Please give a warm welcome to Joan Barbara Simon, author of Long Time Walk on Water, Mut@tus, and more!

Tell us a bit about yourself and what you’re currently working on or promoting.
I’ve been an author all my life I’d say, but a serious writer for about a decade. I’ve published three works of fiction, two academic books on children’s early literacy development and I’ve edited three anthologies of creative writing. At the moment, I’m working on a novel, Verses Nature, which will be submitted as part of my second doctoral thesis. The plot is still being worked out, but essentially it’s about family secrets. As I’m no fan of the traditional begining-middle-end style of writing, Verses Nature is written as slices of story you can juggle. I also tell more than one story at the same time; characters keep butting in, disrupting, each other’s performances. In so doing, I’m making statements about reality, about time. I’m making concessions to the many voices in my head that don’t always like to wait patiently in line. Whether we are multilingual or not, reality, in my opinion, is many-voiced. Origins, obscure. Plurality, obscurity, secrets, sex. That’s a good summary of key themes in Verses Nature. Continue reading →