Endicott Redux

Terri Windling's Studio Online At Last!

I am very excited to invite all of you to browse through Terri's terrific new website, blog, and art galleries! (The Etsy shop is coming...). It is a truly wonderful place, filled with Terri's reflections on the craft of editing, writing, myth and folklore, recommended books, and finally, all of her wonderful art available for viewing. It's like Terri, knowledgeable and generous, beautiful and welcoming -- sharing her love of the mythic arts with all of us.

Here's a list of the sections: The Studio Doorway, The Entrance Hall, The Easel (with links to galleries containing her paintings and collages), Studio Shop (art for sale), Writing Desk, Editing Desk, Inspiration Board, and Speakers Corner. The Drawing Board section is her studio blog (for news and works-in-progress) and also contains links to galleries containing some of her sketches.

Remember when blogging was new and you could catch up on your favorite blogs over morning coffee? Now there's so much good stuff out there that there's no way in heck to keep up with it all (though syndication feeds are certainly a help), and I'm even falling behind on keeping up with blogs by friends. Case in point: I only just found out that Kim Antieau has been posting wonderful little interviews with other mythic-arts writers on her newly re-designed blog; she's got interviews with Alice Hoffman, Charles de Lint, Joanna Harris, Jane Yolen, and poet Jimmy Santiago Baca so far. She has also posted an intriguing interview with herself in which 60 writers, editors, family members and friends asked the questions. You can read some good snippets from the interviews below, and go here to check them out at full length. They are little gems.

Kim to Alice Hoffman: Like many fairy tales, your stories often begin with catastrophe. Terrible things happen to your characters and to the people around them. Is it difficult to be a witness to these tragedies, as the writer? Is this emotionally draining for you as you are writing it? Or is it cathartic? Or neither?

Alice: It's cathartic to take straw and make it into gold, or as close to gold as you can get it. Also to transfigure reality and expand it. Terrible things happen in all fairy tales -- why not? They are the most honest of all literature.

Kim to Charles de Lint: Are you ever unsure of yourself or your writing?

Charles: All the time. I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they’re writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you’re too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you’re too uncertain, you’ll never finish anything.

Kim to Joanne Harris: Alice Hoffman says you can tell something about a person by which book they prefer: Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. Which book do you prefer? Why?

Joanne:Wuthering Heights; partly because I live within a stone’s throw of the place, and the landscape has shaped my childhood, and partly because of the raw poetry of the writing and the extraordinary insight the author shows into the darker mysteries of the human heart – an at such a tender age. Fantastic.

. . . And on another subject entirely, there's a good article posted on Salon.com today about Ursula Le Guin's new mythic novel, Lavinia.

The Return of Joy Williams's The Changeling

There is a terrific article in the New York Times literary blog, Paper Cuts, by Dwight Garner on the triumphant and long overdue return of award-winning author Joy Williams's novel, The Changeling. The article looks at the savage drubbing the novel first received in 1978 by a reviewer who knew very little about the evocative and emotionally deep well of fairy tales and mythic fiction. (Boy, some things don't change!) It is wonderful to know that the book is finally receiving the attention it deserved, and kudos to The Fairy Tale Review  Press (and brilliant editor Kate Bernheimer) for making it available once again. (We will be posting a full review in the near future.)

Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia

There is a terrific interview/article with Ursula Le Guin in the Wall Street Journal, discussing her new mythic/historical novel, Lavinia. The novel follows the life of Princess Lavinia, the very fleeting figure of Aeneas' second wife in Virgil's heroic epic, The Aeneid. Although the original epic has only a handful of lines concerning Lavinia, Le Guin decided she needed much more attention. As explained in the WSJ review, Le Guin "saw in Lavinia a character in search of a writer. Virgil didn't allow Lavinia to speak a single word in his poem. Here, Ms. Le Guin thought, was a woman who needed a voice across the centuries. So she imagined Lavinia: dutiful but strong-willed, romantic but shrewd." You can read an excerpt from the novel here.

There is also an interesting review of the novel by Yvonne Zip of The Christian Science Monitor here: "In one of the more impressive displays of feminist reconstruction since Margaret Atwood wrested Penelope out of the hands of Homer, National Book Award-winner Le Guin has rewritten the last six books of Virgil's epic poem to create a rich life of the mind for the Latin princess. Unlike Atwood's Penelopiad, the novel, as Le Guin writes in an afterword, is a 'love offering,' and she writes with great affection for both the poet and his hero."

Also, if you've not yet read The Aeneid, and don't want to follow Le Guin's example of translating ten lines a day, consider getting hold of Robert Fagels' masterful new translation of this mythic classic. It's a first rate translation -- written in a clear and elegant English but maintaining Virgil's wonderful cadence. It's also a great swashbuckling tale, following the adventures of a Trojan War hero. (There is one cool part with Lavinia, where her hair catches on fire but doesn't burn -- a flaming omen of a coming war). On a side note, Robert Fagels died recently -- a sad loss to the world of classical literature.

The Book of Blood

          

In her terrific article on the Armless Maiden folktale, Midori used this quote from the British poet Vicki Feaver, author of a hard-hitting poem based on the Brothers Grimm verision of the tale, The Handless Maiden:

"I read a psychoanalytic interpretation by Marie Louise von Franz in her book, The Feminine in Fairytales in which she argues that the story reflects the way women cut off their own hands to live through powerful and creative men. They need to go into the forest, into nature, to live by themselves, as a way of regaining their own power. The child in the story represents the woman's creativity that only the woman herself can save."

(The quote comes from an interview in Poetry Magazine, "No More 'Mrs. Nice'.")

I didn't know Feaver's work when I read Midori's piece, and I made a note to myself to seek it out. It's taken me all this time to finally do so...and now I'm kicking myself for the long delay. If you're a fan of mythic poetry, this woman's work is simply not to be missed.

The Book of Blood, Feaver's most recent collection, is the best place to start -- although her previous book, The Handless Maiden, is also a fabulous read. (I've posted a link to the latter book's Amazon.co.uk page here, because the Amazon.com page has Feaver's collection confused with Loranne Brown's novel of the same title.)

The Book of Blood begins with a quote from Stevie Smith, which sets the tone for the pages that follow: "The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out. The passage out that she blasts is often in splinters, covered with blood…"

As Laura Helyer points out on the Poetry House website: "Feaver seems to agree that ‘the passage out’ is a necessarily bloody or messy one for women poets who look to make a space for their voice in a tradition that has largely, and often aggressively, excluded them. By this I mean much must be re-visioned and re-imagined from a woman’s point of view. Even today, it is impossible for women to be indifferent to this imbalance even if they resent being labeled ‘women poets’. This has been successfully addressed and redressed through writers such as Carol Ann Duffy and Angela Carter through the unpicking and rewriting of fairy tales, mythic imagery and the voicing of passive female subjects of often canonical paintings. It is an approach that Feaver has supported in this collection with poems such as ‘Girl in Red’, ‘The Gift’, ‘Medea’s Little Brother’, ‘The Red Cupboard’ and ‘The Fates’ as well as famously in her previous book, The Handless Maiden."

(Read Helyer's full article on Feaver's work here, which includes excerpts from Feaver's poems.)

Writing in The Guardian, Sarah Crown observes: "Like the characters in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber - clearly a strong influence here - Feaver's unruly women are more than capable of taking aberrant pleasure in their actions. A modern-day Red Riding Hood rejoices in her 'sizzling vermilion' lipstick and 'ruby high heels,' not caring that 'Grandma said / it made me look like a tart;' Cinderella, meanwhile, loves her work, seeing herself as 'an artist of the hearth.' Feaver also lends a more sympathetic ear to the stories of mythically wicked women such as Medea (who dismembered her brother) and Blodeuwedd (the Welsh owl-goddess who conspired with her lover to murder her husband). But she does not absolve them. Feaver permits Medea, for example, to tell her side of the story, but at the same time forces us to look her crimes in the face in a retelling so violent it is almost unreadable."

Indeed, Feaver's poems can be dark, violent, sexual, brutal...much like the old fairy tales themselves. She joins a long line of women storytellers, stretching back and back through the centuries, who have used fairy tales as a metaphoric language with which to speak of the stark realities of women's lives. Her work is unflinchingly feminist, but that doesn't mean these are poems for Women Only, of course.

As fellow-poet Matthew Sweeney has said: "Vicki Feaver's poems always come back to contemporary relationships - not so much domestic as domestic gothic, where the women are sensual and murderous. These are powerfully distinctive poems, women's poems that don't shut out men."

     

Art credits: The top two pieces are H.J. Ford's illustrations for The One-Handed Girl (a variant of The Armless Maiden/Handless Maiden/Silver Hands story); the rest of the art comes from Jennie Harbour, a turn-of-the-century English fairy tale illustrator (about whom little is now known, alas).

The pervasive influence of fairy tales...

       

I've come across an interesting "conversation" between Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates on the subject of being a poet. It dates back to 1978, and is available online here.

The comment in it that particularly caught my eye:

Oates: Have fairy tales, Gothic romances and other fantasies played a significant part in your background reading?

Atwood: The Gothic; the supernatural fantasy and related forms have interested me for some time, in fact, my uncompleted Ph.D. thesis is called "The English Metaphysical Romance." This may or may not have something to do with the fact that in childhood--I think I was about 6--we were given the complete "Grimms' Fairy Tales," unexpurgated. My sister was terrified of it, but I loved it. These are, of course, not "children's stories"; they were originally told by adults to anyone who happened to be there, and there is quite a lot of material that we wouldn't consider suitable for children today. It was not the gore--being rolled downhill in barrels full of spikes and so forth--that caught my attention, but the transformations. "The Juniper Tree" was and remains my favorite, followed closely by a story called "Fitcher's Bird." The other interesting thing about these stories is that, unlike the heroines of the more conventional and re-done stories, such as "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood," the heroines of these stories show considerable wit and resourcefulness and usually win, not just by being pretty virtuous, but by using their brains. And there are wicked wizards as well as wicked witches. I would like to write about this sometime.

(Atwood, by the by, contributed one of her fairy tale poems to The Journal of Mythic Arts. You'll find it in our archives here.)

And here's another article that's worth perusing, this one published in The Guardian back in 2004: "Happy Ever After" by A.S. Byatt. An excerpt:

"It is interesting how impossible it is to remember a time when my head was not full of these unreal people, things and events. When I ask friends and colleagues what is their first precise memory of a fairy tale they almost all come up with some shock administered by that psychological terrorist, Andersen - the little mermaid walking on knives, Hans in the icy palace of the Snow Queen. But these shocks happen to people and children who already need and inhabit the other world which gets into our heads and becomes necessary - a world of suns and moons and forests, of princesses and goose girls, of old men and women, benign and malign, of talking birds and flying horses, magic roses and magic puddings, turnips and pigs, impenetrable castles and petrification, glass mountains and glass coffins, poisonous apples and blinding thorns, ogres and imps, spindles and spun gold, tasks and prohibitions, danger and comfort (for the good people) after it. It is very odd - when you come to think of it - that human beings in all sorts of societies, ancient and modern, have needed these untrue stories. It is much odder than the need for religious stories (myths) or semi-historical stories (legends) or history, national or personal. Even as a little girl I perceived its oddity. These "flat" stories appear to be there because stories are a pervasive and perpetual human characteristic, like language, like play...."

All three of these writers contributed fine essays on fairy tales to Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fair Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer. If you're a fan of fairy tales and fairy tale literature, I hope you haven't missed Kate's excellent book, or its sequel Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales. Or her journal, The Fairy Tale Review.

Blue by Elizabeth Genco and Sami Makkonen

We are eagerly awaiting Blue, a graphic novel and the latest offering from the creative team of author Elizabeth Genco and artist Sami Makkonen. Elizabeth explains "BLUE is about a girl whose ex-turned-indie-rock-god comes back and is not as he seems. It's a bit of a sendup of Bluebeard, a old school fairy tale."

And here's a quote from the solicitation copy: "A fresh, fantastic take on the bloodiest of classic fairy tales. When Blue's ex-boyfriend appears on her doorstep, he says he wants to make things right. His true intentions are far more sinister. Blue's shape-shifting powers can help her outrun him, but to survive, she must face him as herself."

Stop by Blue and keep up with the news, promotions, and sneak previews of the forthcoming graphic novel.

Jeffrey Ford: The Shadow Year: A Novel

Jeffrey Ford's new novel, The Shadow Year: A Novel, contains a number of my favorite literary themes: a child's perspective of the mysterious (and often ambiguous) world of adults; the intuitive fantasy world of children; and the echo of fairy tale rites-of-passage through dark and dangerous woods. Set in the early Sixties in a small town, three siblings find themselves at the center of a series of troubling events that begin in the late days of summer, and deepen throughout the winter. The narrator's sixth grade classmate disappears, a peeping tom harasses the quiet neighborhood, and a pale man driving a long white car silently prowls the streets.

The narrator, haunted by the disappearance of his classmate, engages his older brother Jim and younger sister Mary in the task of solving the "case" of the prowler. Yet this single case quickly becomes complicated as throughout the fall and winter, more mysterious events occur: an elderly neighbor and the ice cream man go missing, the school librarian has a mental break down, the peeping tom continues to harass different houses, and the long white car with its pale driver seems to hover at the scene of each of these unexplained mishaps.

The children have their own unique and separate ways of comprehending the perplexing events around them. On a huge piece of plywood in the basement, Jim builds an alternative version of the town, complete with small effigies of neighbors, and a hearse painted white. This "Botch Town," a microcosm of the adult world above in clay and cardboard, provides a vantage point from which to study the evolving pattern of the cases as a whole. Mary possesses a quirky prophetic mathematical vision and, like a child-sized Delphic Oracle, places the effigies in the streets and yards of Botch Town hours before each of the mysterious events occurs. And the narrator, our storyteller and "profiler," writes mini-dramas about his neighbors as a way of subconsciously experiencing and empathizing with the people around him.

But the exact nature of the danger afflicting the people of Botch Town is hard to grasp. Something is lurking unseen in the shadow, casting a pall over the town as the season shifts from autumn to winter. The children, convinced that a powerful and malevolent monster has descended on their neighborhood, place themselves in harm's way as they search for clues. Refusing to share their findings with adults, the siblings close ranks and head out to confront the shadow on their own -- slipping out at night to traverse the local woods, the lake, and even the grade school's labyrinthine basements.

Ford's novel conveys the same subtle-but-palpable current of violence that one finds in traditional fairy tales, at least in the older versions of the tales. This isn't a novel about the loss of innocence, for these children, like the heroes and heroines of fairy tales, are already familiar with the perilous dark -- more so, perhaps, than the adult characters, whose lives are so filled with emotional and physical fatigue that they insulate themselves in private rituals just to function. The narrator's mother, for example, is an alcoholic who regularly spins, over the family dinner, tales of a fantasy vacation in Bermuda.

Ford's writing is wonderful, as always -- his clean, precise style evoking such a specific decade that I found myself reliving my own childhood memories (with all their ambiguities): the backyard barbecues with adults smoking and drinking while children play unattended at the edge of the woods; the Halloween bacchanals, when one went out at night with friends rather than parents and wandered far and wide; and the various trials of grade school, from gruff teachers to playground battles. The siblings are terrific -- their exchanges hilarious (Jim's wisecracks are among the best), intensely loyal, imaginative, and brave. Though eerie and haunted at times, the novel maintains its subtlety throughout -- even its climax and conclusion are muted -- placing the emphasis not on the "action" of the plot, but on the slow transformation of the children, especially the narrator, and of the life of the town itself. Don't miss this one. It's another beauty in Ford's excellent canon of novels.

The Plum Woman

 

Jane Miller has a lovely post on Louise Glück's poetry over on the Persephone Speaks blog. Inspired by the name of the blog, Miller examines the two Persephone poems in Glück's stunning new collection Averno. (Miller is no slouch at poetry herself. I particularly recommend her collection A Palace of Pearls, and the hard-hitting Wherever You Lay Your Head.)

Are ya'll familiar with the Persephone Speaks blog, from Kore Press? It's a terrific source for short, topical essays on women, literature, and the writing process.

The art above is "Persephone and Demeter" by Susan Seddon Boulet.

The Prophet

    

There's an interesting article by Joan Acocella on the New Yorker website about the Lebanese-American writer & artist Kahlil Gibran, who is the third best-selling poet of all time, following Shakespeare and Lao-tzu. Although it's deeply unfashionable to admit it, I was a fan of Gibran's The Prophet during my adolescence (probably the best time to read it), and despite the book's obvious flaws (as clearly outlined by Acocella) some of its lovelier passages stick with me to this day. Calling Gibran the Paulo Coelho of the 1920s, Acocella examines the author's complicated life, the on-going impact of his seminal book, and the life of Mary Haskell, the little-known woman who played a crucial part in both.

Yes, Gibran was another one of those writers with an uncredited mentor/editor/re-writer* who helped him hone his ideas and shape his prose...and, as was often the case in centuries past, that invisible mentor/collaborator was a woman. After publishing some early works in Arabic, writes Acocella, "Gibran made a serious decision: he was going to begin writing in English. To do this, he needed [Mary] Haskell’s help, and she rushed to give it. When they were apart, he sent her his manuscripts, and she sent back corrections. When they were together...he dictated his work to her. She wrote in her diary that if, during that process, 'we come to a part that I question, we stop then and there.' Who resolved the question? We don’t know. She said that 'he always gave every idea, and I simply found the phrases sometimes.' But finding the phrases is a large part of writing. For Gibran’s first English-language publication, a brief poem, Haskell sent him seven pages of proposed corrections....Until he died, she edited all his English-language books. With the third of these, The Prophet, he hit pay dirt." **

It's a fascinating story, and makes me want to read Robin Waterfield's Gibran biography, published in 1998. It also reminds me of a quote by Anais Nin that influenced me in my twenties even more than Gibran's The Prophet did in my teens:

"For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue -- that I had to do the job myself."

* The role of a mentor/editor in a writer's work can be a complicated and controversial one. For more on this, read "Rough Crossing: The Cutting of Raymond Carver" (also on the New Yorker website) about the working relationship between Carver and Knopf editor Gordon Lish.

** I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong per se with this kind of aid and collaboration, even when it's as extensive as Haskell's contributions to Gibran's books. Indeed, I know many writers and artists today -- myself among them -- who are in relationships with other creative artists and who thrive on daily engagement with each other's work. What's notable here is that Haskell worked in the shadows, kept at a firm remove from Gibran's public life and literary persona.

One For Sorrow Wins Crawford Award

Just found out that Christopher Barzak has won this year's William L. Crawford Award for his terrific novel One For Sorrow. Yay, Chris!!  Stop by Christopher's blog to read more about the award itself and to congratulate him on this well-deserved honor. You can read my review along with many others of the novel here. And if you haven't read it yet, put it on your list of things to read in 2008.

Here's a bit from the cover copy:

"Part thriller, part ghost tale, part love story, One for Sorrow is a novel as timeless as Catcher in the Rye and as hauntingly lyrical as The Lovely Bones. Christopher Barzak’s stunning debut tells of a teenaged boy’s coming-of-age that begins with a shocking murder and ends with a reason to hope." 

Isabel Allende: Tales of Passion

The TED website has recently posted this terrific talk by novelist Isabel Allende (author of The House of Spirits, etc.) on writing, passion, and feminism. Truly inspiring.

For more on Allende's books and social justice work, visit the author's website and the Isabel Allende Foundation site.

"Instructions" and more...

Midori has been valiantly covering this blog solo while I've been down with a truly nasty flu -- and as I'm still shaking the last of a rattling cough out of my lungs, my posting may be a bit sporadic over the next week or so.

This post is to let y'all know that there is now an "Endicott Studio Channel" on YouTube, where we'll be putting videos that we think will be of interest to fans of mythic arts -- such as the Mythic Journeys documentary from the good folks at the Mythic Imaginations Institute, Ben Okri discussing his approach to writing, an A&E biography of J.K. Rowling, a little film on artist Paula Rego, the great June Tabor singing Child Ballad #191: "Hughie Graeme,"  and more. (f you come across other good videos on YouTube, send us a note and let us know.)

The video above is of Neil Gaiman reading his fairy tale poem "Instructions" at Cody's Books in Berkeley, California. Considering his voluminous output of work over the last several years, Ellen Datlow and I will forgive him for forgetting that he actually wrote the poem at our request for our children's fairy tale anthology A Wolf at the Door, where it was first published in 2000. It's my favorite of all his poems, and a real treat to hear him read it.

(While you're on YouTube, if you're a martial arts fan, check out this little video that Howard Gayton made of a tournament/demonstration of our Kung Fu teacher's school, The Dragon Temple, in our village hall in rural Devon.)

In the Labyrinth

Ok...a moment of shameless self promotion, for which I apologize in advance! I have finally built a blogsite for myself. I hope you will stop by occasionally to visit (and leave comments too if you like) and I promise not to double blog between Endicott Redux and Into the Labyrinth. I am still building the pages and putting in material (I don't have all my books and articles up yet), so it should get fatter over the next month as I move in. Thanks everyone for this small indulgence.

Shadows of the past....

Douglas Gresham has published a moving tribute to his stepfather, C.S. Lewis, in a recent edition of The Guardian -- timed to co-incide with a new London staging of William Nicholson's Shadowlands, the moving play about C.S. Lewis (known to his stepson as "Jack") and Gresham's mother, Joy Davidman.

"I think that in today's sad and dark world many people will have difficulty in believing in the real Jack," writes Gresham. "He was a man who had grown up with the thinking of the 19th century. He believed in honesty, personal responsibility, commitment, duty, courtesy, courage, chivalry and all those great qualities that society in its wisdom dispensed with in the 20th century on the grounds that they were somehow outdated, and now needs so desperately to recall and recover." (Read the full article here.)

For more information on Shadowlands, visit the Wyndhams Theatre website. 

The Need for Wonder

In this video from the Human Forum Conference in Puerto Rico, Endicott contributor Ari Berk discusses the need for wonder in children's lives. He's introduced (in song!) by Fred Johnson. Part II of Ari's talk is here.

The Power of a Great Idea: With Thanks to Colleen Mondor

Just wanted to give another round of thank yous to Colleen Mondor, who set up last week's fabulous Summer Blog Blast Tour of 50 Authors. The whole project was incredibly informative, insightful, and inspirational, opening the door to a new and dynamic way to meet authors and read about their works.

Here's a bit from Colleen's recent blog post about the experience:
"I began organizing the Summer Blog Blast Tour a couple of months ago, for reasons I explained earlier. I had hopes that it would introduce readers to authors they have not been aware of and give them some insight into how some of their favorite books were written. I envisioned lots of jumping from site to site as readers followed the daily link lists and became more and more interested in what the SBBT was trying to accomplish. I thought I might hear from some authors or publishers who found our work to be worthwhile. I thought we might connect with a few people - I hoped we would.

"But really-- I had no idea we would hit this one so incredibly freaking far out of the litblogosphere ballpark...."

Summer Blog Blast of interviews with authors of Young Adult fiction

Just a reminder that the week is speeding by and there are quite a few great interviews out there in the blogosphere. For instance, don't miss Gwenda Bond's interviews with Ysabeau Wilce, Cecil Castelluci, and Holly Black over at Shaken & Stirred.

You can see the full schedule of interviews at the organizing host's website: Colleen Mondor's Chasing Ray. It's been a great week!

The Privilege of the Pen

This seems to be Ellen Kushner Week here at Endicott (see the "Thomas the Rhymer" discussion below), because there's another new post on her Live Journal that we'd like to share with you. Her latest book, The Privilege of the Sword, was a Nebula Award nominee this spring (as well as a Tiptree Honor Book), and for the Nebulas she was asked to write a brief personal essay about the novel.

Ellen posted her essay on Live Journal yesterday, and I recommend it to aspiring writers out there who may be interested in how novelists name and create their books. The piece is short but informative. My favorite line in the essay is: "Halfway through the book I got that awful feeling you get when you realize it was all a huge mistake. What was I thinking?!"

That happens to me all the time as well, no matter what I'm writing: short story, essay, novel. I get halfway through, and without fail at that point it all seems like a horrid mistake. If this happens to you, just push on through. It might all be a mistake, of course...but chances are it's not. (And in fact, in my days as a New York editor, it was the authors who never doubted themselves who always turned in the roughest manuscripts that needed the most work. A little self-doubt can be a good thing.)

Speaking of Ellen, she's alerted us to the fact that Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss have been interviewed about their new book Interfictions over on the Yatterings site, and there will be an Interfictions reading as part of the KGB Bar Reading Series in New York on June 20th. The book cover above, by the way, comes from the Small Beer Press hardcover edition of The Privilege of the Sword.

Tiptree Short List: Russell and James

Now that summer is here, and my stint as chairwoman of the Tiptree Award jury is done, I am able at last to catch up on all my reviews and the pile of books awaiting reviews. (Thank you all you patient authors and publishers out there who have sent us books.) I want to start off with two of my favorite books from the Tiptree Award short list:

Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is a collection of wonderful short stories reminiscent of the subtle magic realism of Kevin Brockmeier. Most of these tales are set in strange backwater towns, where precocious children observe the odd rituals of adults and older siblings: A plucky young girl wrestles alligators for tourists and saves an older sister from her nightly romps in the deadly swamp with a succubus. Two brothers, wearing three-d glasses that allow them to see ghosts, search stagnant lagoons in search of the ghost of their drowned sister; and packs of wild girls are gathered into dormitories where they must be forced to shed their raucous and gleefully wolfish natures and become domesticated young women. There is great humor and poignancy in these stories.

Betsy James’ Listening at the Gate is a beautiful and mythic Young Adult novel. James creates a complex tale of dualities as two children from two different cultures struggle for identity in this richly imagined world. Escaping patriarchy, Kat is raised by her aunt in the Upslope world of the forests and farms, while Nall, a young man washed ashore from a Selkie island, is an outcast whose sealskin has been destroyed. Both young adults confront the rigidity of their cultures – with terrible and world changing results. Throughout the novel, James incorporates fragments of poetry and children’s songs which act as an unexpected commentary on adult conventions. James is also a terrific illustrator and artist (do have a look at the art and essay "The Morning Series" on her website) and has created small exquisite woodcuts that illustrate each chapter. (The image below is from "The Morning Series.")

Catherynne Valente: The Orphan's Tales

In Vol. One of The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, Catherynne M. Valente has proven herself a prodigious successor to that other heroic storyteller, Shah’razad. This gorgeous novel of intricately interwoven stories delights and enchants with its innovation and seemingly-endless source of imagination. The orphan, the novel’s primary storyteller, is a feral child who secretly inhabits the lush palace gardens. Her smudged eyes are ringed with miniscule tattooed words, the “printed” source of her tales. A young prince, drawn by the girl's soft voice, becomes a rapt audience of one, captivated, terrified, and thrilled (just as we are) by the magical power of the girl’s stories.

In a textured, baroque writing style, Valente gives us familiar tales from around the world, but twists them into new, unexpected shapes that challenge what we assume about heroes and heroines, about rites of passage, and about women and men. In these richly populated worlds of fabulous desert cities, forests and jagged mountains, there are pirate saints, dog-headed monks, bears who transform themselves into men, and girls who shape-shift into swans. There is an oracle who speaks from a secret mouth in her abdomen, griffins and satyrs, and a necromancer who traffics in bodies that provide buyers with the opportunity to experience life in new shapes.

With book in hand, we at least have an advantage over the young prince, who must wait until evening to hear the stories strung together over many nights. I found it almost impossible to stop reading once in the grip of the orphan's tales. My disappointment in finishing the novel was happily allayed by the fact that one can now pre-order Vol. II, The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice (due out October, 2007). Both books, it should be noted, are beautifully illustrated by Michael Kaluta.

Sad news

Lloyd Alexander died today, at the age of 83. He died at home (where he had been receiving Hospice care), just two weeks after the death of his wife Janine, to whom he'd been married for sixty-two years. The couple had met in Paris at the end of World War II, and had settled in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.

Lloyd was the author of some of the finest children's fantasy novels of the 20th century -- including the much-loved The Chronicles of Prydain series. "My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author," he once admitted. "I was fifteen, in my last year of high school. My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work." He went on to write over thirty books for children and adults, winning the prestigious Newbery Medal, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and many other awards and honors. He was a tireless advocate for children's literature, a great fan of folklore and mythology, a writer generous with his time to his legion of young (and not-so-young) fans, and one of the nicest men I've ever met.

In an article on fantasy for the Children's Book Council, Lloyd wrote: "The best fantasy it seems to me, is permanently relevant. Because it deals metaphorically with basic human situations, it always has something to say to us. Also, I think that fantasy offers a certain vividness and high spiritedness unique to itself. We shouldn't underestimate the value of sheer fun, delight, and excitement. In any art, boredom is not a virtue. Dealing with the impossible, fantasy can show us what may be really possible. If there is grief, there is the possibility of consolation; if hurt, the possibility of healing; and above all, the curative power of hope. If fantasy speaks to us as we are, it also speaks to us as we might be." (Read the full article here.)

His final book, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio, will be published by Holt in August. It has been reported that Lloyd's comment on the novel was: "I have finished my life's work."

Julie Phillips Interview

Jennifer Reese at Critical Mass, the National Critics Circle Directors' blog, has a smashing interview with Julie Phillips, author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon. Julie Phillips won the National Critics Circle Award for best biography, and just recently, a special recognition award from The James Tiptree, Jr. Awards mentioned in the post below.

(Photograph by Chris van Houts)

Children's Book Writers and Film

Saturday's post on Beatrix Potter has got me thinking about two other children's book writers whose lives got the movie treatment, turning them into men rather different than the men they actually were.

The film Hans Christian Andersen, made in 1952 and featuring Danny Kaye in the title role, turned this difficult, enormously complex man into a gentle, simplistic character. Andersen did indeed live a rags-to-riches story straight out of one of his own fairy tales; he was born to a poor family in Odense and died a wealthy man celebrated around the world (acclaimed, during his lifetime, for his adult novels and travel writing as well as his fairy tales). But his rise was not a straight-forward one, nor was his character. He lived at a time when wealth and achievement could not entirely erase the stigma of his working class origins; he also lived at a time when his sexual passion for men could not be openly acknowledged. Had Andersen been alive today, his life — and thus his art — would have been very different. As his biographer Jackie Wullschlaeger commented: "Without the enormous repression of his time, he could have declared himself to be a homosexual. Many people have asked me what would have become of him today. He might have taken anti-depressants and been happier, but then he would not have written his fairy tales"  -- for his fairy tales, with their distinctive strain of tragedy, were drawn from the pain of Andersen's own experience.

To read more about Andersen's life, here's a short article from the Endicott archives. And I highly recommend Wullschlaeger's book, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller.

Finding Neverland, a film inspired by the life of J.M. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan), is a charming but heavily fictionalized concoction, playing fast-and-loose with the facts of Barrie's life in order to tell a simpler, more romantic story. The biggest change is that handsome, charismatic Johnny Depp plays the part of the Scottish playwright, depicting him as a gentle, fey, unworldly man, rather than as the odd little sharp-edged man that he actually was.

There seems to be a desire on the part of filmmakers to turn children's book writers into dreamy characters who spin dreamy sorts of tales -- neglecting the fact that the tales themselves aren't dreamy at all. Go back to Barrie's original text for Peter Pan and you'll find that it contains a razor-sharp strain of humor entirely absent from the Disney cartoon -- which is, sadly, still the version of Peter Pan best known around the world today.

For a proper film treatment of Barrie's life, seek out the DVD of Andrew Birkin's docu-drama The Lost Boys, which was made for British television. Birkin worked with a vast array of Barrie's surviving journals, correspondence, manuscripts and photographs, as well as conducting extensive interviews with those who had actually known James Barrie. The last of the real-life "Lost Boys," Nico Llewelyn Davies, read and advised on Birkin's script — and when the final production was broadcast, he phoned up Birkin in tears, "undone," he said, by the way actor Ian Holm had turned into his Uncle Jim.

You can read about Barrie's life in a short article in the Endicott archives, in a New Yorker article by Anthony Lane, and in two Barrie biographies: J.M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image by Janet Dunbar and J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys by Andrew Birkin. I also recommend Birkin's web site, where he generously makes a treasure trove of Barrie material — journals, letters, story notes, photographs, etc. — freely available to fans and scholars.

Another children's book writer with a fascinating life story is E. Nesbit (1858-1924), author of The Railway Children and other classic fantasies. She was an early socialist and founder of the Fabian Society, and she lived an adventurous, bohemian life full of art, politics, and love affairs with men like Bernard Shaw. If a film is ever made of her life, let's hope that she, too, isn't turned into a twee figure lost in the mists of childhood. To learn more about her, seek out Julia Brigg's biography A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit. There's also a short article on Nesbit's fiction by Gore Vidal, of all people, on the New York Review of Books website.

The Real Miss Potter

When I heard that a film was being made about Beatrix Potter, it seemed like a terrific idea to me -- for this famous children's book writer (and early environmentalist) led a fascinating life. The finished film, Miss Potter, is a disappointment, alas...and Anthony Lane has nailed the reasons why in his wonderfully acerbic review in The New Yorker. The film, he says, "lapses, during the longueurs, into glorious views of the Lake District, without noticing that Potter herself, though steeped in the countryside...took care to parcel it out in tempting glimpses on the page, in the crannies of her industrious narratives. The hills and fells led her not into Wordsworthian rapture but into a social comedy as concise, and often as acidic, as Jane Austen's." (Read the full article here.)

If you'd like to know more about Beatrix Potter, forget the film and read Linda Lear's engrossing new biography Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, which Elizabeth Hand has reviewed in The Washington Post. "At her death in 1943," writes Hand, "the elderly Mrs. Heelis, nee Potter, left an estate valued at today's equivalent of 7 million pounds -- more than $13 million. Her influence on children's literature is almost incalculable and can be seen in works by Alison Utley, Margaret Wise Brown, Tasha Tudor, Robert Lawson and Margery Sharp, to name just a few. Not bad for an empire built on what her editors called 'the bunny book'.

"Yet Potter herself remain