Endicott Redux

Coraline Trailer

The trailer for Coraline is now online! There's also a DivX version (which has more visual detail but requires you to download the DivX plug-in) on Neil Gaiman's website.

Magical Mushrooms

Here are some wonderful Alice in Wonderland-like mushrooms that I saw at the Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna, VA. I was so excited by them that I forgot to find out what they're actually called.

   

The Endicott Studio/JoMA office has been closed because I'm out sick and Midori is away. We'll be back to posting (and answering correspondence) as soon as possible. (Many thanks to JoMA reviewers Jamie Bluth and Elizabeth Genco for pitching in.)

The Ash Girl

From February 28 to March 8 the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center will show The Ash Girl, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker and directed by Leslie Felbain. Says the notice: "Celebrated playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker spins the Cinderella fairy tale back to its Central European roots as she conveys the Ash Girl's tumultuous journey toward self-discovery with poetic language and compelling metaphors."

Timberlake Wertenbaker has written a host of plays, some of which are collected in Timberlake Wertenbaker: Plays One and Timberlake Wertenbaker: Plays Two. Go here to read more about her.

You can also learn more about the story of the Ash Girl in Terri Windling's article, "Ashes, Blood, and the Slipper of Glass," or in Helen Pilinovsky's article, "Donkeyskin, Deerskin, Allerleirauh: The Reality of the Fairy Tale." The image above is by Adrienne Ségur.

Sleeping in Magic

Terri's post last week showing a magical bed made me think of my own favorite magical bed. I ripped this picture out of a magazine in 1991, and have been saving it for the day I stop moving around and can sleep happily ever after in this woodland fantasy. Only a wee little part of my mind wonders how much dust will collect up there on the draped fabric. The bed was a one-of-a-kind creation by Mariette Himes Gomez. You can see more of her work here, although none of the pieces look anything like this bed.

But wait, I've just recently fallen in love with this bed above, too, designed by Chris McCloud, the owner of the interior design firm Design 6. Philadelphia magazine quotes Chris: "I thought, 'How interesting would it be if a tree fell through the roof and was carved out into a bed.'" The bed is made of sustainably harvested English burled elm and took its makers at The Wood Shop 273 hours to create.

And here's one last bed, below, complete with its own fairy tale. It's part of the La Lune Collection. I'm hoping that Grandma is napping elsewhere, and not inside that giant dog.

Kathryn Spence

A week or so ago, artist Kathryn Spence's owls were making the rounds on all my favorite craft blogs.  I promptly fell in love: 

Spence makes the owls from trash and scrap fabric.  Pieces of Beanie Babies live on in this stunning Great Horned Owl:

Kathryn's owls were on display at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco in 2006; you can read more about them (and see more pictures!) at the exhibition page. Here you'll find more of her work from past exhibitions, including pigeons made of newspapers and these intriguing dolls:

Learn about Kathryn Spence in this essay from a past exhibit at the Kemper Museum, and see a list of her exhibitions here.  (The first two pictures in this post come from a post at Ullabenulla, where I first read of Spence's work.)

Now then... where's my copy of Wizard Of The Pigeons?

Albannach

I had the good fortune to hear Albannach play last weekend at the Mid-Winter Scottish/Irish Music Festival in Philadelphia. Albannach (the Scots-Gaelic word for "Scottish" or "Scotsman") includes a piper, main drummer, bass drummers, and bodhran musicians, and the energy they bring to their playing is infectious. The bag piper, Donnie, is nicknamed "bullfrog" for the way his cheeks and neck inflate while he plays, and the drummers stomp and dance tirelessly while they pound out their rhythms.

Check out Albannach's tour schedule to see when they'll be in your area. And go to their MySpace page to listen. Oh, and if you're like me, and your first thought is "wow, that's chaotic," wait a couple of minutes more to let the sound sink deeply into your brain and I'll bet that you, too, will be hooked.

         

                      Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Guiding Lights: Lisel Mueller

    

We're introducing a new posting category this week called Guiding Lights, featuring the writers, artists, and performers who have particularly inspired us over the years.

I'll start things rolling with one of my own Guiding Lights: poet Lisel Mueller. I've been re-reading her collections recently, and realizing just how influential they were in forming my ideas about the power of folklore and mythic language, back when I was a younger editor and writer. I discovered Mueller's work thanks to Jane Yolen, who published "Why We Tell Stories" (still my favorite of Mueller's poems) in her Pantheon anthology Favorite Folktales From Around the World. I immediately sought out Mueller's own publications and was thrilled to discover a wealth of other poems with myth and folklore themes, such as her Sleeping Beauty poem "Immortality," and "Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny."

Mueller drew on the Brother and Sister fairy tale in another one of my favorite poems, "Animals Are Entering Our Lives," which begins:

Enchanted is what they were
in the old stories, or if not that,
they were guides and rescuers of the lost,
the lonely, needy young men and women
in the forest we call the world.
That was back in a time
when we all had a common language....

Her folkloric poem "Bread and Apples" begins:

In the tale
the apple tree rises before her,
not in an orchard,
but solitary and sudden
in a world she does not know
is supernatural. It asks
in an old woman's voice
to be relieved of its red-faced burden....

Her splendid long poem "Voices of the Forest" begins:

No matter how exhausted you are,
and though you think you will die of thirst,
do not enter the house in the forest.
Ignore the unlocked door
and the lamp in the window, lit for you.
Pass the house, which is real
and warm and apparently safe,
where the traveler is received
by someone, or at least
It is only when you finish eating
and, drowsy and grateful, pull of your shoes,
that the ax falls or the giant returns
or the monster springs or the witch
locks the door from the outside and throws away the key....

Her other poems are as powerful as her folkloric ones, working with themes of history and memory and exploring works of art ranging from the paintings of Edward Hopper and Paul Delvaux to the fiction of Mary Shelley, demonstrating how stories, both personal and cultural, can shape and re-shape our lives.

Mueller's own life story (chronicled in her poem "Curriculum Vitae") is both tragic and triumphant. She was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924, and raised there until the age of 15, when her parents fled to America to escape the Nazis' persecution of her father, a Hamburg intellectual. (Mueller's beloved grandparents stayed behind in Germany and perished in the war.) She learned the language of her new country, eventually attending the University of Evansville, where she earned a B.A. in sociology, followed by graduate work in comparative literature, with an emphasis on folklore and mythology, at Indiana University.

Mueller did not begin to write poetry seriously until the age of 29, when the death of her mother "placed my grief/ in the mouth of language, /the only thing that would grieve with me," as she explains in her poem "When I Am Asked." Her first collection, Dependencies, was published at the age of 41 (so take heart, all you late-bloomers out there). Since then, Mueller has published six more collections (The Private Life, Voices from the Forest, The Need to Hold Still, Second Language, Waving from Shore, Learning to Play by Ear, and Alive Together), winning the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Carl Sandburg Award, the National Book Award for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize. 

You can read a selection of her poems here, here, and here. (You'll also find her fascinating essay "Two Strains: Some Thoughts About English Words" on the Ploughshares website.) Then I highly recommend picking up Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, which provides a splendid introduction to the poet's work.

Back in 1995, Mueller generously allowed me to include her wrenching poem "Bedtime Stories" in The Armless Maiden, an anthology that drew upon folklore and fantasy to address the subject of child abuse, and which raised money for a children's shelter in Arizona. Read the poem online here, and you will see why this extraordinary writer is one of my Guiding Lights.

[Posted with thanks to Jessica Wick & Amal El-Mohtar, the editors of Goblin Fruit, whose own love of Mueller's poetry prompted me to dig out her collections again.]

To sleep, perchance to dream....

 

Oh lordy, I so want this magical bed, created by scupltor/metal-worker Shawn Lovell in Oakland, California. Lovell specializes in one-of-a-kind and commissioned works using traditional and modern forging techniques. Visit the Shawn Lovell Metalworks website to see more. (With thanks to poet Debra Cash, via Delia Sherman & Ellen Kushner, for the link.)

And for the complete "fantasy woodland" bedroom, here's an enchanting rug created by one of my favorite designers, Tord Boontje, (a Dutch artist who lives and works in France), for the Spanish rug company Nanimarquina. You'll find lights, fabrics and other items for this fantasy room in the "Projects" section of Boontje's website, Studio Tord Boontje.

   

The Monday Video

Our Monday Video today comes from Anglo-Indian singer Sheila Chandra, performing the Scottish song "Lament of McCrimmon/Song of the Banshee." It's a rendition that draws upon both sides of the singer's heritage, evoking the ancient sound of the Indian drone and the distinctive drone of traditional Scottish pipes.

"This melody was composed in 1745 on the departure of Donald McCrimmon by his sister. Another legend has it that Donald McCrimmon had a premonition of his death and composed the tune the night before he died and that his sister later wrote the words. Donald McCrimmon is said to have been killed in a skirmish in 1746 at the Rout of Moy during the last Jacobite Uprising. The McCrimmons were famous pipers and the hereditary pipers of the Clan MacLeod."

See "Folklore of the Voice," our profile of Sheila Chandra, for more information on this extraordinary performer.   

The Sunday Poem

      

Our Sunday Poem today is "Faun" by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963). Fauns were wild, licentious, goat-footed creatures in Roman myth (comparable to Greek satyrs), companions to Faunus and Fauna, the god and goddess of the forest depths.   

The art above comes from the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

2007 Spectrum Award

    

Break out the champagne for Chris Barzak, Joy Parks, and David Gerrold, who have just won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Short Fiction, honoring works of speculative fiction that deal positively with gay characters, themes, and issues. The winning stories are: "The Language of Moths" by Christopher Barzak (from Realms of Fantasy magazine), "Instinct" by Joy Parks (from the anthology The Future is Queer), and "In the Quake Zone" by David Gerrold (from the anthology Down These Dark Spaceways). The Future is Queer, edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel, won in the Other Works category, along with the television series Torchwood and the film V for Vendetta. Congratulations to all concerned. More information can be found here.

Half Flight by Shweta Narayan

JoMA is pleased to introduce our readers to new author Shweta Narayan and invite you to read her beautiful and haunting short story, Half Flight, based on the fairy tale Six Swans. Despite the efforts of the heroine to free her brothers from their enchanted forms, the youngest brother remains trapped as half swan, half boy. In this strange, interstitial life between human and animal, real and fantastic, he struggles to find an identity that will include both.

"The boy with one wing does not fall asleep. He rises into sleep, lifts into sleep, sleeps high, high above the muck and drizzle. In sleep he soars over rippled clouds, wrapped in clean and comforting sky. The ground is an occasional patch of brown and green below. Until he wakes.

She has caught him in nettles and his feathers are falling, falling out.

The swan with one arm falls awake..."

The magic of old books...

   

As book lovers here at the Endicott Studio, how could we not be smitten by the paintings of John C. Hulse?

Hulse studied art at Boston University, and trained as a metal smith and jeweler at The College of Art and Design in Detroit. He has traveled extensively, studying old master paintings, and now lives in Florida creating delicately crafted still life images. His work has been exhibited and collected across the U.S. and Europe.

To see more of his beautiful art, visit the painter's website and blog.

A night in the desert....

For those of you in the southwest of England, tonight is the second in a series of talks presented by Howard Gayton and me at The Big Red Sofa in Chagford. (The first was on women and fairy tales, back in November.) Tickets have been sold out for a couple of weeks (or I would have posted on this sooner), but I've learned that they are willing to sell a few on the door tonight if you don't mind sitting in the doorway area, where there's a bit less visibility. Those tickets are limited too, so phone to reserve: 01647 433883.

This time, we're celebrating the storytelling traditions of the indigenous peoples of Arizona's Sonoran desert....generating some desert heat and sun on a cold, cold winter evening here in Devon with stories, art, desert poetry, and more.

You can find more information about The Big Red Sofa on their website, blog, and MySpace page. The poster above was designed by Chagford artist David Wyatt and features art by Tucson photographer Stu Jenks.

The Monday Video

We kick off the week this time with a video of Israeli singer Yasmin Levy and her superb, international back-up band performing "Ir me Kero Madre" on Dutch television during their recent tour of Europe. Levy's father was one of the leading figures in the preservation of traditional Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) songs, and Levy herself is dedicated to the revival of this passionate, cross-cultural art form. As her website explains it:

"The Spanish Jews who fled Spain in 1492 after the Edict of Expulsion took with them a rich cultural heritage including the Spanish language. For nearly five centuries Sephardi Jews have kept alive the language of those Spanish exiles. Ladino, as it is popularly known, is an archaic form of Spanish with structures and vocabulary that can be traced back to the 15th century. Over the centuries it has absorbed vocabulary from the countries in which the Iberian Jews had settled.

"While there remain very few native-Ladino speakers today, there has been a recent worldwide revival of interest in this 'dying' language. Likewise enjoying great popularity today are Ladino songs. These can be divided into romansas, ballads (dramatic narrative poems) and kantigas (lyric songs), the most popular of which are love songs."

Visit Yasmin Levy's website for information on her various CDs, and her tour schedule. If you have the opportunity to see her perform live, don't miss it. She has the presence of a goddess onstage and her voice is truly transporting.

The Sunday Poem

The Sunday Poem today is "The Maiden Without Hands" by Martha Carlson-Bradley, based on the fairy tale of the same name. It comes from The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, a wonderful (and wonder filled) anthology edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson. You can read nine other poems from the book on The Poets' Grimm website.

Don't miss Midori's insightful article on the Maiden Without Hands fairy tale (a.k.a. The Armless Maiden), or poems based on the tale by Margaret Atwood, Nan Fry, Rigoberto González, and Elline Lipkin, all published in past issues of JoMA. To read the fairy tale itself, you'll find an annotated version on the Surlalune Fairy Tales site.

The painting above is by one of JoMA's favorite artists, Jeanie Tomanek. Visit her website to see more of her stunning work. The illustration to the left is by H.J. Ford, from Andrew Lang's Lilac Fairy Book, 1910.