is the hardest thing any parent can face. So if the parent knew beforehand about the loss, would she choose to have the child anyway, just for the journey of loving the child for however many years the child was with her?

A question worth pondering asked by a movie worth seeing.

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Two Excellent Reviews of THE YEAR OF LOVING
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Two Excellent Reviews of THE YEAR OF LOVING

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Two excellent reviews of THE YEAR OF LOVING

Two of my favorite book review blogs posted reviews of THE YEAR OF LOVING, and they were great reviews.

Tome Tender Book Blog, whose tag line is “When it comes to books, who needs shelf control”–a sentiment with which I heartily agree–ran the most beautiful review yesterday. The review started off by saying “In two words I can give my recommendation of Traci L. Slatton’s The Year of Loving. READ IT!”

Well, those words are music to a novelist’s ears!

About the love triangle, Dii the reviewer wrote,

Two men want Sarah, one is far too young, self-absorbed in his own life, one is older, powerful and used to taking control of every situation. While both have their good sides, Sarah is not ready to commit to anyone until she can rein in her own personal issues. For anyone who has ever felt like it is you against the world, like your heart is being stabbed repeatedly with a rusty blade or like a cockroach under someone’s shoe, you will relate to Sarah in all her flawed glory.

It delighted me that Dii got that love triangle so perfectly.

Dii wrote with great compassion about the character of Sarah and her troubles with her daughters:

Traci L. Slatton has NOT created a Shrinking Violet in Sarah, or a woman who spends her energy wallowing in self-pity. Sarah is a strong woman, vital and oh my, her wickedly wry sense of humor is priceless! Her headstrong determination sometimes is her worst enemy, but hey, no one is perfect. I almost needed a leather strap to bite on when she tangled with her daughters and their callous attitudes when her concern WAS to be a good parent who tried to set high standards for them, knowing she was powerless to help them see that her boundaries were far healthier than their father’s “gifts.” Another connecting point for so many. Love her, hate her, Sarah is real, she feels, she tries to do what is right, no matter what, but she is a woman alone and she recognizes that, too, no excuses, no apologies.

It thrilled me to read this review because Dii had perfectly understood what I was trying to do with this story and its characters. It’s gratifying all the way into the mitochondria of my cells!

So check out this wonderful blog and the review here.

Tome Tender's excellent review of The Year of Loving

Sandy at The Reading Cafe called THE YEAR OF LOVING “realistic, revealing and sensitive.”

THE YEAR OF LOVING is a story of hardships and struggles; embittered exes, and troubled and rebellious teens caught between the destructive nature of battling parents. Traci L. Slatton writes a tale of one woman’s emotional journey into the abyss of relationship failure, financial strain, and an independent nature that comes across as complicated and unrelenting. The premise is intense; the characters are controversial and tragic. There are moments of heartbreak and grief; acceptance and moving forward; falling in love and letting go of the past.

She’s another one of those treasured readers who deeply understands a story, and she writes a thoughtful review. So read Sandy’s review here.

The Reading Cafe
Beautiful Santa Fe
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Beautiful Santa Fe

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There’s a friend to whom I used to send lengthy missives about my life. I fear I trespassed against my friend’s great kindness with these long notes. I have promised myself to stop.

But as George Orwell said, writing is thinking, and in the process of writing, I clarified things in my mind. My thoughts opened and organized themselves. It wasn’t so much self-expression as self-understanding. It was a useful process.

I caught myself contemplating how to explain to my friend about the enchantment of Santa Fe, as I drove out of Albuquerque toward this beautiful town.

As I left the airport city, the sky expanded. The blue deepened in intensity. My spirits rose of their own accord, responding to the unfettered freedom of that great expanse of the heavens.

It’s not just the sky—it’s the light of Santa Fe that’s so compelling. I love Cape Cod, too, for the light. In Truro, there’s a honeyed quality to the light, a lavender richness underlying the brilliance. In Santa Fe, the light is crystalline. The absolute clarity of luminosity is breath-taking.

Then there’s the landscape: the mountains, the rich red-brown of the earth, the piñon trees and the rocks and the desert and the forests.

Last time I was in Santa Fe, we saw a bear alongside the road. It was a medium-sized animal, maybe an adolescent, a grayish streak hurtling alongside the cars. I never knew bears could move so fast. I also saw a roadrunner streaking across the road: it looked like a tiny dinosaur.

Yesterday a friend took me hiking on Mt. Ataleya. She lent me open-toed Teva sandals because I hadn’t packed sneakers, and I went to lengths to avoid the cactus while scrambling up the trails.

Earlier in the day, I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which I recommend. The gift shop is emblazoned with one of O’Keeffe’s wise sayings, which put me in mind of my own Sabin, who says the same thing: “Nothing is less real than realism.” It is magical here.

Georgia O'Keeffe

 

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Movie Review: Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil
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Movie Review: Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil

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Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil pleased me enormously. I love Bosch’s work, and there were several moments during this documentary when the camera lingered adoringly over his paintings.

The film tells the story of gathering Bosch’s paintings for a 500th anniversary show in Den Bosch. A group of museum guys—archivists, restorers, historians—track down the works, and then have to wheel-and-deal with assorted other museum types in order to borrow the paintings. The Venetian museum director said, “These paintings cannot leave the Galleria L’Academia unless they are restored.” That was a thinly veiled shake-down—the Dutch team had to pay for the restoration. Leave it to the Italians.

The Prado bureaucrats were hilarious. A lot of delicate negotiation happened off-screen, but was implied. I chortled a few times.

A painting and a drawing were newly attributed to Hieronymus, and one painting was de-attributed. There was a scene when the team was asking, “Who will call Ghent to tell them?” Meaning, what poor sap would have the misfortune of telling the museum in Ghent that their Hieronymus Bosch wasn’t painted by Hieronymus Bosch? The team leader, they decided.

Meantime, a painting in a Kansas City museum was newly confirmed as a Bosch. That was fun. It makes me imagine finding a dusty, cracked old painting in the attic…and having it attributed to a great master. I could write a novel about that. Maybe I will.

It is, ultimately, Bosch’s imagery that is the star of this film. I was delighted to realize that not all the fantastic figures hail from the astral plane. Many do, of course; you can see the same demons there, if you alter your consciousness so as to perceive the astral plane. However, several figures are actually from the Devic Kingdom. I exclaimed out loud, right there in the Film Forum theater, when I realized that. How cool! The Devic Kingdom represented in a painting from 500 years ago!

The Garden of Earthly Delights ranks among my top 10 favorite paintings, it’s just ravishingly beautiful, a feast for the senses. I get lost in it.

If you like Bosch or love art, then go see Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil. It won’t disappoint.

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil

James Cooper’s Article in American Arts Quarterly noting Sabin Howard & Traci L. Slatton
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James Cooper’s Article in American Arts Quarterly noting Sabin Howard & Traci L. Slatton

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My husband classical figurative sculptor Sabin Howard and I have been acquainted with Jim Cooper for many years. Jim is the editor and publisher of American Arts Quarterly, a quarterly arts magazine published by the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center. The magazine has published several articles about Sabin through the years, my favorite of which is “Recovering Beauty in Bronze,” in which Jim writes,

Howard’s sculptures have content as well as exquisite form. All art is about art, even with a recognizable subject, and Howard clearly states the importance of Michelangelo to him. Each of the bronze sculptures in his studio has a theme; many are inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Others are intense psychological portraits. He subscribes to the literal translation of psyche logos, which means the study of the soul, psyche and anima.

Jim Cooper is an art critic who holds my husband in high esteem, for which I am grateful. To be candid, I think Sabin deserves it. In my opinion, Sabin is the finest figurative sculptor in centuries. I believe in Sabin and so I have supported him in his work, building his websites, providing tech support for his webinars, and writing books with him; Sabin and I have a partnership. I am grateful to say that Jim respects this partnership and, moreover, he’s willing to acknowledge it. Cooper wrote in that same article, “He [Sabin] credits his wife, writer Traci Slatton, for giving him the language and ideas to understand the deeper implications of his art: “She gave me a vocabulary to be able to talk about issues of closed energy systems, which is basically a modernist system, and an open energy system.””

So Jim and I keep in touch. A few months ago, I emailed to tell Jim about how Facebook wouldn’t let Sabin ‘boost’ an advertisement about our sculpture book, The Art of Life, because of the nudity on the cover of the book. Jim was intrigued and we exchange emails and a phone call. Our discussion resulted in Jim’s splendid new article, “The Classical Nude, Pornography and the New Philistines.”

Check out the Spring 2016 issue of American Arts Quarterly, Jim’s article is beautifully written and thought-provoking. I especially appreciate the nod Jim gives to me, calling our book “superb” and later on, noting that “Traci is a historian, a graduate of Columbia and Yale, and has written several novels, while covering cultural issues for The Huffington Post.” This business of making art and of being married to an artist in today’s world is fraught, and I’m grateful when an art critic of Jim’s standing honors the work we do.

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