Endicott Redux

On the Border

    

          Tell me where your country ends and mine begins

Someone I don’t know stops me on the street. She is a stranger, but clearly she knows who I am. She grabs my arm, then lets it go, then tells me she has just finished reading In Perfect Light. I smile awkwardly and nod, not really knowing what to say.

"It’s beautiful," she says. "Really beautiful. But your books are sad."

"Sad?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"Yes," she says.

"But full of hope and expectation," I add.

"Yes," she says, "But why do your characters have to suffer so much?"

"Well," I say, "They live on the border." And then I want to add. "My characters, some of them get saved." But that’s not what I say. Instead I reiterate my point. "Well, you see, my characters, they all live on the border."

...So begins a wonderful essay titled "Notes from Another Country" by New Mexican/Texan writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz -- author of adult novels, young adult novels, children's books, and poetry so gorgeous it lifts from the page as if on angels' wings. "Notes from Another Country" is available on Sáenz's website. You can read and/or download it here.

"I write in English, dream in Spanish, listen to Latin chants," says Sáenz. "I like streets where Chicanos make up words. Sometimes, I shout Italian words to wake the morning light. At dust, I breathe out fragments of Swahili. I want to feel words swimming in my throat like fighting fish that refuse to be hooked on a line."

The painting at the top of this post is by Tucson artist Daniel Martin Diaz. Visit Diaz's website and his MySpace page to see more of his work.

Arthurian Britain

   

If, like me, you're a fan of Patrick McCormack's work, then you too have been eagerly awaiting the third and final volume of "Albion," his Arthurian trilogy. The third novel, The Lame Dancer, is now available -- for free! -- online, posted (with the author's permission) on the site of Professor Howard Wiseman, an Australian academic with a passion for British history.

McCormack is an Oxford-trained historian who lives on Dartmoor. His "Albion" series, set in 5th century Britain, is rigorously researched and does a fine job of bringing the society of the Dark Ages to life -- which is precisely why there are so many fellow historians among McCormack's fans. The books are dark, robust, heroic -- but there's also plenty of magic here, deeply rooted in myth, and the distinctive mysticism of the British landscape. If you haven't yet read McCormack's work, start with the first two books in the series: The Last Companion and The White Phantom. Now, I wish someone would bring this trilogy out in an American edition....

The art above is by another Dartmoor dweller, Alan Lee. Go here to see more of his drawings.

   

On ghosts and giants. . .

I hope y'all are familiar with Fantasy Magazine, the weekly webzine devoted to high fantasy, contemporary and urban tales, surrealism, magical realism, science fantasy, and folktales. The magazine is co-edited by the indefatigable Sean Wallace and Cat Rambo (of Prime Books), along with the stellar team of Paul Tremblay, K. Tempest Bradford, Paula Guran and Stephen Segal.

They've published some terrific fiction recently, but of particular interest to mythic fiction readers is Paul Jessop's fine tale "A Word Without Ghosts" (with its delicious allusions to fairy tales, animal bridegroom myths, and the story of Peter Pan), and Richard Bowes' enchanting fable "The Cinnamon Cavalier." Don't miss them.

The charming painting above is "The Artist at Work," from K. Tempest Bradford's profile of illustrator Kat Beyer.

Speaking of Prime Books, did you know that they're republishing the "Snow White, Blood Red" fairy tales series in new trade-paperback editions? Black Thorn, White Rose is available now, with more volumes to follow.

   

Of men and dogs...

 

I was researching the folklore of dogs recently and came across a good, short article to share with you: "Black Dogs: Guardians of the Corpse Ways" by Bob Trubshaw (posted on the At the Edge website).

"The dog is the oldest domestic animal," writes Trubshaw, "traceable to the paleolithic, since when dogs have enjoyed a peculiarly close relationship with humans, sharing their hearths at night and guarding the home, working during the day as sheepdogs or hunters. This close symbiotic relationship with people is reflected in the early literature where dogs seem to have clear connections with the Otherworld. But this is not unique to hounds as many species from bulls, boars, to owls and cuckoos have clear associations with deities which lead to ritual veneration. However, archaeological evidence and mythology brings recurring examples of a very specific role for dogs. They are the 'psycopomps', the guides on the paths to the Otherworld, the guardians of the 'liminal' zone at the boundaries of the worlds...."

If you happen to be looking for a more in-depth study of dog mythology, try David Gordon-White's wide-ranging, fascinating book Myths of the Dog-Man, from the University of Chicago Press. The Mythology of Dogs by Gerald and Loretta Hausman is also a good source of information on dog lore from around the world.

As for dogs in magical fiction, I hope you haven't missed Kij Johnson's absolutely brilliant story "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change," published in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales. (It can be read online here.) Reviewer Colleen Mondor was as bowled over by Kij's story as I was:

"Johnson takes a relatively simple idea -- that animals have gained the ability to speak -- and takes readers into an emotionally charged arena that is wholly unexpected and exhilarating. Once I realized the hook for this story, I thought it might be funny in a wry or maybe even sophisticated sort of way, but I didn’t think that Johnson would be able to touch my heart so deeply....'The Evolution of Trickster Stories' is a perfect story for classes on the modern short story; it conveys an amazing amount of powerful emotion in such few words and in a truly uncanny way."

I recommend reading Colleen's full review (over on the Bookslut website), in which she also looks at dog tales by Nick Abadzis (Laika) and Charles de Lint (Dingo), as well as a reptile novel by Wendy Townsend and animal poetry from Marjorie Maddox.

Kristen Bakis' novel Lives of the Monster Dogs is a Frankenstein-like story about a race of dog-people, designed by a mad scientist, now living in New York City. I loved the wacky premise, but didn't find the book itself entirely successful...Ellen Datlow loved it, however (as did many other people), so it's definitely worth checking out. On the mainstream shelves, I was impressed and occasionally unnerved by the hard-hitting stories in Brad Watson's Last Days of the Dog-Men. Despite the fanciful title, this is a collection of realist stories with just a tinge of surrealism at the edges...but don't miss it if you're a dog lover, or simply a fan of fine contemporary writing.

Art credits: The painting at the top of this post is from my Desert Spirits series, called "Coyote and the Dog Spirits." The second painting is by Meinrad Craighead, who often uses dog symbolism in her deeply spiritual and mythic art, which has been collected in a beautiful volume titled Crow Mother and the Dog God. The photographs on the left are "Old Dogs" and "Macbeth" by the dog-obsessed artist William Wegman. Visit his website to see more of his work. (There's a cool little flash movie on the homepage.) For more dog lore and art here's a link to to our previous post on the subject: Magical Dogs.

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).

Attention writers: a call for submissions

Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman & Theodora Goss, was a provocative anthology of interstitial fiction published last year by Small Beer Press under the auspices of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. Containing terrific fiction by Christopher Barzak, Catherynne M. Valente, Veronica Schanoes, K. Tempest Bradford, Matthew Cheney, Anna Tambour, and others, with a critical essay on interstitiality by Heinz Insu Fenkl, and cover art by Connie Toebe, the book created quite a buzz.

Now the I.A.F. is getting to work on a second anthology of interstitial fiction, to be edited by Delia Sherman and Chris Barzak this time, and published by Small Beer Press in 2009. The editors would like all interested writers to know that the book will be open for submissions later this year. The submission guidelines are below.

To learn more about interstitial fiction, visit the Interfictions blog, the IAF website, and the IAF discussion board.

"From these airborne stories stream contrails of traditional realism, philosophical fable, literary fantasy, existential horror, transmogrified myth, off-center science fiction and unabashed slapstick. . . . [Interfictions] belongs on the nightstand of anyone interested in the development of contemporary short fiction."  -- Michael Bishop on Interfictions in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

   

Interfictions II submission guidelines
from Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak, editors:

What We’re Looking For

Interstitial Fiction is all about breaking rules, ignoring boundaries, cross-pollinating the fields of literature. It’s about working between, across, through, and at the edges and borders of literary genres, including fiction and non-fiction. It falls between the cracks of other movements, terms, and definitions. If you have a story idea that’s impossible to describe in a couple of sentences, it may be interstitial.

We’re looking for previously unpublished stories that engage us and make us think about literature in new ways. Rather than defining “interstitial” for you, we’d like you to show us what genre-bending fiction looks like. Surprise us; make us see that literature holds possibilities we haven't yet imagined.

We are also open to graphic stories of about 10 pages.

Who We Are Looking For

Writers in all genres of fiction (contemporary realism, mystery, historical, fantasy, whatever) who have an idea that challenges generic tropes and expectations. If you're not sure whether a story is interstitial, send it along anyway.

Practical Matters

Our submission period will be from October 1, 2008 to December 2, 2008. Please submit electronically only. Send your stories to: interfictions [at] interstitialarts.org. You will hear from us after January, 2009.

Overseas submissions are welcome. Stories previously published in other languages may be submitted in English translation for first English language publication.

Please follow standard manuscript formatting and submission conventions: ie, double-spaced, with 1” margins, and the name of the story on each page. No simultaneous or multiple submissions. Word count is open, but the ideal range is 4,000-10,000 words. Payment will be 5 cents a word for non-exclusive world anthology rights, on publication, along with 2 author’s copies.

Any questions? Write us at interfictions [at] interstitialarts.org. 

   

Catching up....

"April 1st: This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three-hundred and sixty-four." — Mark Twain

      

First of all, our apologies for the erratic nature of this blog recently. Midori had to take time off from Endicott & JoMA over the last couple of months while she's back in the Midwest selling her old house, and I've been coping with health problems this winter, making my own work schedule unpredictable. Midori will be back to the Endicott office in Tucson soon, and then, between us, we should be able to return to a more regular schedule. (Many thanks to the other Endicott reviewers, who have been pitching in when they can.)

Here are some things to catch up on, a combination of recommendations sent to us and items that recently caught my eye:

* Our Monday Video this week (okay, it's Tuesday, nevermind) is "Achilles on Skyros Island," a short film about the mythological imagery on ancient Greek pottery (above). It was recommended by mythic artist and musician Catherine Crowe, whose beautiful work can be viewed over on Imago Corvi.

* The New Yorker Magazine recently published a fascinating article by Jill Lepore discussing fake memoirs, factual novels, and "the history of history" vrs. the history of the novel. ("Just the Facts, Ma'am" in the March 24th issue. You can read it online here.) "Historians and novelists are kin," writes Lepore, "but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes."

* If you live in southwest England, there's an event here in Devon on Saturday night that promises to be terrific: "Stones and Spirit: An Evening of Music and a Visual Journey across the Steppes." Katy Marchant and Steve Tyler (from the fabulous