Thanks for stopping by my website. My name is Lily Iona MacKenzie, and this is my blog! In many of my blog posts, you’ll discover why writing is my addiction. You’ll also find the results of this compulsion in the books I’ve created—four novels and a poetry collection. Shanti Arts Press will be publishing my hybrid memoir Dreaming Myself into Old Age: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in September 2023 and my new poetry collection, California Dreaming, on June 27, 2023. My novels feature sexy, adventuresome, and inspirational women and men—some of them over 60—breaking boundaries. Without diving into my imagination and surfacing with what I find there, my days would be dull. I hope my writing brightens your days!
" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "
" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "
" A wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing comic novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths.... "
" Fling! is both hilarious and touching. Every page is a surprise, and the characters! I especially loved Bubbles, one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read. "
" Fling! is both hilarious and touching. Every page is a surprise, and the characters! I especially loved Bubbles, one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read. "
" Fling! is both hilarious and touching. Every page is a surprise, and the characters! I especially loved Bubbles, one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read. "
" These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life. "
" These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life. "
" These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life. "
" Indicative of the title, the poems in All This range from the conventional lyric/narrative that captures an intense moment of emotion, an epiphany glimpsed briefly out of the corner of the eye, to the more experimental. "
" Indicative of the title, the poems in All This range from the conventional lyric/narrative that captures an intense moment of emotion, an epiphany glimpsed briefly out of the corner of the eye, to the more experimental. "
" Indicative of the title, the poems in All This range from the conventional lyric/narrative that captures an intense moment of emotion, an epiphany glimpsed briefly out of the corner of the eye, to the more experimental. "
“What is art, and what happens to us when we see or make it?
These questions animate Lily Iona MacKenzie’s California Dreaming. From ancient Egyptian artefacts to Richard Serra’s sculpture, from martial music on Red Square to Dvorak and Copeland via a scenic route that takes us on a multi-part journey through Matisse, MacKenzie shows us what she numbers among poetry’s true aesthetes.
Even travel and family come to her first as forms of beauty. Beauty, though, never fully shelters us from a world of moral urgencies—injustice and violence hover just on the edges of these poems, reminding us that our sense of the beautiful is both fragile and essential.”
- Lewis Buzbee
- Lewis Buzbee
—Robert Archambeau, author of Alice B. Toklas is Missing, Laureates and Heretics, Poetry and Uselessness, The Poet Resigns, and Inventions of a Barbarous Age
In Dreaming Myself into Old Age, Lily Mackenzie gifts us, along with dreams, perceptive thoughts on myriad subjects like how she approaches an art project or her wonderment about alternative universes.
She discovers in a surprising place a description of what is likely her own shadow. In sharing so intimately her individual path, she tacitly challenges the reader to take his or her own inward journey. She makes clear that, like traveling physically, inner journeys require planning, time and attention. But the effort is clearly worthwhile —especially at a late age when one knows oneself quite well. Then going deeper can unearth not only nuances of self-discovery, but the unexpected and the profound.
—Solace Wales, author of Braided in Fire: Black GIs and Tuscan Villagers on the Gothic Line
“Fling! is both hilarious and touching, the madcap journey of an aging mother and her adult daughter from cold Protestant Canada into the hallucinogenic heart of Mexico's magic. Every page is a surprise, and 'Bubbles; is one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read.”
“Fling! is both hilarious and touching, the madcap journey of an aging mother and her adult daughter from cold Protestant Canada into the hallucinogenic heart of Mexico's magic. Every page is a surprise, and 'Bubbles; is one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read.”
“Fling! is both hilarious and touching, the madcap journey of an aging mother and her adult daughter from cold Protestant Canada into the hallucinogenic heart of Mexico's magic. Every page is a surprise, and 'Bubbles; is one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read.”
- Lewis Buzbee
- Lewis Buzbee
- Lewis Buzbee
“Fling! is both hilarious and touching, the madcap journey of an aging mother and her adult daughter from cold Protestant Canada into the hallucinogenic heart of Mexico's magic. Every page is a surprise, and 'Bubbles; is one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read.”
“Fling! is both hilarious and touching, the madcap journey of an aging mother and her adult daughter from cold Protestant Canada into the hallucinogenic heart of Mexico's magic. Every page is a surprise, and 'Bubbles; is one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read.”
“All my pockets are full/ of dread” Lily Iona Mackenzie writes, as she navigates cycles of hope and despair for a beloved husband struggling with cancer. Each finely crafted poem in this powerful collection comes alive on the page while she traces the days’ journeys with a painter’s eye, a musician’s ear, and the deft pen of a poet.. No More Kings calls out to all who have experienced that deepest and most human of cares: concern for the health of a loved one.
- Lewis Buzbee
- Lewis Buzbee
- Jackie Kudler, author of Sacred Precinct and Easing into Dark
“Fling! is both hilarious and touching, the madcap journey of an aging mother and her adult daughter from cold Protestant Canada into the hallucinogenic heart of Mexico's magic. Every page is a surprise, and 'Bubbles; is one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read.”
“Fling! is both hilarious and touching, the madcap journey of an aging mother and her adult daughter from cold Protestant Canada into the hallucinogenic heart of Mexico's magic. Every page is a surprise, and 'Bubbles; is one of the most endearing mothers in recent fiction. A scintillating read.”
“Tillie’s life wasn’t meant to follow other girls’ paths. With free love, hippies, and drugs looming, she ends up in San Francisco. Lily Iona MacKenzie deftly takes readers into that throbbing world of drugs, booze, and one-night stands. They’ll root for Tillie as she struggles to find herself and be swept along as she learns that true happiness is seldom found amid glitter and grime. It’s hiding somewhere else … in plain sight. A well-written and visceral story.”
- Lewis Buzbee
- Lewis Buzbee
- Janice Gilbertson, author of Summer of ’58, Canyon House, and The Dark Side of Gibson Road
“Curva Peligrosa is a wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths; it’s a book which attempts to say serious and important things about language, story-telling, mortality, indigenous cultures, love, and sex.”
“Curva Peligrosa is a wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths; it’s a book which attempts to say serious and important things about language, story-telling, mortality, indigenous cultures, love, and sex.”
“Curva Peligrosa is a wildly inventive, consistently engaging, and amusing novel, but under its bright exterior lurk darker undertones and truths; it’s a book which attempts to say serious and important things about language, story-telling, mortality, indigenous cultures, love, and sex.”
- Steven Bauer
"Hilarious, spiritual, and sensual, Lily Iona MacKenzie's wonderful novel Freefall: A Divine Comedy takes you on a rollicking ride spanning three countries and four decades. These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life. "
"Hilarious, spiritual, and sensual, Lily Iona MacKenzie's wonderful novel Freefall: A Divine Comedy takes you on a rollicking ride spanning three countries and four decades. These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life. "
"Hilarious, spiritual, and sensual, Lily Iona MacKenzie's wonderful novel Freefall: A Divine Comedy takes you on a rollicking ride spanning three countries and four decades. These fascinating characters will fill your imagination, defying expectations about aging, art, and what truly matters in life. "
- Laurie Ann Doyle, Award-winning author of World Gone Missing
- Laurie Ann Doyle, Award-winning author of World Gone Missing
- Laurie Ann Doyle, Award-winning author of World Gone Missing
“The poems in Lily Iona McKenzie’s All This are an engrossing atlas of both geographical and emotional landscapes. They move from Canada to California, from the body to bereavement, from poetry to politics, from loss to love and back again. These innovative poems resonate because, miraculously, their topographies feel both familiar and new. We love living in them.”
“The poems in Lily Iona McKenzie’s All This are an engrossing atlas of both geographical and emotional landscapes. They move from Canada to California, from the body to bereavement, from poetry to politics, from loss to love and back again. These innovative poems resonate because, miraculously, their topographies feel both familiar and new. We love living in them.”
“The poems in Lily Iona McKenzie’s All This are an engrossing atlas of both geographical and emotional landscapes. They move from Canada to California, from the body to bereavement, from poetry to politics, from loss to love and back again. These innovative poems resonate because, miraculously, their topographies feel both familiar and new. We love living in them.”
- Dean Rader, English professor at the University of San Francisco, has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and popular culture.
