Clouds of Magellan has published four titles by Victor Marsh. Titles can be found online
Find out more about Victor at victormarsh.com
My Teacher’s Name is Love
My Teacher’s Name is Love: Some Poems for Prem. A collection of poems examining love, self, devotion, and opening to a wider cosmos. Whimsical, meditative, rapturous, these poems are a contemporary expression of spirit.
The Boy in The Yellow Dress
The Boy in the Yellow Dress by Victor Marsh (2014). Perth in the 1950s. After being caught wearing his mother’s yellow dress, young Victor had to hide any tendency towards gender inappropriate behaviour. But his interest in dancing and theatre (and mooning over Rudolph Nureyev on the telly) were bound to make the facade collapse at some point. Emerging sexuality and the sense of not being ‘at home’ in his body, let alone the world, ran alongside a search for meaning that brought him eventually to a spiritual awakening under the young guru Maharaji … Part family tragedy, part existential comedy, The Boy in the Yellow Dress is a warts-and-all account of exile and the subsequent journey homewards that is less about finding a respectable place in the world than an intimate connection with the ultimate source of being.
‘If ever a memoir captured the Zeitgeist, it’s this one … Wise, funny, surprising at every turn … More than a portrait of growing up gay, it chronicles the wild search for meaning of an entire generation.’ Amanda Lohrey
Mr Isherwood Changes Trains
Mr Isherwood Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood and the search for the ‘home self’ by Victor Marsh. 2010. (ISBN-13 : 978-0980712056)
British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) lived more than half his life in California, writing for the Hollywood studios. Famous initially for the stories he wrote about his time in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, he attracted a second wave of interest in the 1970s with his ‘out’ biography Christopher and His Kind. But much less is known about Christopher Isherwood’s writing during his forty years as a student of guru from the Ramakrishna Order.
In Mr Isherwood Changes Trains, Victor Marsh confronts the assumptions and prejudices that have combined to disparage the sincerity of Isherwood’s religious life. Marsh elucidates those features of Vedanta philosophy that enabled Isherwood to integrate the various aspects of his dharma: his vocation as a writer, and a spirituality not based on the repudiation of his sexuality. Marsh details the life search for a ‘home self’ that found expression in later works such as My Guru and His Disciple and in what it is seen as Isherwood’s finest novel, A Single Man.
At last an intelligent appreciation of Chris and his work, as well as a proper understanding of him as both a writer and Vedantist. — Don Bachardy
Marsh does a valuable service… exposing the ways many homosexual writers can be bashed obliquely without admitting to homophobia. — Dan Luckenbill — Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide
Marsh writes with nuance and considerable scholarly acumen… a remarkably incisive and absolutely necessary book: remarkably incisive because it stretches the borders of Isherwood scholarship, and absolutely necessary because it places gay men at the very heart of the religious journey. — Dr Donald L. Boisvert, Department of Religion Concordia University, Montreal.
Christopher Isherwood sustained a long project of spiritual self-fashioning, a fact often overlooked, or even denigrated, by his many biographers, critics and reviewers. In this original reappraisal, Dr Marsh makes a convincing case for the centrality of the spiritual in Isherwood’s life. In addition, his interrogation of the contingencies that have accumulated to separate homosexuality from spirituality strikes me as being of more general and profound importance. … written with admirable lucidity. — Professor Stephen Muecke, School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales
Speak Now
Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage, edited by Victor Marsh, with an introduction by Michael Kirby (ISBN-13 : 978-0980712094). 2011. A range of writers on the theme of Marriage Equality – the view from 2010 – yes, no, ambivalent. Marriage Equality became a reality in Australia in 2017 after a hard-fought public battle.
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