Hello, everything is progressing as it should! –my eleventh book remains scheduled for publication in September 2016, a new and selected volume of poetry, “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code” –I’m extremely excited about this! (to be published, like many of my other published volumes of poetry, by Persea Books)
I will also be writing book about my father; he was a very special man, who supported me through everything, and did not believe in hitting, as that was no way to indicate love, and that’s why I was never hit as a child. If you love something, you do not hit it! –even if you’re God, or Jesus; you do not hit, you do not use that power to bully or threaten anyone. And you don’t rape Mary just because you need a son…
This was why he was opposed to ideas of Christian hell, this mostly Native American man whose father wasn’t black at all, Cherokee and Caucasian…
No threats of eternal punishment just to get obedience; it should be choice, not mandate… Something my mother still does not comprehend, as she’s perfectly willing to acknowledge The Lord as her master… Not me! –no man is my “master”! —I refuse to have one; US slaves were freed! –my mother is one of those who did not free themselves psychologically; she remains “bound” just not physically.
My father’s father right here:
My father was Cherokee, Black and a bit Caucasian like his father (who was only Native American and Caucasian). And he grew up in the south at a time where segregation was the rule, yet his family defied that rule, by allowing the races to mix…
and I am a mix of both of them, and my black mother:
I had what many might consider to be an odd upbringing, a mother intent upon Christian hell as the place that I’m going. Little did she know that the man she had married was teaching me something else, the most important lessons that I’ve ever been taught:
HOW TO TREAT WHAT IS AND SHOULD BE LOVED!
Some people doubt that I am truly “black” when they learn that I was never hit, that my relationship with my father bordered on ideal… I know tales of being whipped and spanked only through others, not through personal experience. No extension cord beatings, no beatings at all.
I would walk to church with my mother, and hear that I was going to hell, but the moment I got home, my father took me for very long walks, and wanted me to understand that there was no way that all could have been created before there was any awareness of the world, how new necessities would give rise to things people in bible days could not even imagine…
I grew up with dichotomies…
On these walks I was expected to interact with whatever I noticed; these walks took hours, and I always came home with a chapter of an alternative “holy book”, volumes from the Golden Library of Knowledge: “Ants”, “Atoms”, Butterflies and Moths”, “Energy and Power”, “Engines”, “Mathematics”, The Moon”, “Space Flight”, Submarines:, “Prehistoric Animals”, “The Body in Action” and “The Insect World” to name some of them.
Not books meant for girls.. My father was opposed to that, so raised me to partake of everything… He even created my first name for me, telling me when I was seven, that since there had never been a presence like mine in the world, I also needed a name that hadn’t been in the world… I get to define my name, a privilege and responsibility I do not take lightly.
Every Sunday, I came home with one of these books that cost a quarter, and this way had chapters of an alternative bible…
I wasn’t raised according to conventional definitions and limitations of gender…
He died in 1980, the year before I graduated from Oberlin College, first in my class, a 4.11 GPA, lowest grade was an “A-” in an English class of all things…Something considered unusual for brown girls… for “girls” at all! –how surprised people were to see that it was me at the top of the class! –I graduated Phi Beta Kappa too.
Tiny brown girl.
But without that “-” , no “limited fork” as I tried to find somewhere to put that idea, and the space created by the “-” was perfect for me to try to fill. In every other class, I attained the ceiling easily, but only in English did I have a weakness, so I focused on English in grad school in Hew Hampshire working with Charles Simic currently reading another manuscript of mine: “LFMK: Looking for my Killer”
(a prose poam from that collection “The Afterlife of Corpses” has been published online in issue 6 of One.)
Also the reason that my father rejected Christian hell, something that didn’t make sense to him; something that no father who loved his children would ever make, because this bullying method was no way to express love –and so my father was completely opposed to hitting.
But now, because of changes in my situation, I’ve written a very different kind of book, one with a potential to sell! –one that I even dare to hope becomes a movie; working on a final revision now of:
“Looking for Forker Gyrl”
IN
NKH: New Kiss Horizon
It is for this new book, that I need an agent! –poem: “Higginson Matters in Magnificent Culture of Myopia” is one of the new poems in “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities Red Dress Code” –cover is not yet known but I do have a YouTube video of the same name:
This book, my eleventh, won’t be published until September 2016, but this other manuscript has so much more potential… The short story, “Mongongo Drupe” published in Callaloo,(Volume 38, Number 1, Winter 2015) is a chapter, in slightly different form of NKH (New Kiss Horizon)
Whole manuscript is really a bit of sex-positive feminism, but my fine publisher at Persea feels that this NKH book must wait until 2017 at the earliest, but I believe in this book so much, that I am willing to seek publication outside Persea…
I did have an agent, long before I produced anything the nature of NKH, but because I published over the years, mostly literary poetry, and won many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, (aka “Genius award) and two nominations for the National Book Critic Circle awards, for “Pyramid of Bone” and “Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler“, that agent dropped me and NOW I NEED ANOTHER, AND HAVE A BOOK WHERE AN AGENT COULD MAKE A DIFFERENCE. NKH could be a very popular book, but Persea Books, as much as I love my publisher, would not be able to offer me the kind of dollars that are the potential of NKH, and I’m sure that this must violate something in the contract giving Persea first opportunity to publish all of my work, but the magnitude of NKH could be beyond anything that Persea can do… I would like this manuscript considered by publishing houses including but not limited to Persea –only an agent could get this manuscript read, and as much as I love my publisher, Persea is also acting as my agent; a conflict of interest right there; how can I expect my existing publisher to pay beyond what she’d have to? –the only way is with a third party agent; contact me, and I’ll let you read parts of the manuscript… I need money.
and then you can decide if you’d like to represent NKH. Thank you.
I need an agent for NKH! –I am willing to break my contract with Persea in order to have this book… If you are or know of an agent, please contact me… I am presently revising NKH to make it as perfect as I can… It does include plenty of wonderful sex, and involves an unexpected couple , two sixty-somethings enjoying a weekend in Chicago… Fiction, of course! –but based on something I’ve long craved, being in a marriage not right for me from the time I was a teenager until I was 60, as I am in NKH…
That I can both imagine and write about what I’ve always wanted is a testimony to a need for love, a need for love that I choose! –and not love chosen for me, beginning with a rape when I was fifteen –hardly a good introduction to pleasures of the body that become realized finally in NKH, when the Adorabilis character is 60 years old,
If you are an agent or know of an agent, please contact me via comment to this message or on Facebook where you can find me as: Thylias Moss
I NEED AN AGENT FOR NKH! I WILL COMPLETE MY REVISION SOON, AND ALTHOUGH PERSEA WILL PROBABLY WANT TO PUBLISH THIS BOOK, I AM WILLING TO RISK POSSIBLE CONTRACT VIOLATION IN ORDER TO HAVE AN AGENT ABLE TO SUBMIT THIS BOOK TO TOP PUBLISHING HOUSES… PLEASE LET ME KNOW…Thank you…
Thylias Moss Writing 