Like a Lake

Carol Mavor is a writer who lives in Manchester England. Her most recent books are Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale; Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour; and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetee, Sans Soleil and Hiroshima mon amour.

Millions of Years Ago 1 My Nico 2 Unfolding a Flood 4 Turning the Key 5 The Memory of Lake Tahoe 16 My Mother's Eyes 17 My Mother 18 Coda 21 By Chance 25 When Bamboo Shoots Poke Their Heads out of the Earth 29 Blue Rambler 30 Tender Buttons 47 Waiting 49 Refusing to be Plucked 55 We Want Roses 56 She Sleeps with Him Every Night 59 She-Wolf Made of Rock 61 Blue Ticket 65 Learning to Swim 66 Floating Studio, Floating Zendo 67 Fannette Island 76 Floating Zendos and Mentorgartens 79 I Learned about Snowflakes 82 I Learned about the Birds of Lake Tahoe 84 Summer Snow Cake 86 Love or Affection 88 Mary's Dream 89 Each Other's Pockets 90 Black Cloth 91 Brown Kimono 94 Something Broke 96 The Voice of the Lake 101 Moon Writing 102 Artichoke 104 No Name for Him 107 What's in a Name? 108 Like Piles of Laundry? 109 Frozen Pond 111 Coda's Dream 113 Like Mother and Son 114 Fifteen Good Prints 115 Glass Moon 117 Tsukimi Udon (Moon Noodles) 118 Soaring 121 Walking Underwater 123 Open My Heart 125 Like Rice on Chopsticks 126 Like a Sequence of Poems 127 Waiting, Still 128 Morpheus 129 Blue Marble 131 Something Like Love 132 Afterword (Afterward): Like the Navel of My Dream of Nico 133 Acknowledgments 139 Illustrations 141 Notes 143

"Like a Lake is like a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It's a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book." - Max Porter "Like a Lake is a story of where art comes from, the love and grief held in forms - a house, a cup, a photograph, a stone. The experience of reading this novel is lake-like - a beautiful surface opens, and opens, and opens and ripples with grief." - Jennifer Doyle, author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art "Like A Lake is... like a lake. A famous one, Lake Tahoe, situated on the California/Nevada border, features plot-wise and thematically in the book, almost flowing it together... an adventurous, even pioneering, book..." - Source Magazine