The Drawing Board (blog)

The Tilly Report

Tilly and the Buddha

Thursday's Song

This week's tune is "Little Lion Man" by Mumford & Sons. The band, which consists of four musicians from West London, was formed in December 2007 and released their first album, Sigh No More, earlier this year. It's a terrific debut -- particularly if you're a fan of folk-inspired bands like The Decemberists.

You can also see a video of Marcus Mumford performing with last week's song-of-the-day musician, Laura Marling, here; and there's a live performance of "White Blank Page" here. For more information, and to hear more of their music, visit the Mumfords & Sons website and blog.

The Poem for the Day...

. . . is "The Girl Without Hands" by Debra Nystrom, from the Spring 2002 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. The poem is based on the Grimm's fairy tale of the same title, and -- unusually -- looks at this classic story from a parent's point of view.

I also highly recommend Midori Snyder's web article on the history of Handless & Armless Maiden folk tales, if you haven't read it already. At the end of the piece you'll find links to other poems that use the Handless Maiden motif.

The paintings above are "The Handless Maiden" and "Communion" by Jeanie Tomanek, one of my very favorite contemporary painters. You can see more of her exquisite work on her website and in the Endicott gallery.

Two quick recommendations...

1.  Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins has posted a fabulous new series of mythic maquettes (pictured above) among the other treasures on his website. And there's an in-depth interview with Clive on the Zoe in Wonderland blog. (With thanks to Midori Snyder for the link.)

2. Canadian author Charles de Lint discusses urban fantasy on the Publisher's Weekly website. (With thanks to Ellen Kushner for the link).

Autumn in Devon

So very beautiful this time of year. Above: a picture taken from the slope of our back yard, looking over the rooftops to the hills beyond, where the bracken has turned from green to rust. Below: more autumn color. All three photos were snapped very early this morning, which is my favorite time of day - that quiet hour shared only with the birds and Tilly before heading off to my office and my work....

Here's a Quote for the Day, from Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia, Jacob Have I Loved and other children's classics. It comes from Gates of Excellence: On Reading and Writing Books for Children, which I highly recommend:

"If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living."  

More on "life in Devon" can be found on the blogs of two other artists in the neighborhood, Rima Staines and Danielle Barlow -- both of whom know a thing or two about creating lives that are works of art.       

The Tilly Report

She's gro-o-o-o-o-o-wing.... (Click on picture for larger image.)

Thursday's Song

The song I'd like to share with you this week is "Alas I Cannot Swim" by singer/songwriter Laura Marling. Marling hails from Hampshire, England and was just 18 when the video above was recorded. (And doesn't that fiddler look like he just strolled out of a Midori Snyder or Emma Bull story?) Marling's influences seem to range from Joni Mitchell to Johnny Cash, from Tori Amos to traditional bluegrass. Formerly a member of Noah and the Whale, her first solo album came out in 2008 and was nominated for a Mercury Prize.

Other great Marling songs & videos include: "Blackberry Stone" (performed with Marcus Mumford), "My Manic and I" (the animated video version), "My Manic and I" (a haunting, stripped-down version of the song performed on the Jools Holland show), "New Romantic,"  and the utterly gorgeous "Rambling Man," in the video below. 

The Writing Life

 

Fairy Scribe by Alan Lee

 

I recommend "On Becoming a Writer," a short piece by Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz (with thanks to Ellen Kushner for the link). If you, too, struggle to complete things, take heart.

And then get back to work!

 

The Tilly Report

Tilly and the Lady (a sculpture by Wendy Froud)

Fantasy and Mythical Thinking

I'll be away from home and the office for the next few days,  but before I go I want to recommend Katherine Langrish's excellent post on "The Value of Fantasy and Mythical Thinking," over on the Awfully Big Adventure blog.

"The ‘mystery of existence’ is an artefact," she writes. "We choose to ask an answerless question, and that question is at the core of our humanity. The before-and-after of life is a great darkness, and we build bonfires to keep it out, and warm ourselves and comfort ourselves. The bonfire is the bonfire of mythical thinking, of culture, stories, songs, music, poetry, religion, art. We don’t need it for our physical selves: homo heidelbergensis got on perfectly well without it: we need it for humanity’s supreme invention, the soul."

You can read the full article here.

Katherine is the author of four mythic fiction novels for young readers: Dark Angels and The Troll Trilogy, all of which I strongly recommend. Her work has been compared to Alan Garner's -- which is high praise indeed, but entirely deserved. (I'd also compare her fiction favorably to Susan Cooper's and Nancy Farmer's.) I'm particularly captivated by the author's skillful use of mythic motifs and the interplay of light and shadow in her stories -- which are page-turners to be sure, yet are also deep and complex and utterly true inside their fantasy trappings. The Troll Trilogy draws on Scandinavian myth, Dark Angels on the legends, lore and history of the border region between England and Wales. Katherine, who lives in Oxfordshire (where, as it happens, I'm having dinner with her tomorrow night) is better known on this side of the Atlantic than in America -- but I predict that's going to change in the years ahead. Don't miss these books.

Autumn on Dartmoor

"Landscape with Hill and Apples"  (Viewed from the road near our front gate.)

"Still Life with Dog and Bracken"

From the sketch files....

"Bunnies for Charlie"

"Puppies for Howard"

(click on the drawings for larger versions)

Body and Soul

 

I've been re-reading the books of Thomas Moore recently (the contemporary writer, not the counsellor to Henry VIII or the 18th century Irish balladeer), and finding them even more intriguing the second time around. In provocative volumes like Care of the Soul, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life,  A Life in Work, Original Self, and Dark Eros, Moore blends Renaissance philosophies together with world myth, Taoism, Catholic mysticism and the psycho-mythic inquiries of Hillman and Jung to create a "soulful" and "enchanted" way of living in the modern world.

Many of Moore's ideas are rooted in the writings of Renaissance alchemists and philosophers such as Paracelsus, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Giordono Bruno. These have become familiar names around my house -- not only because I re-visited John Crowley's masterful "Aegypt" novels earlier this year, but also because my husband is in the middle of a Masters program on the History of Western Esotericism in which such figures inevitably loom large. I studied alchemy myself (as a part of my myth and folklore studies) way back in my own university days -- but I'm not sure I fully got it back then. Now, with a few more decades under my belt, alchemical ideas seem richer, wiser, and more applicable to modern life than I'd previously understood  -- and have quietly permeated my work and world view more than I'd ever realized. 

I've also been reading The Alchemy of Illness, Kat Duff's meditation on the mythic, archetypal, and alchemical aspects of living with a chronic or life-threatening disease. It's a slim but fascinating volume, and although its brevity means that the author doesn't always follow her ideas quite as deeply as I personally would have liked, I've found much in the book to think about, chew on, and make me look at my own experience of chronic illness afresh. Which is all too rare.  

The picture above is "Woman Curing" by Oaxacan artist Fernando Olivera. It comes from the "Ilness and Calamity" issue of The Journal of Mythic Arts (Winter 2006).

Literary Pup

On Creativity

Many thanks to Ellen Kushner for pointing the way to The Intuitive Edge, a blog by Deborah Atherton and Leslie Zeigler focusing on the ups-and-downs of the creative process. I particularly like Deborah's recent post on Coffee and Creativity (September 15, 2009) -- which covers some of the same ground as my own meditation on creativity, "On Myth and Writing" ... albeit much more succinctly!

Another good blog I've only recently discovered is Claire Massey's The Fairy Tale Cupboard, for all things fairy tale. Marvelous.

 

Delectable fruits...

 

The Autumn 2009 issue of Goblin Fruit magazine is now online. The poems are terrific, as always (my personal favorite is Rosalind Casey's "At the Woodcutter's"); and the design of the issue is truly stunning. Go read it here.

The Tilly Report

It's been a big week for Tilly. She's had the last of her vaccinations, and so she's now allowed out in the Big Wide World. She's begun walking on a leash (or "lead," as they say here in the UK), and has made her first visits to the village Commons, the village Square, and my studio above the village wine shop -- where she got so excited she pee-ed on my studio-mate's rug, but nevermind. She's learned "Sit" and "Down," she's starting to learn "Heel,"  and she's appointed herself the task of ridding the garden of snails (by eating them). She's encountered horses, cats, men in funny hats, helicopters, and accordions; she spent a whole day away from us with puppy-sitter Rima Staines; and she's made her first canine friend: Ozzie, a lovely whippet owned by our friends Shany Niv & Marko Zerdin. (Noble Ozzie is pictured below with Shany, Howard and Tilly.) She's growing bigger, bolder, exploring father afield -- attempting to squirm through fences now and out the hole in our old front gate -- until she's startled by some new sight or sound and reminded that she's just a wee puppy after all. This morning, it was the distant baying of the hounds in our local hunting pack that send her scurrying inside again, her little tail between her legs....

Tonight, Tilly's second Puppy Party. Wish her luck.

For those of you in western Massachusetts: Don't miss Witness, a solo exhibition by  Beckie Kravetz at the Student Union Art Gallery at U Mass Amherst (October 13 - 30, 2009) -- an installation consisting of 24 life-size ceramic figures (heads, busts and torsos).

"This work is a response to tragedies, both personal and global," says the artist. "The crowd has gathered to watch an unknown, powerful event. The viewer becomes part of the crowd, and individual experience informs their interpretation of the event and the other witnesses."

Beckie and I shared an art studio in downtown Tucson for many years, where I was privileged to watch the creation of many figures included in the exhibition...and oh, how I wish I could be present for the premier of the completed piece.  More information on the show can be found on the U Mass website; more information on Beckie and her work can be found on her own website. For a glimpse of the individual clay figures, such as the haunting pieces pictured above and below, visit Beckie's work-in-progress gallery of photos.

I've recently taken a particular interest in the role of stepmothers in fairy tales -- prompted in no small part by the fact that I've become a stepmother myself this year -- so I was fascinated to come across Genevieve Valentine's excellent short story "To Set Before the King," published online by the good folks at the Interstitial Arts Foundation.

The author comments: "To Set Before the King" is about the accidental evil stepmothers; the frustrated cooks who have to bake a pie of live birds just to please the king; the tricked; about the children who realize all at once that fairy tales are the darkest kind of story you can ever tell at night."

The picture here is of Snow White and her stepmother-in-disguise by Margaret Tarrant, 1915.

You may recall my recent post about The Laidley Worm of Spindleston Heugh, the lastest project from the Chagford Filmmaking Group ("A dragon in the neighborhood," August 26). You can now view some charming photos from the film shoot here, on the CFG's website.

Across the ocean in New York, Lisa Stock (InBytheEye Films) has completed production on Brother and Sister, a short film based on my poem of that title, which was in turn based on the German fairy tale. Keep an eye on the Brother and Sister web page for the upcoming New York screening dates.

For those of you in western Massachusetts: Don't miss Witness, a solo exhibition by  Beckie Kravetz at the Student Union Art Gallery at U Mass Amherst (October 13 - 30, 2009) -- an installation consisting of 24 life-size ceramic figures (heads, busts and torsos).

"This work is a response to tragedies, both personal and global," says the artist. "The crowd has gathered to watch an unknown, powerful event. The viewer becomes part of the crowd, and individual experience informs their interpretation of the event and the other witnesses."

Beckie and I shared an art studio in downtown Tucson for many years, where I was privileged to watch the creation of many figures included in the exhibition...and oh, how I wish I could be present for the premier of the completed piece.  More information on the show can be found on the U Mass website; more information on Beckie and her work can be found on her own website. For a glimpse of the individual clay figures, such as the haunting pieces pictured above and below, visit Beckie's work-in-progress gallery of photos.

Telling and Re-telling Stories

I've recently taken a particular interest in the role of stepmothers in fairy tales -- prompted in no small part by the fact that I've become a stepmother myself this year -- so I was fascinated to come across Genevieve Valentine's excellent short story "To Set Before the King," published online by the good folks at the Interstitial Arts Foundation.

The author comments: "To Set Before the King" is about the accidental evil stepmothers; the frustrated cooks who have to bake a pie of live birds just to please the king; the tricked; about the children who realize all at once that fairy tales are the darkest kind of story you can ever tell at night."

The picture here is of Snow White and her stepmother-in-disguise by Margaret Tarrant, 1915.

Magic on Film

You may recall my recent post about The Laidley Worm of Spindleston Heugh, the lastest project from the Chagford Filmmaking Group ("A dragon in the neighborhood," August 26). You can now view some charming photos from the film shoot here, on the CFG's website.

Across the ocean in New York, Lisa Stock (InBytheEye Films) has completed production on Brother and Sister, a short film based on my poem of that title, which was in turn based on the German fairy tale. Keep an eye on the Brother and Sister web page for the upcoming New York screening dates.