Background
Swan, Gladys was born on October 15, 1934 in New York City. Daughter of R. J. and Sarah (Taub) Rubenstein.
(In the mid-1980s, a little known Missouri-based writer an...)
In the mid-1980s, a little known Missouri-based writer and painter named Gladys Swan sold to a major New York publisher the first of what would become a five-book saga about a down-and-out but courageous traveling carnival. Filmmaker Victor Nunez, struck by the grittiness of the characters and the high-octane energy of these eccentrics battling to entertain and survive, optioned Carnival for the big screen and wrote a full screenplay. Nunez’s film was never made. But now here is Swan's first book, a work that captures with stunning authenticity a uniquely American landscape.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039474330X/?tag=2022091-20
( hloride, New Mexico, is a dusty mining town slowly blea...)
hloride, New Mexico, is a dusty mining town slowly bleaching away in the sun, a casualty of the big copper firms' exodus to South America. To the dying place returns Roselle More -- hometown girl and faded Hollywood star -- for the premiere of her new film. The even is a cynical promotional gimmick, one that her director, Bill Brodkey, making a last-ditch attempt to affirm his own artistic integrity, hopes will also resurrect the actress' bottomed-out career. Naturally the citizens of Chloride hope the publicity will do the same for their town. But Roselle vanishes. A double assumes her place -- and suddenly nothing is as it seems. In this eerie, beautifully crafted novel, Gladys Swan presents an impressionistic palimpsest of myth and modern life, in which the present is revealed as only a play of light and shadow over a ghost dance that -- tenuously -- ensures the world's continued existence. Part history, part myth, part meditation on truth and illusion, the novel becomes a kaleidoscope of plots and subplots, each refracted through the perceptions -- the voices -- of a cast of characters as intriguing as the Southwest itself. And as the town giddily whirls toward its rendezvous with truth, these characters find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. Presiding over and in some mysterious way engineering this ultimate rendezvous is the oracular A.J. ("Bird") Peacock, archetypal trickster, Oberon, Puck, Prospero to the town. Truth, Bird points out, is not always comforting. The truth (or a truth) is finally revealed when the voices of the title -- of the past, the land itself -- speak during the novel's apocalyptic conclusion. There, in the wilderness, in a dazzling play within a play, the past comes face-to-face with the present, the spiritual with the profane. In this crowning union of memory and desire, this shoring-up of fragments against ruin, the discerning reader will hear echoes of writers as disparate as Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Joyce. Never less than consummately entertaining, Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices works flawlessly on many levels at once. The demands of this remarkable novel are great, but so are its rewards.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807117064/?tag=2022091-20
( hese eleven compelling stories reveal the interplay and...)
hese eleven compelling stories reveal the interplay and varying hues of two basic elements of human experience -- memory and desire, Gladys Swan's characters are frequently forced to shed their illusions as they struggle to shape their lives. The title story, like many of the others in the collection, has as its backdrop the beautiful but sometimes harsh landscape of the American Southwest. There a reclusive farmer known as Goat Man takes in a young Mexican boy as his companion. When the greed of a tax collector and the complicity of a community destroy Goat Man, the boy vanishes into the night but returns in the form of a legend, a reminder to the residents of the valley of their changing, crueler world. In another story a traveling carnival breaks down when a sandstorm does final damage to the dreams of the company, and a tired, almost defeated woman attempts to regroup and continue what has been so hopefully called "Carnival for the Gods." An older couple, carrying their Jewish past to a "Land of Promise." Discovers instead an alien territory and must struggle from day to day, one leaning to the past, the other inclining toward an unattainable vision of the future. In "The Ink Feather" a small, lonely girl, witness to endless quarrels between her mother and her much older brother, draws comfort from the world of her dolls and the prospect of adventure outside the mist-covered windows of her house. In "Getting an Education" a diffident young woman, "trying to be a student and to discover what she ought to be learning," finds insight in the details of the lives around her, especially the secretive, eccentric existence of one of her professors. A widowed grandmother, in "Black Hole," is impregnated during a chance encounter with a nameless stranger and shocks her family when she determines to give birth to and raise her child. Like that grandmother, all of the characters in these fictions -- whether from the comfortable middle class or the fringes of society -- are at odds with themselves and their world. It is Gladys Swan's special gift that she can so seamlessly depict the particular terrors and wonders of their lives. This is a mesmerizing collection.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807114804/?tag=2022091-20
(Nine stories...skillfully track time's toll on the abilit...)
Nine stories...skillfully track time's toll on the ability to live and love fully. -- Publishers Weekly. "With A GARDEN AMID FIRES Swan claims new mastery of the short story. A wide variety of settings adds brilliance to important thems: the irresistible powers of memory, the confusions of exile, genuineness and falsity in art, the integrity of loneliness...Uncannily good." -- Fred Chappell.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1886157588/?tag=2022091-20
( In A Visit to Strangers, Gladys Swan's characters inha...)
In A Visit to Strangers, Gladys Swan's characters inhabit slightly alien, off-center worlds as they struggle to achieve some sort of permanence or stability. Strangeness of situation, environment, and relationship prevents them from taking refuge in worn-out pieties and false values. There are no easy solutions. Several stories portray disenchanted people who have failed to commit themselves at key moments and end up abandoning their lives to "the stream . . . in which lost things lie." But in others, direct interaction with strangers offers enlightenment to the characters, who are often strangers to themselves. Images drawn from the visual arts suggest the inevitable attempt to fix upon some unchanging essence beneath or within the flux of time, a point of solidity upon which the characters seek to secure their identities. Thus Rich in "Lucking Out" struggles to create an art of the contemporary moment that carries something of the amazement he feels when he goes to Italy and finds himself in "the stunning midst" of what the Renaissance had to offer. And a young woman in "Portrait" discovers that she lacked the vision to live out the promise of her youth, captured by a painter in her portrait. It appears that those who can re-create themselves through the imagination in the process of meeting strangeness have the best chance to evolve. In "The Afternoon of the Pterodactyl," a young boy, Robert, preparing for a school report, contemplates the metamorphosis of a lizard to a bird and, in the process, sees how to adapt to the new domestic situation that his mother's boyfriend, Paul, presents. Memory also figures heavily in the characters' responses to transitory situations. Queenie Ballmer, the old woman in "Falling Leaves," panics at her children's suggestion of a nursing home. Her surroundings hold her in the present: "It would all be gone then--this room that she kept neat as a pin, the house that Wendell had built, the street with Susie's house across from hers. Her whole life would be blown away like so many leaves, and what could she hold onto then?" Swan communicates a tenuousness about everything that happens between and among her characters. There's a mix of promise and decay, of ennui and the desire for amazement, as they reexamine their lives, reconcile their pasts, or attempt to reinvent themselves.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826210511/?tag=2022091-20
( News from the Volcano is a collection of five poignant ...)
News from the Volcano is a collection of five poignant stories about wanderers and outsiders, people searching for an unnamed something that is missing from their lives. Set in the Southwest, a landscape of vivid contrasts and powerful forces, the stories unravel the struggles of these who find themselves in extreme situations, looking and listening desperately for whatever might save them from self-destruction. "Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn" introduces Rachel Lerner, a young girl growing up in a Jewish family from the East that, lured by dreams of success, has resettled in New Mexico near the end of World War II. The household is overshadowed by the mother's unhappiness in an isolated mountain town amid people she finds raw and by the father's mounting suspicions that his business associate is stealing from him. Rachel must weave a path for herself through the conflicting emotions of her parents while also recognizing and confronting the forces at play in the larger world. In "Sloan's Daughter" the protagonist confronts the spiritual emptiness of his political aspirations as they are shaped by the corruption of the past. The rebellious young daughter forces Sloan to recognize the questionable history of his family's manipulative and reckless pursuit of personal gain. In the title story, Lupe is faced with a violent death, but refuses to acquiesce to the chain of violence surrounding that confrontation. All of the characters are crafted with the remarkable realism readers have come to expect from Gladys Swan. The stories are gripping and their resolutions powerful. Taking the reader on tough journeys through rough country, both physically and psychologically, News from the Volcano is a masterful collection by an exceptional writer.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826212964/?tag=2022091-20
artist literature educator writer
Swan, Gladys was born on October 15, 1934 in New York City. Daughter of R. J. and Sarah (Taub) Rubenstein.
Bachelor, Western New Mexico University, 1954. Master of Arts, Claremont University, 1955. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Western New Mexico University.
Postgraduate, University Missouri, 1992—1998.
Member faculty department Enmglish Franklin College, since 1961. Distinguished visiting writer-in-residence University Texas, El Paso, 1984—1985. Member faculty Vermont College, Montpelier, 1981—1996.
Visiting professor Ohio University, 1986—1987. Associate professor University Missouri, 1987—1997.
( hese eleven compelling stories reveal the interplay and...)
(In the mid-1980s, a little known Missouri-based writer an...)
( News from the Volcano is a collection of five poignant ...)
( In A Visit to Strangers, Gladys Swan's characters inha...)
( hloride, New Mexico, is a dusty mining town slowly blea...)
(Nine stories...skillfully track time's toll on the abilit...)
Member of Society Midland Authors, Association Associate Writing Programs, Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association.
Married Richard B. Swan, September 9, 1955. Children: Andrea, Leah.