Terri Windling's Blog, page 162

Some little people looking for a good home, at the Inte...

Some little people looking for a good home, at the Interfictions Online fundraising campaign. (And I should add that the print is nicer than the image appears here. It's on heavy paper and almost looks like an original drawing.) Please support the good folks at the Interstial Arts Foundation if you possibly can.

"'Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.'' - Friedrich Schiller

Recommended Reading

This is another week when the Big Life Stuff I'm dealing with is going to take all of my attention, so I'd like to leave you with some recommended reading, gathered from hither and yon.....

Four pieces I particularly recommend:

1. The Julliard School of Music's 109th Commencement Speech by mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (CMuse) -- a passionate, inspiring speech that applies to all of us in the arts. DiDonato presents the graduates with lessons from her own experience, including this:

"It's not about you. This can be a particularly hard, and humbling, lesson to face – and it’s one I’ve had to continue to learn at every stage of my own journey – but this is a freeing and empowering truth. You may not yet realize it, but you haven’t signed up for a life of glory and adulation...you have signed up for a life of service by going into the Arts. And the life-altering results of that service in other people’s lives will never disappear as fame unquestionably will. You are here to serve the words, the director, the melody, the author, the chord progression, the choreographer -- but above all and most importantly, with every breath, step, and stroke of the keyboard, you are here to serve humanity.

"You, as alumni of the 109th graduating class of The Juilliard School are now servants to the ear that needs quiet solace, and the eye that needs the consolation of beauty, servants to the mind that needs desperate repose or pointed inquiry, to the heart that needs invitation to flight or silent understanding, and to the soul that needs safe landing, or fearless, relentless enlightenment. You are a servant to the sick one who needs healing through the beauty and peace of the symphony you will compose through blood-shot eyes and sleepless nights. You are an attendant to the lost one who needs saving through the comforting, probing words you will conjure up from the ether, as well as from your own heroic moments of strife and triumph. You are a steward to the closed and blocked one who needs to feel that vital, electric, joyful pulse of life that eludes them as they witness you stop time as you pirouette and jettè across the stage on your tired legs and bleeding toes. You are a vessel to the angry and confused one who needs a protected place to release their rage as they watch your eyes on the screen silently weep in pain as you relive your own private hell. You are a servant to the eager, naïve, optimistic ones who will come behind you with wide eyes and wild dreams, reminding you of yourself, as you teach and shape and mold them, even though you may be plagued with haunting doubts yourself, just as your teachers likely were -- and you will reach out to them and generously invite them to soar and thrive, because we are called to share this thing called Art."

Amen.

2. "Storytelling is a Magical, Ruthless Discipline" by Zadie Smith (Medium)

"[T]he truth," says Smith, "is something happened when I had kids. I went from not being able to think of a single story to being unable to stop seeing stories pretty much every place I looked. Now, before anybody raises a hand to object, I am not a biological essentialist, nor one of these people who believe a gift for empathy arrives along with the placenta. The explanation, in my opinion, is less dramatic: storybooks. For the first time since childhood I am back in the realm of stories and storybooks -- three stories read out loud to a four year old, every night, on pain of death -- and this practice has reawakened in me something I thought I’d misplaced a long time ago, on book tour, perhaps, or in the back row of a university lecture hall. This feeling of narrative possibility and wonder — this idea that every person is a world. How could I have forgotten that? Did I really almost drift away, down that anemic, intellectual path where storytelling is considered vulgar and characters a stain on the purity of a sentence? Dear Lord --  almost."

3. An interview with Rebecca Solnit, author of The Faraway Nearby, Wanderlust, etc. (The White Review)

"I loved stories before I could read," Solnit recalls. "I had a huge appetite for narrative, and my mother said I learnt how to read in the first week or two of first grade, and then I was off and running. Books were these boxes of treasure, and reading gave me the key to them. I was just astounded that all of this was available, and that I could access it was so exciting. It was the only thing that I had, and the librarians loved me, because I spent a lot of time reading in libraries. At first I wanted to be a librarian because they live around books all day -- that was the first semester of first grade -- and then I realised that I wanted to be a writer, because that’s an even more intimate relationship with books. But just that discovery that books are these treasure boxes that you can open and be anyone and go anywhere and know everything -- that was amazing. There are book people and then there’s everybody else. There are people who might read books and then there are people who are so enchanted by books and who live in that other world in which books exist."

4. An interview with Iain McCaig, illustrator, film designer, storyteller (John Barleycorn Must Die)

"My higher calling," says Iain, "is to serve the story. I never just make images, the images are always there to tell stories. So the calling is to serve the story and you will serve the story no matter how you feel, or what you’re doing, or whether you’re sleepy, tired, inhibited -- that's all irrelevant. The show must go on. It must. Otherwise, get off the stage."

Also recommended:

* "The Book of Miracles" by Marina Warner (The New York Review of Books)

* An interview with Marina Warner (Prospect)

* "Slaying Monsters: Tolkien's 'Beowulf'" by Joan Acocella (The New Yorker)

* "What Muriel Sparks Saw" by Parul Sehgal (The New Yorker)

* "The Quiet Greatness of Eudora Welty" by Danny Heitman (The Humanities)

* "The Legend of Vera Nabokov: Why Writers Pine for a Do-It-All Spouse" by Koa Beck (The Atlantic)

* "MFA vs. POC" by Junot Diaz (The New Yorker)

* "E.B. White's Beautiful Letter to a Man Who Had Lost Faith in Humanity" (Brain Pickings, audio)

* An interview with Dani Shapiro, author of Still Writing (Brain Pickings)

* "La bella vite: Friedrich Schiller and Beauty" by John Armstrong (Aeon Magazine)

* "Drip, Drip, Drip by Day and Night: The Literature of Rain" by Alexandra Harris (The Guardian)

Tilly and I will be back to Myth & Moor just as soon as we can be.

Images above: a Butterick poster from the early 20th century (I believe the artist remains unknown, but do correct me if I'm wrong); "When Apples Were Golden and Songs Were Sweet" by John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1947); "Five Little Pigs" by Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954); a detail from the Unicorn Tapestries (15th century); "Alice in Wonderland" illustrations, fairies, and a charming little mouse from Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig; and Tilly on the bench outside the studio. Many thanks to Beckie Kravetz for the Joyce DiDonato speech, and to Ellen Kushner for both the Zadie Smith and E.B. White links.

Art in the interstices....

Today is the opening day of the Interfictions Online Indiegogo campaign, and I've donated some prints (including the one above)  to this excellent cause. Two of the prints are up on the page now, and others will appear as the campaign goes on. There are lots of other donation rewards too -- signed books, e-chapbooks, and more -- so please go over to the Indiegogo page and have a look.

Interfictions Online provides a sanctuary for artists who refuse to be constrained by category labels. The journal is dedicated to Interstitial Art, which is art that flourishes in between different genres, disciplines, mediums, and cultures.

"Someone who’s breaking the rules needs a place where it’s safe to break them," says editor Sofia Samatar. "That's us. We're the latest project of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, and we're asking for your help to maintain a place for artists who walk the highwire in the attempt to make breakthrough art for an audience that's hungry for work that doesn't fit into neat little boxes."

The goal of the campaign is to raise enough money to pay contributors professional rates for the next two issues of the journal, and to create a new visual arts section, while remaining free to the public online.

Go here to read the latest issue of Interfictions Online, which is absolutely packed with treasures.

And go here to support the Indiegogo campaign, which runs through July 14.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

All of the music today come from the UK alt-folk bank Matthew and the Atlas, known for their poetic lyrics, gorgeous harmonies, and Matt Hagarty's velvet voice.  They've just released their first album, Other Rivers -- which has a slightly different sound than their previous EPS, more "alt" than "folk." Although I prefer the earlier accoustic sound (old folky that I am), the album is definitely growing on me.

Above, a haunting video for "Nowhwere Now" (reminiscent of Charles Freger's Wilder Mann), from Other Rivers.

Below, a live performance of "To the North" for Reverb Magazine's "Mile Marker" series, filmed in Denver, Colorado. The song comes from an EP of the same name, but is also included on the new album.

Next:

"Come Out of the Woods," from the Kingdom of Your Own EP, which remains my favorite of their songs. (Lyrics here.) This performance was filmed at ASongAPlace's Sunday Folk Club in Brussels, Belgium. 

And last:

A mysterious video for "Pale Sun Rose"  from the new album.

Want more this morning? Have a listen to "Within the Rose" (posted here a couple of years ago) and "I Followed Fires. (Thanks again to Jennifer Ambrose, who first introduced me to this band.)

Archaic values

''Humans, like other animals, are shaped by the places they inhabit, both individually and collectively. Our bodily rhythms, our moods, cycles of creativity and stillness, even our thoughts are readily engaged and influenced by seasonal patterns in the land. Yet our organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse with our own signs. Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses – once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth – become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary."

  - David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous)

''I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?'' - Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

 ''As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth...the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.''  -  Gary Snyder (The Practice of the Wild)

Mist and mystery

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."  - Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses)

The Unmapped Country

"We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it’s easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found."  - Cecelia Ahern (Thanks for the Memories)

''There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.''  - George Eliot (Daniel Deronda)

''To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away...To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.'' - Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

"One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I've thrown in my lot with love, and don't know any other way to go on breathing.''  - David Guterson (The Other)

"We must hold in our minds these utterly contradictory thoughts: not one of us matters at all; each of us is infinitely precious."  -  Janice Emily Bowers (A Full Life in a Small Place: Essays from a Desert Garden)

Beauty, grace, and morning mist

"The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.''  - Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
  - Buckminster Fuller

"You can have the other words –- chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it."  - Mary Oliver

"In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.''   - Siddhartha Guatama Buddha

Tilly and I climb above the mist as dawn breaks over Nattadon Hill. Grateful for beauty. Living gently. And striving, always, for grace.

Tune for a Monday Morning

Today's tune comes with a "yarn animation" by the BAFTA nominsated writer/director/animator Ainslie Henderson, created for "Moving On" by James, the Britpop band out of Manchester. It's absolutely beautiful...and hard to get through with dry eyes.

"Ainslie’s animation is wonderful, heartfelt, truthful, innocent, and reveals a true storyteller," says James' lead singer, Tim Booth. "As a band we were determined to work with him even if it meant dipping into our own pockets. Animation takes weeks and is painstaking work, for the animator, compared to that of most videos. I remember standing in a back garden in Highbury, mobile burning my ear, as I told him in detail of my mother’s death and that of my friend Gabrielle – the twin inspirations for 'Moving On.' My mother’s death was clearly a birth of some kind and that description caught Ainslie’s imagination.

"Two days later, with perfect timing, his video script came through on my email, as I was having a meeting with our manager Peter, trying to persuade him that we should pay the extra needed to work with Ainslie. I tried reading it to Peter but couldn’t complete it due to tears. Peter read it and welled up. That Ainslie found such a perfect medium to fit our song blows us away."

And Ainslie Henderson says: "My connection with James is a long and evolving one. The first time I heard their music was sitting at a friend’s house, aged 18, stoned and confused. ‘Sometimes’ was playing, I remember feeling something that until then I didn’t know pop music could make you feel. I thought crying was only for when you feel loss or sadness. Pop music, but woven with something sincere and yearning, passionate and beautiful."

True beauty

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Life to too short not to create, not to love, and not to lend a helping hand to our brothers and sisters." - Eric Maisel