Michelle Blake has published three novels in the acclaimed Lily Connor mystery series, The Tentmaker, Earth Has No Sorrow and The Book of Light.
She has also published a chapbook of poems, Into the Wide and Startling World, awarded publication in the New Women’s Voices Competition, Finishing Line, and a collaboration of poems and images with the artist Fran Forman, Escape Artist.
In addition, her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Southern Review, MORE, Mezzo Cammin and others.
To read essays, poems and reflections, visit the WRITING section of her website.
“Michelle Blake’s series about an Episcopal priest...stands out for a couple of reasons—besides the essential one of being written with intelligence and grace. These books take a long view of crime, finding meaningful lessons in antisocial acts.”
“Outstanding...eloquent prose, astute scholarship, convincing characters and vivid settings make this a remarkable work, raising the genre of the parish mystery to new heights.”
“Signs and sacraments abound—‘lights switched on at dusk like wishes for night to rise,’ ‘the grey dust of day on sills and quilts’—in Michelle Blake’s acute and beautifully made poems…Blake has heard Roethke’s invocation to “live in perpetual great astonishment,” for her compassionate, luminous poems transport us through glib and difficult times ‘into the wide and startling world.’”
One cold morning in January, I wake before dawn and write down, It’s ridiculous to blame anyone else for our lives. Our lives are gifts that exist long before we enter them and go on long after we leave them, intact, just as they are. What we do and see and learn is what we need to learn.
I’m not sure where this comes from and I’m not sure I believe it, not entirely, but the fact that I am able to receive and record such a thought is a testament to forty years of hard labor in the fields of forgiveness. I grew up in a series of violent, sometimes brutal households, with adults addicted to drugs and alcohol, as well as gambling and sex and who knows what else. Pain. A lot of the adults in our lives, my brothers’ and mine, were addicted to pain, their own pain and the rush of inflicting pain on others.