Terri Windling's Blog, page 109

Tunes for a Monday Morning

First up this morning: "Gingerbread" by Nancy Kerr, a singer/songwriter and fiddle player based in Sheffield. The song is from Instar, a forthcoming album of songs inspired by the natural world. It's due out in September and I'm hearing that it's very good indeed.

Below: "The Ol' Cook Pot" by The Henry Girls, a trio of sisters from Donegal, Ireland, joined here by Denise Boyle on mandolin and the Echo Echo Dance Company. The song can be found on The Henry Sisters' fourth album, December Moon (2012).

Next, summer love from The Henry Girls, from their new Sketches EP.

And last:  "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," a traditional song (Child Ballad No. 74) re-imagined by Jim Moray. Don't let the video's charming opening (and adorable cats) fool you: this is a tragic tale of love gone wrong. Moray, based in Bristol, has been re-working British folk material in interesting ways for more than a decade now. This one comes from his new album, Upcetera, due out next month.

Paintings by Carl Larsson (1853-1919)

The wild path

In a 2011 interview on the late, lamented Bookslut site, Lu��s Alberto Urrea (an old friend of mine from our respective Tuscson days) was asked if he ever got stuck as a writer:

"I do get stuck! I think everyone gets stuck!" he answered. "Here's the thing: this is a part of my belief system that continues to grow over the years: I have to thank the ancient Chinese poets and writers, and especially the Japanese haiku poets. Writing is not a product, but a process. Writing is a life style, a life choice, a path. Writing is part of my process of sacredness and prayer even. What I do is writing; that's how I've chosen to understand and process the world, as a writer.

"When I feel stuck," Luis continued, "then that season has taken a bit of a pause. The garden has already grown many different blossoms, and my task is to know when not to force something more. It would be a mistake to do battle with the writing spirit. Writer's block is like a stop sign; it's a warning. So sometimes I just think for a while, sometimes I drive cross-country, sometimes I read something. That's the time to do something fascinating that's outside of myself, and there's always something fascinating going on. If I get all wrapped up in myself, I'll grind to a halt eventually. If nothing else, I'm just not that interesting.

"The world is full of hilarious, upsetting, entertaining, disturbing stuff out there ��� that well just never runs dry. That's a great gift for all of us. We just have to go out and look."

I often remember this useful advice from historical novelist Hillary Mantel: 

"If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ��music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient."

"Be wild," says storyteller and curandera Clarissa Pinkola Est��s; "that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one���s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down."

Tilly is good at reminding Howard and me to "be wild," no matter how busy our days can get. Then we're out the door and down the path to the river, the woods, the hills, the moor...and soon whatever is stuck becomes unstuck. The blood is moving. Ideas are flowing.

Then it's back home and back to work once more, bringing the whole wild world with us.

Words: The  Luis Urrea quote is from an interview by Terry Hong (Bookslut, December 2011). I highly recommend his fiction, nonfiction and poetry, which I've talked about previously here and here. The Hillary Mantel advice is from "Hillary Mantel's rules for writers" (The Guardian, February 2010).  The passage by Clarissa Pinkola Est��s is from Women Who Run With the Wolves (Ballantine Books, 1992). The poem in the picture captions is from Candles in Babylon by Denise Levertov (New Directions, 1982). All rights reserved by the authors.
Related posts: Ben Okri on "The magic of the writer's craft," Susan Cooper on "When the magic is working," and reflections on art as "Gift exchange."
Pictures: Husband and hound on our walk by the river yesterday afternoon.

Writing from the center

From an interview with Terry Tempest Williams in The Bloomsbury Review (1991):

"My writing comes out of my life. Every one of my books has come to me as a question. In the case of Pieces of White Shell, I asked, 'What stories do we tell that evoke a sense of place?' That book, of course, focused on traditional Navajo stories and beliefs. In a very real way, the Navajo inspired me to return home, to look within my own culture, my own stories. Coyote's Canyon was an experiement in weaving such stories together. And in Refuge, the question was simply, 'How does one find refuge in change?'

"The next question I would like to ask," she continues, "will have to do with an 'erotics of place,' as it relates to our love, or lack of love, towards the natural world. In other words, how does intimacy with each other, or lack of intimacy, affect our intimacy with the land? Like death, our sensuality is something we're afraid of and so we have avoided confronting it. I am interested in taboos, because I believe that's where the power of our culture lies. I love taking off their masks, so we can begin to face the world openly. I believe that will be our healing."

"The writers who touch me, who move me, are the writers who are generous not just with with what they know, but also with what they don't know....It's that kind of honesty, that generosity of spirit that I ask of writers. And it's difficult, because you have to be thoughtful, taking nothing for granted, and you have to be willing to risk everything, to write against your instincts."

"I believe there is an unspeakable joy in being fully present and responding totally to the moment. For me, that's where joy dwells and feeling lies; in fact, that's the well of all strength and wisdom -- knowing all we have, all we will ever have, is right now; that's the gift."

The passages quoted above are from A Voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams edited by Michael Austin (Utah State University Press, 2006) -- a book I often return to when the world seems heavy and my heart needs a lift. The interview was conducted by David Petersen in 1991. The poem in the picture captions is from Poetry (April 2016). All rights reserved by the authors.

Reading, writing, and the life of the spirit

"I did not go to any school until I was twelve years old," writes English novelist Penelope Lively; "until then, my home-based education centered entirely upon reading -- pretty much anything that came to hand, prose, poetry, good, bad, indifferent, any page was better than no page. At a barbaric boarding school, where the authorities saw a taste for unfettered reading as a sign of latent perversity, I went underground and read furtively, hiding books like other girls hid Mars bars or toffees.

"At university, there was a great swathe of reading, which was fine, but I liked to read off-piste, shooting into English literature, which was not supposed to be my subject, and into areas of history ignored by the syllabus. Grown-up life -- syllabus-free, exam-free -- came as relief; now, there was a day job, but also the opportunity for unbridled reading. I became a public library addict, dropping in several times a week for my fix, and this continued into married life and motherhood, when I read my way through the small branch library of our Swansea suburb, pushing the pram there with a baby in one end and the books in the other.

Lively, of course, went on to become a prolific and celebrated author, winning of the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger and the Carnegie Medal for Children's Literature for The Ghost of Thomas Kemp. She was appointed a Dame of the British Empire for services to literature in 2012. Reflecting on her long career, she notes:

"You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others. When I was a child, reading released me from my own prosaic world into fabulous antiquity, by way of Andrew Lang's Tales of Troy and Greece; when I was a housebound young mother, I began to read history all over again, but differently, freed from the constraints of a degree course, and I discovered also Henry James, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green, and William Golding, and so many others -- and became fascinated by the possibilities of fiction. It seems to me that writing is an extension of reading -- a step that not every obsessive reader is compelled to take, but, for those who do, one that springs from serendipitous reading. Books beget books.

"Would I have become a writer had I been denied books? Plenty of people have done so. Would I have gone on writing in the face of a blizzard of rejection letters? Others have. Unanswerable questions but they prompt speculation. Looking back at that difficult beginning, bashing out a story on typewriter whose keys kept getting stuck together, the endeavor seems precarious indeed."

Everything is fiction, says Irish writer Keith Ridway (in a fine new essay for The New Yorker): 

"When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones -- they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor -- please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience -- with our senses and our nerves -- is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

"So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn���t what all of us do, all day long, all life long."

Words: The passage by Penelope Lively is from Making It Up (Viking, 2005). The passage by Keith Ridgway is from "Everything is Fiction" (The New Yorker, August 2, 2012). All rights reserved by the authors. Pictures: Late summer in the studio's hillside garden, with flowers, frog pond, a bench under the plum tree, and ripening plums.

Many thanks to all who came to the Widdershins Meet the...

Many thanks to all who came to the Widdershins Meet the Artists evening at Green Hill Arts on Saturday night, as well as to all the artists who spoke so eloquently about their work there. The exhibition is still running, until August 27th, and I'll be at one more event associated with it: the Power of Story talk on August 20th. (Check out the Green Hill calendar for other events too.)

Tilly and I will be back to Myth & Moor this Wednesday. See you then!

Myth & Moor update

I'm off-line for the rest of the week, taking some "Studio Retreat" time in order to focus entirely on a work-in-progress. Tilly and I will be back next week.

Here's a round-up of recent reading recommendations to leave you with until then:

Sarah Lyall on Robert Macfarlane's "Landmarks" (The New York Times)

Claire Armitstead on Devon poet Alice Oswald (The Guardian)

Paul Kingsnorth on writing about the animate landscape (The Guardian)

Daniel A. Gross on silence (Nautilus), Rubin Naiman on sleep (Aeon), and Sara Lewis on fireflies (Aeon)

Akilesh Ayyar on different ways of writing a novel (The Millions)

Ramona Ausubel on how to be a writer (Lit Hub)

Hana de Goeij on the ubiquity of Czech libraries (The New York Times)

Amanda Craig on the summer's best children's books (The New Statesman)

Anne Gracie interviews Eva Ibbotson (The Word Wenches)

Rob Maslen on "Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction" (The City of Lost Books)

Charles Vess on illustrating "The Books of Earthsea" by Ursula Le Guin  (Tor.com)

Katherine Langrish on dwarfs, pixies, and the "Little Dark People" (Seven Miles of Steel Thistles)

Rosemary Hill on Beatrix Potter (London Review of Books)

Glynis Ridley on pioneer botanist Jeanne Baret (The Dangerous Women Project)

Lily Gurton-Wachter on the literature of motherhood (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Lauren Elkin on female fl��neurs  (The Guardian)

Jane Shilling on A.S. Byatt's Peacock & Vine, about William Morris & Mariano Fortuny (The New Statesman)

Kirsty Stonell Walker on Frida Kahlo & Elizabeth Siddal (The Kissed Mouth)

And here's a post of mine on why Internet breaks are important, as I prepare to spend time off-line.

Some recommended viewing:

Kevin Horan's glorious (The Washington Post)

Charles Fr��ger's portraits of the afterlife at Japanese folklore festivals (CoDesign)

Some recommended listening:

Syria's Secret Library (BBC Radio 4)

Robert Macfarlane on landscape & language (Radio New Zealand)

Nature study sketches & paintings by Beatrix Potter. Many thanks to Jackie Morris for the two radio links.

Coming up on Saturday, August 20th:

Coming up on Saturday, August 6th:

The artists taking part in the Widdershins 2016 exhibition of moorland mythic art:
Angharad Barlow, Danielle Barlow, Hazel Brown, Brian Froud, Wendy Froud, Paul Kidby, Alan Lee, Marja Lee, Pauline Lee Virginia Lee, Rima Staines, Neil Wilkinson-Cave, me, and David Wyatt. Artists & artisans with work in the adjoining Green Hill shop include Suzi Crockford and Alexandra Dawe.

Wendy is away in America right now, and Rima is off on her Hedgespoken travels, but most of the rest of us will be there. If you're anywhere close to Devon, please come join us. Tickets can be booked online on the Green Hill website, or by phoning 01647 440775, or purchased at the door. All proceeds help to keep this community arts, heritage, and youth centre in operation.

For more information on the event, go here. For more information on the exhibition, go here.

The art above is by David Wyatt, from his fabulous "Imaginary Village" series.

Coming up this Saturday:

The artists taking part in the Widdershins 2016 exhibition of moorland mythic art:
Angharad Barlow, Danielle Barlow, Hazel Brown, Brian Froud, Wendy Froud, Paul Kidby, Alan Lee, Marja Lee, Pauline Lee Virginia Lee, Rima Staines, Neil Wilkinson-Cave, me, and David Wyatt. Artists & artisans with work in the adjoining Green Hill shop include Suzi Crockford and Alexandra Dawe.

Wendy is away in America right now, and Rima is off on her Hedgespoken travels, but most of the rest of us will be there. If you're anywhere close to Devon, please come join us. Tickets can be booked online from Green Hill Arts, or purchased at the door. All proceeds help to keep this community arts, heritage, and youth centre in operation.

For more information on the event, go here. For more information on the exhibition, go here.

The art above is by David Wyatt, from his fabulous "Imaginary Village" series.

Woodland interlude

Thank you to everyone who came to the Artists' Coffee Morning at Green Hill yesterday, participating in a lively, wide-ranging conversation on art and nature, and the nature of friendship.

"The world is very old," writes American environmentalist Rick Bass, "and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe -- what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe' -- in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does."