Myth & Moor

The communion of the word

"A writer is, first and last, a reader. Who do you write for? Gertrude Stein was asked, and famously replied, 'Myself and strangers.' That self, the reader-self who is allied with strangers, may be a writer's better half, more detached, more trust-worthy, than the writing self who swaggers through a lifetime of prose. It is difficult -- and diminishing -- to separate the self who writes from the one who reads. Both acts belong to the communion of the word, which is a writer's life." 

 - Patricia Hampl (I Could Tell You Stories)

"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

 ― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.” 

- Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me)

From an interview with Richard Ford in The Paris Review:

Ford: "I want to write, partly at least, for the kind of reader I was when I was nineteen years old. I want to address that person because he or she is young enough that life is just beginning to seem a mystery which literature can address in surprising and pleasurable ways. When I was nineteen I began to read [William Faulkner's] Absalom, Absalom! slowly, slowly, page by patient page, since I was slightly dyslexic. I was working on the railroad, the Missouri-Pacific in Little Rock. I hadn’t been doing well in school, but I started reading. I don’t mean to say that reading altogether changed my life, but it certainly brought something into my life—possibility—that had not been there before."

Interviewer: "What was it about Absalom, Absalom!?"

Ford: "The language—a huge suffusing sea of wonderful words, made into beautiful, long paragraphs and put to the service of some great human conundrum it meant to console me about if not completely resolve. When I was old enough to think about myself as trying to be a writer, I always thought I would like to write a book and have it do that for someone else."

Yes.

Images above: "Sequel" (and tree leaves from "Sequel") by UK artist Nicola Dale, book architecture by Dutch artist Frank Halmans, book sculpture by UK artist Emma Tayor, and details from "Proverbial Threads" by US artist Robbin Ami Silverberg.

A Room of One's Own, III

"When I was seven, I said to my mother, may I close the door? And she said yes, but why do you want to close the door? And I said because I want to think. And when I was eleven, I said to my mother, may I lock my door? And she said, yes, but why do you want to lock your door? And I said, because I want to write."  - Dorothy West

"I can live a solitary life for months at a time, and it does me good, because I'm working. I just get up bright and early -- sometimes at five o'clock -- have my black coffee and go to work. In the days when I was taken up with everything else, I used to do a day's work, or housework or whatever I was doing, and then work at night. I worked when I could. But I prefer to get up very early in the morning and work. I don't want to speak to anybody or see anybody. Perfect silence. I work until the vein is out. There's something about the way you feel, you know when the well is dry, that you'll have to wait til tomorrow and it will be full up again."  - Katherine Anne Porter

"What I love about my cabin -- what I always forget that I love until I open the door and step into it -- is the absolute quiet. Oh, not the dead silence of a studio. A silence so physical that you begin to gasp for air; and it's not the allegorical silence silence of an empty apartment, with its creaks and sniffles and traffic a dull roar below, and the neighbors' muffled treading overhead. No, this is the silence of the world: birds shifting weight on branches, the branches squeaking against other twigs, the deer hoosching through the woods....It's a silence where you can hear the blood in your chest, if you chose to listen."  - Rita Dove

"Writing requires huge amounts of solitude. What I've done to soften the harshness of that choice is that I don't write all the time. I like to go out -- which includes traveling; I can't write when I travel. I like to talk. I like to listen. I like to look and to watch. Maybe I have Attention Surplus Disorder. The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention."  - Susan Sontag

"When I get up in the morning, I always have the desire to sit down and write. And most of the days I do write something. But then I get telephone calls, and sometimes I have to write an article for The Foreward. And once in a while I have to write a review, and I am interviewed, and I am all the time interrupted. Somehow I manage to keep on writing. I don't have to run away. Some writers say they can only write if they go to a far island. They would go to the moon to write not to be disturbed. I think that being disturbed is a part of human life and sometimes it's useful to be disturbed because you interrupt your writing and while you rest, while you are busy with something else, your perspective changes or the horizon widens. All I can say about myself is that I have never really written in peace."  - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"I feel that art has something to do with achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction." - Saul Bellow

The last word today comes from Ann Petry, who says:

"It doesn't much matter where I sit to write."

All of the photographs and quotes above come from The Writer's Desk, a beautiful little volume of black-and-white photographs featuring writers in their work spaces, by Jill Krementz. Krementz is a portrait photographer, photojournalist, and author based in New York City (and the wife of the late Kurt Vonnegut). The cropped images here don't do full justice to her work. The book's cover iimage is a portrait of Eudora Welty at her desk.

A Room of One's Own

I'd like to go back to the subject we were discussing (before illness distracted me) in the posts Guarding the Egg and The Things That Stop Us in Our Tracks, namely: the challenge of obtaining uninterrupted time for creative work and the tricky business of sustaining a good work/life balance.

To start us off, here's a passage from Janet Sternburg's Introduction to The Writer on Her Work (an excellent anthology of essays first published in 1981):

"I'm drawn back to a room from my childhood," Sternburg writes, "the back room of my aunt's apartment. When my parents and I visited, I used to vanish into that room. My means of escape was the typewriter, an old manual that sat on the desk in the back room...[which] was a place of freedom. There I could perform that significant act: I could close the door. Certainly I felt peculiar on leaving the warm and buzzing room of conversation, with its charge of familial love and invasion. But it wasn't the living room I needed; it was the writing room, which now comes back to me with its metal table, its stack of white paper that did not diminish between my visits...that room was essential to me. I remember sitting at the desk and feeling my excitement start to build; soon I'd touch the typewriter keys, soon I'd be back in my own world. Although I felt strange and isolated, I was beginning to speak, through writing."

"Looking back," says Sternburg, "I feel sad at so constrained a sense of freedom, so defensive a stance: retreat behind a closed door. Much later, when I returned to writing after many silent years, I believed that the central act was to open that door, to make writing something that would not stand in opposition to others. I imaged a room at the heart of a house, and life in its variety flowing in and out. Later still I came to see that I still valued separation and privacy....

"Now I've come to believe that there is no central act [of chosing either isolation or engagement with others]; instead there is a central struggle, ongoing, which is to retain control over the door -- to shut it when necessary, open it at other times -- and to retain the freedom to give up that control and experiment with the room as porous."

In an essay from the same collection, Anne Tyler says: "I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes -- learning how to close the door on it when ordinary life intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again -- that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.... After the children started school, I put up the partitions in my mind. I would rush around in the morning braiding their hair, packing their lunches; then the second they were gone I would grow quiet and climb my stairs to my study. Sometimes a child would come home early and I'd feel a little tug between the two parts of me; I'd be absent-minded and short-tempered.

"Then gradually I learned to make the transition more easily. It feels like a sort of string that I tell myself to loosen. When the children come home, I drop the string and close the study door and that's the end of it. It doesn't always work perfectly, of course. There are times when it doesn't work at all: if a child is sick, for instance, I can't possibly drop the child's end of the string, and I've learned not to try. It's easier just to stop writing for a while. Or if they're home but otherwise occupied, I no longer attempt to  sneak off to my study to finish one last page; I know that instantly, as if by magic, assorted little people will be pounding on my door requiring Band-Aids, tetanus shots, and a complete summation of the facts of life. "

"When I first started writing," says Sara Gruen (in Why We Write, edited by Meredith Maran), "I had a corner in the living room. I put up a freestanding screen, but that didn't keep little bodies from coming around the corner asking for milk and cookies. I could only write when no one else was home. We ran out of money for day care when my first book didn't sell, so all of a sudden I was taking care of a toddler and trying to write. My husband built me an office -- really more of a cage -- out of baby gates. My son couldn't unplug the computer anymore, but he could still throw things at me. Somehow I managed to finish my second book, and when it sold, we could afford a babysitter and once again I had the house to myself during the day.

"That didn't always translate into productivity. At one point, I was so stuck on Water for Elephants that that I worked in a walk-in closet. I covered over the window and made my husband move his clothes out and pasted pictures of old-time circuses on the wall. We had no Wi-Fi, which was perfect. The only thing I could do was open my file. I figured if I stared at it long enough, something would happen. Apparently I was right, because I finished the book, but I spent four months in that closet. Does a walk-in closet count as a room of one's own? Somehow I don't think that's what Virginia Woolf had in mind."

Lest we think that work/life balance issues are unique to women writers with children, here's a searingly honest except from an interview with Barry Lopez in Michigan Quarterly Review (2005). When asked if he'd made sacrifices for his work (which requires a great deal of travel), Lopez responded:

"Choosing the life I did, I've lost some things that from time to time cause me the deepest kind of anguish. Foremost among those are my social relations with other people. No one is comfortable exploring this topic with a stranger, but the truth is, if you're devoted to your work your family is going to pay a price. How you cope with that — opting for the work or opting to maintain the long-term stability of a marriage, a family — is a singular measure of character.

"I've lived in this house for almost thirty-four years, but I know relatively few people here. I'm not involved in the fabric of day-to-day life on the McKenzie, in part because my work is not local. My life is not working in the woods. If it were, I'd be logging every day with people whose lives I shared and whom I went to church with. I don't have that. I've chosen to do work that takes me a long way away. And when I come home, what I really crave is privacy.

"I've chosen a life that has made it impossible or very difficult for me to remain fully engaged in the life of a family. As a consequence, there have been times in my life when I've been very lonely. I can't look at paying this price, though, as having made a sacrifice. Because you choose one thing, you don't get another. I miss the pleasures of daily human contact and company. I'm in close touch with a community of people spread all over the country, all over the world, but I don't see them every day. I love my work. It's the good I have to offer. I don't regret what I've done, but I have gone through times when I wondered what it would have been like if I had chosen community over being the kind of outrider that I am. If I had chosen a monastery or a community of people to stay with, if I had chosen a conventional family life where I married somebody and had children. But those were choices I did not make."

Your thoughts?

The photographs above come from a series of articles on writers' rooms published in The Guardian: George Bernard Shaw's writing hut in the garden of his last house, Shaw's Corner, in Hertforshire; Jane Austen's writing table at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire; Charlotte Bronte's writing table in Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire; Rudyard Kipling's writing room at Bateman's, his grand Jacobean house in the Sussex Weald; Charles Darwin's study in Kent; and Virginia Woolf's writing shed in the garden at Monk's House in Sussex.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

The first two songs today come from Child Ballads, a lovely new album from American folk singers Anais Mitchell (yes, she was named after Anais Nin) and Jefferson Hamer. The album is exactly what you'd expect from the title: songs drawn from Francis J. Child's great collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, first published (in ten volumes) in the 1880s and '90s. Although deeply rooted in the landscape and folk tradition of the British Isles, these songs made their way over to the New World with Anglo-Scots immigrants and thus became a vibrant part of America's folk heritage too -- particularly in the eastern Appalachian, Blue Ridge and Smoky mountain regions. Francis Child was American himself, a scholar of literature, language and folklore at Harvard University in Boston.

Above: Mitchell & Hammer perform "Willie's Lady," Child Ballad 6, at a recent Folk Alley Session.

Below: "Tam Lin," Child Ballad 39, a faerie ballad from the Scottish Borders.

There have, of course, been many fine poems, short stories, children's books and fantasy novels based on the Tam Lin ballad. The latter includes Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip, An Earthly Knight by Janet McNaughton, Deersnake by Lucy Sussex, and The Queen of Spells by Dahlov Ipcar.

Carrying on with the Child Ballads theme:

 "The Dowie Dens of Yarrow" (Child Ballad  214), from the album Fairest Floo'er by Scottish singer/songwriter Karine Polwart; and "The Elfin Knight,"  Child Ballad 2, from the album The Girl Who Couldn't Fly by singer/songwriter Kate Rusby, from Yorkshire.

Reaching into the past, below:

The House Carpenter," performed by Pentangle (with John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, and Jacqui McShee) during the 1970s folk music revival. "The House Carpenter," a.k.a., "The Daemon Lover," is Child Ballad 243. Many of the mythic writers/artists of my generation grew up during the folk revival and were strongly influenced by it.

And one more:

"Jock O'Hazeldean," Child Ballad 293, peformed by Maddy Prior at London's Cecil Sharpe House (The English Folk Dance and Song Society) in 2008. Prior, of course, was the lead singer in the '70s electric folk band Steeleye Span.

If you're in the mood for  few more ballads, try: "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry" (Child Ballad 113), performed and explained by Scottish singers Caorolyn Allan and Jenny Keldie;  "Twa Sisters" (Child Ballad 10) from Scottish singer Emily Smith (and Julie Fowlis does a lovely version too); Anachie Gordon (Child Ballad 239) from Irish singer Mary Black; "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" (Child Ballad 106) from the British folk stalwart Martin Carthy; and  "Hughie Graeme" (Child Ballad 191) from the great June Tabor.

If you love ballads and folk music, I hope you know about John Boden's wonderful site, A Folk Song a Day. I'm addicted to it.

For a history of the folk revival in Britian, I recommend Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, a fascinating book by Rob Young.

And no discussion of ballads is complete without mentioning Charles Vess's  The Book of Ballads, an absolutely magical volume of ballads rendered in narrative graphic form. The book won the Eisner Award, and the original artwork (all 132 pages of it) is now housed in the Library of Congress collections.

Book News: Happy Birthday, Queen Victoria!

No, it's not the actual queen's birthday, but the birthday/publication day of the latest book from Ellen Datlow and me: Queen Victoria's Book of Spells...which has which has already received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. (For a list of authors in the book, go here.)

Ellen and I have chosen the term "Gaslamp Fantasy" rather than the other common appelation, "Victorian Fantasy" -- for in fact these stories can be set at any time during the 19th century, from the Regency years at the century's start to Queen Victoria's reign at the end.  Steampunk fiction is part of this genre, but there are other kinds of Gaslamp Fantasy too -- including historical fantasy (without Steampunk gadgets and googles), dark fantasy with a gothic bent, fantastical romance and mystery, and Fantasy of Manners: a brand of magical fiction that owes more to Jane Austen, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope than to C.S.Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien.

As a fantasy lover, Jane Austen addict, Victorianist, and obsessive Pre-Raphaelite fan, this is a book I've long wanted to create, with all of these passion explored in its pages. The authors here range from award winners and bestsellers to rising new talent (as is usual for our books), and every one them tackled the theme in deliciously different and surprising ways.

* If you're on Twitter, there will be a "Tor Chat" on Queen V tomorrow night: Wednesday, March 20th, at 4-5 pm (American eastern standard time). I won't be on the chat, alas, because the international time difference makes it just too late for me (I am distinctly not a night owl), but Ellen will be there, along with some of the very fine authors in the book: Jeffrey Ford, Catherynne Valente, Kaaron Warren, and Leanna Renee Heiber.

* For those of you in or near New York City, please come to the book's release party at the aptly named Queen Vic pub (68 2nd Ave at 4th Street) on March 27th. It promises to be a fabulous affair, and all are welcome. There will be readings by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Veronica Schanoes, Genevieve Valentine and Leanna Renee Heiber...plus a Victorian dessert competition judged by Ellen Datlow. (To enter, bring something sweet for Ellen to try, and extras to share with other attendees. The winner will receive a hardcover copy of the book signed by all authors in attendance.) Queen Vic will open its doors starting at 7:00 p.m. and readings will commence at 7:30. You can contribute to the mood by attending in your favorite Victorian or steampunk/gaslamp finery--not mandatory by any means, but "lovingly encouraged."

* If you'd like to read Jane Yolen's fabulous contribution to the book, "The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown," you can find it on Tor.com here.

Queen Victoria's Book of Spells bas been published by Tor Books (a quick shout-out here to our Tor editor, Liz Gorinsky), and is available, as of today, in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions. Happy birthday, Queen V!

The cover art for Queen Victoria's Book of Spells is by Allen Williams.

Preparing for the muse

"I start all my books on January 8th," says Isabel Allende. "Can you imagine January 7th? It's hell.

"Every year on January 7th, I prepare my physical space. I clean up everything from my other books. I just leave my dictionaries, and my first editions, and my research materials for the new one. And then on January 8th I walk seventeen steps from the kitchen to the little pool house that is my office. It's like a journey to another world. It's winter, it's raining usually. I go with my umbrella and the dog following me. From those seventeen steps on, I am in another world and I am another person.

"I go there scared. And excited. And disappointed -- because I have a sort of idea that isn't really an idea. The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up too. If she doesn't show up invited, eventually she just shows up." *

"I write eight to ten hours a day," Allende says, "until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.”

"One of the hardest things to do with a novel," says Philip Pullman, "is to stop writing it for a while, do something else, fulfill this engagement or that commitment or whatever, and pick it up exactly where you left it and carry on as if nothing had happened. You will have changed; the story will have drifted off course, like a ship when the engines stop and there’s no anchor to keep it in place; when you get back on board, you have to warm the engines up, start the great bulk of the ship moving through the water again, work out your position, check the compass bearing, steer carefully to bring it back on track … all that energy wasted on doing something that wouldn’t have been necessary at all if you’d just kept going."

"I don't know where my ideas come from," Pullman says, "but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again."

* The first quote is taken from Why We Write, edited by Meredith Maran (Plume/Penguin, 2013), published in aid of the 826 National youth literacy program. Please consider ordering a copy to support this worthy cause.

Recommended Reading:

Please don't miss "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter" by fairy tale scholar Marina Warner, which is over on the Paris Review site.

Warner writes: "Angela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself."

So very true. In the mythic arts field we owe an enormous debt to Angela Carter, whose influence on contemporary fairy tale literature remains unsurpassed to this day.

Art above: "Little Red Riding Hood" by Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

It's Publication Week!

Last night was the Book Launch for After (the latest anthology from me and my editorial-partner-in-crime Ellen Datlow) at Books of Wonder in New York City. Since I mixed up my days and didn't mention it here in time, I hope those of you who were interested in it heard about it anyway! And there's another reading coming up in New York on the 20th of November if you missed the first one. (And this time, I'll be there too.)

If you'd like to know more about the editing process behind the book (or why I edited a dystopian anthology in the first place -- admittedly a bit of a stretch for me), Ellen and I talk about it this week in the "Big Idea" column on John Scalzi's always-interesting blog, Whatever.

When Women Were Birds

I've recently read Terry Tempest Williams' new book, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, and I'm completely under its spell. It's a beautiful meditation on land, love, family, faith, activism, and art...all rooted in the red rock of southern Utah; a book that I already known I'll return to often in the years ahead.

When it ended, I found myself so unwilling to part with William's clear, honest voice in my ear that I pulled out a stack of her previous books: Refuge, Red, Leap, etc.. They are wonderful to re-read all at once, in the sequence of publication, which allows one to follow the evolution of her work, politics, and spiritual beliefs. And although I first read these volumes when I, too, lived in the American South-west, returning to her books from the green hills of Devon underscores how universal our need is for connection to the wild.

So this, dear readers, is "Terry Tempest Williams Week" here at The Drawing Board, with a week's worth of quotes drawn from various books, essays, and interviews. Today's quote is from When Women Were Birds -- excerpted from a passage in which Williams reflects on the powerful art installation pictured below. (The birds are made out of X-ray film from hospital MRIs.)

"Now, in a shift of light," Williams writes, "the shadows of birds are more pronounced on the gallery's white wall. The shadow of each bird is speaking to me. Each shadow doubles the velocity, ferocity of forms. The shadow, my shadow now merges with theirs. Descension. Ascension. The velocity of wings creates the whisper to awaken....

"I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars."

Yes. Yes. Yes.

"Swoop" by Julia Barello. Please visit the artist's website to see more of her work. If you're in the mood for further reading, an old article on mine on the folklore of birds is here.

Time and memory

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called 'leaves') imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”  - Carl Sagan

“Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.”  - Marge Piercy

The book art above is by Su Blackwell and Samantha Y. Huang, both based in London, and Nicholas Jones, based in Melbourne, Australia. Please visit their websites to see more.

Mothers and mermaids...

Above: a thoroughly magical little video for Katherine Langrish's thoroughly magical mermaid novel, Foresaken. Kath says:

"The idea for Forsaken came from the classic poem 'The Forsaken Merman' by the late Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, which in turn is based on an old Scandinavian ballad. It tells the story of a merman who married a human woman, Margaret. They live together happily under the sea and she has children by him - till one day she hears church bells ringing and feels a sudden longing to go and pray in the 'little white church'. The merman agrees to part with her for a short while. But once on land she never returns to the sea, leaving her husband and children to grief for her. In Arnold's poem the merman says:

Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white, sleeping town;
At the church on the hill-side—
And then come back down.
Singing: "There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.

"The old belief about mermaids was that they had no souls. In order to preserve her immortal soul, Margaret is ready to desert her husband and children. Was she right to follow her beliefs? Or wrong to cause her loved ones so much pain?

"In the original legend, the merman clambers into the churchyard to try and find his wife, but when he looks into the church, 'all the stone images turned their backs on him'. When I read this, a shiver ran down my spine and I knew I had to tell the story again - but this time, I wondered what would have happened if, instead of the merman, one of Margaret's own mer-children went to find her?"

The video was shot on location around the Farne Island. The voice-over is by Polly Carey, and the music was composed and performed by Richard Hughes of We Are Goose.

Three Recommendations:

* Delia Sherman talks about her new YA novel The Freedom Maze in a podcast over on the Small Beer Press website, chatting about "her southern roots and the nature of dreams." It's a terrific little podcast -- and the book in question, a time-travel fantasy set in Louisiana, is quite simply one of the best YA novels I've read in years. (For more information on the book, including a download of the first chapter, go here.)

* Stephen Fry discusses the subject of storytelling in Episode 5 of Fry's Planet Word over on BBC Two. Fry asks "what makes a good story and why some writers just do it better. He reveals what stories make him shiver with joy or, conversely, shudder with horror. From Homer's epic to Joyce's modern-day reinvention with Ulysses, from taking in Shakespeare, PG Wodehouse, Tolkien, Orwell, Auden, Bob Dylan and the even the mangled web of words that became known as Birtspeak, Stephen uncovers why certain words can make us laugh, cry or tear our hair out." Watch this soon, as it will be online only until November 1.

* Christina Cairns continues the discussion on "creative burn-out" in her excellent new post "Decending into the underworld, the labyrinth, the abyss" on A Mermaid in the Attic.

And here's what has made my day...

...the book trailer video for our new Bordertown anthology! (It's running exclusively on io9.com this week, so I can't embed it here; just follow the link.) Go watch it before you read the "making of" information below, as it's more fun to stumble upon it fresh....

Okay, you're back?

Ellen Kushner, Holly Black, and I cooked up the initial idea for video...but then Ellen ran with it, wrote the script, and, with our publisher's support, made the leap from Cool Idea to Finished Project. (See that deep, dark chasm between the two? Alas, that's where too many Cool Ideas end up unless there's a person, like Ellen, with both vision and tenacity behind them.)

Ellen got Vital Theatre on board (the company that produced her fabulous "Klezmer Nutcracker" in New York), and they, in turn, brought in some terrific young actors from the New York City school system. Bravo to everyone -- especially Ellen, who has been involved with every step of the project, but also to the kids, New York radio host Jim Freund (the grumpy old-timer in the video), the video crew, the support team at Vital Theatre, and the good folks at Random House Publishers (including the book's fine editor, Mallory Loehr), who all helped to make it happen.

The picture on the left above, by the way, is a Bordertown sketch created by Brian Froud back in 1991 (for a film project that didn't make the leap across the chasm). You'll find more sketches by Brian on the Bordertown website, on the Characters page.

And one last thing: Christopher Barzak is running a new Bordertown contest over on his blog. (Chris has a terrific story in the new book.) The prize is a one-of-a-kind Bordertown pendant by Mia Nutick of Chimera Fancies.  All the info is here.

The best of my birthday presents...

...is the debut of a new blog by my husband, Howard Gayton, and his friend and colleague, comic book artist Rex Van Ryn. Howard and Rex have been working on a graphic novel every morning at our kitchen table, and their blog, John Barleycorn Must Die, is a documentation and exploration of the creative process.

As you know, I love "creative process blogs" (having posted on the very subject last week) and this one -- full of fabulous comic art, creative musings and conversation, and the two men's extremely wacky humor -- is a delight.

It will appear every Friday, and every fourth week will feature a conversation with a guest artist (or writer, filmmaker, dramatist, etc.) -- a population we're not exactly lacking in this village. Filmmaker Billy O'Brian (in the photo with Howard below) will be the first of the guests.

The graphic novel, like the blog, is called John Barleycorn Must Die -- a title many of you will know from the old English folk song. It's an unusual book, created in an unusual way, with an unsual blog to record the process.

Now, here's where I have to admit that I've never been a big reader of comics or graphic novels, although I respect them as an art form. So for me, what's fascinating about Howard and Rex's project, besides my love of seeing art spread across the kitchen each weekday morning, is the cross-word puzzle way they are piecing it together. I love being able (in actuality and through the blog) to eavesdrop on the intellectual process of working out the book, of wrestling with creative ideas that succeed and creative ideas that don't. It's the process I relate to, as a novelist and painter, and that will keep me coming back to this blog each week for more.

Thank you, guys, for the serendipity of posting your first blog entry on my birthday. You couldn't have given me a better present.

To all my American friends, family, colleagues, and readers. . .

Enjoy that turkey and pumpkin pie for me, the latter of which is virtually unknown here in England. (As is Shoofly Pie, which I grew up with in a family that is Pennsylvania Dutch on my maternal grandmother's side.)

And since I've been recommending something every day this week, here are Thursday's recommendations:

Reading/Print

1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving by Catherine O'Neil Grace and Margaret Bruchac. Published by the National Geographic Society, this is a fascinating book for children which dispells many of the myths that have grown up around the holiday by exploring the actual history of the event. 'Sure wish I'd had this when I was a kid.

Giving Thanks by Chief Jake Swamp, with illustrations by Erwin Printup, Jr. This is a truly lovely children's book that draws on the Iroquois ceremonial tradition to remind us that giving thanks shouldn't be limited to a single day each year.

Reading/Web

The Cranberry Cantos: The editors at the Poetry Foundation provide a wonderful round-up of Thanksgiving poems old and new here. (Don't miss "Perhaps the World Ends Here" by Navajo poet Joy Harjo. Or Bruce Guernsey's ode to the Yam!)

Listening

 

A British friend asked me recently if Thanksgiving was a religious holiday. "No," I said. "It's pretty much all about the food, and watching football, not going to church."

Then to whom, she asked, are we giving thanks?

I reckon that all of us Americans would give a different answer to that. Some would say "to God," some would say "to the land, for its bounty," some would say "to the family and friends gathered 'round the table, who sustain our lives as food sustains the body," and some would say, "who the hell cares, pass the turkey."

I'm in all these catagories, thankful to it all and for it all...although "god," to me, isn't Our Father sitting on high with a long white beard, it is the mystery of life that permeates all things. I don't seem to have a need for god/spirit/the mystery to be explained, or proved, or confined into one set of religious practices; the mystery of life just is, and for that I'm thankful today, every day, always. So my Thursday "listening" recommendation is Iris Dement performing her charming song "Let the Mystery Be."

Wednesday's Recommendation: It F*cking Gets Better

  My colleage Hal Duncan, a young Scottish writer of mythic novels and a contributor to The Journal of Mythic Arts, has a video up on Tor.com right now that I highly recommend. Brit Mandelo explains:

"The It Gets Better project has been huge on the public media, the internet, everywhere as an attempt to save the lives of queer teens, or at least make their burden slightly more bearable. Speculative writer and all-around interesting guy Hal Duncan observed on Twitter that most of these videos would not have spoken to a teenage-him, and I personally agree. They are full of platitudes and well-meaning but unhelpful good cheer. They don’t connect, especially if you are or were a queer teen who was not just sad but angry. So, he made his own It Gets Better video, and it’s the best one I’ve seen."

Honest, obscenity-laced, wise, and even profound -- I admit it, Hal's video made me cry by its end. You can watch it here.

And while you're at it, check out Hal's novel too. They are wild, weird, and wonderful.

 

 

Monday's Recommendations

 Things to read, and look at, and listen to:

Reading (print)

Please don't miss The Turquoise Ledge, a new memoir by the award-winning Tucson writer Leslie Marmon Silko. It's an unusual book: richly mythic and symbolic, engrossing, surprising, harrowing, and deeply moving. Lordy, can this woman write! I particularly love Silko's evocation of the desert flora and fauna of southern Arizona; I can practically smell that creosote-and-sage scented air. (Many thanks to Carolyn Dunn, no slouch of a writer herself, for the heads-up on Silko's latest.)

Reading (on the web)

Monique Poirier has written an interesting post on the Steampunk movement and Native American indentity over at the Beyond Victoriana blog (with thanks to Amal El-Mohtar for the link). "Part of the fun of Steampunk is the aspect of alternate history," she says, "of deliberate anachronism and the application of alternate timelines and technological developments and the ration of ‘Steam’ to ‘Punk’. It means having the chance to create alternate histories in which Native Americans maintain sociological primacy and control over the North and South American landmass, if we so choose. . . ." Read the whole post here.

Looking

My fairy-goddaughter, photographer Guarina Lopez-Davis, was awarded a 'Young Artist Grant' by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities this year to create "Modern Natives//Personal Regalia":  a multimedia photographic project consisting of large format photographs (silver toned and hand printed), audio interviews and an accompanying website. The project is Guarina's creative response to the controversial Edward Curtis' photographs of Native Americans taken in the early years of the 20th century. "This is a project that I have been thinking about conceptually for almost 15 years" she says. "As a Native person, I am acutely aware of the historical misrepresentation of all Native tribes. I am also aware that the Native voice in the Contemporary Art world is almost non-existent on a grand scale. With this project my hope is to give a voice to Native peoples, so that our presence can be known as modern as well as traditional."

You can see Guarina's gorgeous photographs on her "Modern Natives//Personal Regalia" website.

Listening

In the video below, shot at the Botanic Gardens in Tucson (one of my favorite places there), R. Carlos Nakai (Native American flute), William Eaton (harp guitar), and Will Clipman (percussion) perform "My Wild Heart Sings," from their CD A Distant Place (Canyon Records). I have the album on my CD player right now -- and it's a song that fills my own wild heart with desert rhythms on a mist-shrouded morning at the edge of Dartmoor.

 

 

 Also: The poet & musician Joy Harjo has a lovely new CD out, Red Dreams: A Trail Beyond Tears. You can hear a bit of it here.

More news from the Border

The new Bordertown book (discussed in my last post) contains a mix of writers old and new. Half of them (like co-editor Ellen Kushner) are writers who first created the series with me, back in our wayward youth -- while the other half (like co-editor Holly Black) are younger writers who grew up with the Bordertown books, and whose work was influenced by the urban fantasy genre that they helped to pioneer.

Janni Lee Simner, one of the latter, has just written a lovely little piece, "Running Away to Bordertown," about the magic of writing and reading urban fantasy. 

Annette Curtis Klause, also one of the latter, writes about her own journey to the Border on her blog, Human Oddity.

And speaking of good blog posts, are you all keeping up with the "Fairytale Reflections" over on Katherine Langrish's blog? The latest entry in this fabulous series is by Delia Sherman, discussing The Snow Child.

News from Bordertown

Here is the cover art for the new Bordertown anthology, a fat collection of brand new Bordertown stories to be published by Random House in May, 2011. (Click on the art to see a larger version.) The cover painting is by Steve Stone, and the design by Ellice Lee. Our Random House editor is the valiant Mallory Loehr, assisted by Chelsea Eberly.

A limited number of Advanced Reading Copies of the book were handed out to reviewers at the World Fantasy Convention, and more will be sent out closer to the publication date. There's also a new Bordertown website in the works, and I'll link to it here when it's ready to debut.

Our first “unofficial review” comes from One Minute Monkey, the LJ page of Michael M. Jones (book reviewer for The Green Man Review and other publications):

“This is over 500 pages of fiction and poetry, revisiting the Bordertown setting which helped lay the groundwork for today’s urban fantasy bonanza. Not only have many of the original contributors showed up for another go-around, but they’re joined by a fair number of today’s hottest writers, those who pretty much GREW UP with Bordertown. This isn’t a rehashing of the old days, this is a love-fueled rock n’ roll continuation and updating where a new generation meets the old gang. (And in my opinion, they came up with a perfectly appropriate way to make those intervening 13 years between installments seem like 13 days… heheheheh.)”

Updated to add: Here's Michael M. Jones' full review, which is our very first!

And f.y.i., here's the volume's complete Table of Contents:

WELCOME TO BORDERTOWN
edited by Holly Black & Ellen Kushner

Introduction – Terri Windling
Introduction – Holly Black
Bordertown Basics (Letter from the Diggers)
Welcome to Bordertown – Terri Windling & Ellen Kushner
Shannon’s Law – Cory Doctorow
Cruel Sister (poem) – Patricia A. McKillip
Voice Like a Hole – Catherynne M. Valente
Stairs in Her Hair (song) – Amal El-Mohtar
Incunabulum – Emma Bull
Run Back to the Border (song) – Steven Brust
Prince of Thirteen Days – Alaya Dawn Johnson
The Sages of Elsewhere – Will Shetterly
Soulja Grrrl: A Long Line Rap (song) – Jane Yolen
Crossings – Janni Lee Simner
Fair Trade (Comic) – Sara Ryan & Dylan Meconis
Lullabye: Night Song for a Halfie (song) – Jane Yolen
Our Stars, Our Selves – Tim Pratt
Elf Blood – Annette Curtis Klause
The Wall (poem) – Delia Sherman
Ours is the Prettiest – Nalo Hopkinson
We Do Not Come in Peace – Christopher Barzak
A Borderland Jump-Rope Rhyme (poem) – Jane Yolen
The Rowan Gentleman – Cassandra Clare & Holly Black
The Song of the Song (song) – Neil Gaiman
A Tangle of Green Men – Charles de Lint

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Annette Curtis Klause has written a good description of its premise:

"The gate to Elfland has reappeared in our world," she explains, "and around it stretches a border where neither magic or technology works quite right. Bordertown is a place unlike any city but also like a bit of them all. Runaways come from both sides of the border to find adventure. Elves play in rock bands and race down the street on spell-powered motorcycles. Humans have the freedom to recreate themselves but have to cobble together ways of doing what was once for granted with a combination of iffy magic and ingenuity. But all isn’t fun and happy-ever-after in the clubs and squats of the bohemian Soho neighborhood or even in the high-priced elvin homes on Dragon Hill. Prejudice, addiction, and revenge walk hand in hand with the artists, poets, and musicians of the city, gangs of elves and humans are constantly at war or in uneasy truce, and surviving sometimes depends on discovering skills you didn’t know you had."

 Bordertown, says Holly Black (in her Introduction to the new volume) is "a city where the capricious and dangerous elves of folklore (even if they called themselves something else) walk around in leather jackets, drink alongside human artists and poets at bars, and, most of all, exist in a world that isn’t long ago and far away. Bordertown is always close by, just around a corner, the place you can run away to if you dare...."

 In the photo below, Holly and Ellen sign ARCs, hot off the press, at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio (October, 2010): 

Until the new Bordertown website is up, you'll find a bit more information on the series here -- and there's information on the creation of the new anthology on Ellen Kushner's blog. Two good Bordertown fan sites are The Hard Luck Cafe and The Yellow Brick Road -- and go here for a charming little ditty called the "Bordertown Waltz" by reader Gina Donahue. The little Bordertown sketches above are by my friend Iain McCaig, who knows the back streets of B-town well.

Video Enchantment

The video above, which is a trailer for M. Rickert's new book (Holiday, from Golden Gryphon Press), was created by my friend Thomas Canty. It's a beautiful, mythic, and haunting little film.

 American fantasy readers will know Tom as an award-winning cover artist and illustrator whose work has graced many books in our field -- including my Snow White, Blood Red series, the original "Fairy Tales" series, and twenty-plus volumes of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. What some of you young'uns may not know, however, is that Tom was instrumental in changing the look of American fantasy literature, back in the 1980s, from the ubiquitous swordsman-and-babe-in-brass-bikini covers to a much broader and more sophisticated range of art. His distinctive, iconic imagery has its roots in the 19th century Arts-&-Crafts movement and the art and design of the Pre-Raphaelites; and like William Morris himself, Tom's aesthetic extends far beyond the canvas to design-work in a variety of mediums.

It's great to see Tom venturing into video, and I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next. I'm also a big fan of M. Rickert's short fiction, so this seems to be an inspired pairing of talents.