Terri Windling's Blog, page 206

Love and art

'The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite
of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not
heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's
indifference."  - Elie Wiesel

Photograph by the extraordinary animal photographer Tim Flach (from his new book, More Than Human).

Autumn in New York City

I'm in New York now, working on a collaborative writing project that will involve much walking and talking and plotting and scheming, and cups of coffee in tiny cafes, and the clatter of keyboards against an '80s pop soundtrack and the drum beat at the heart of Manhattan.

Here, as in Devon, I start my days early, with a cup of coffee
underneath the trees or at the water's edge in Riverside Park. I miss my faithful canine companion -- but Tilly is where she should be now,
wandering our beloved hills back home, while I stalk the Muse down city
streets...and will soon return, new stories in hand.

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."  - E.L. Doctorow

I'm flying off to New York City today, en route to Ba...

I'm flying off to New York City today, en route to Baltimore for Faeriecon East. It's so nice to be going back to my country-0f-birth for positive reasons this time, as opposed to my last journey back in March.  I'll update this blog during my travels as I'm able, and I hope to see some of you in Baltimore.

For folks in New York: I'll be co-hosting a reading from After
at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art on November 20th -- please come!
And do come over and introduce yourself if we haven't met before.

Fairies above by me and Arthur Rackham (1867-1939.

Tune for a Monday Morning

Today's tune, in honor of water and stone, of woodland and wind and the season of falling leaves:

"By the Water" by Mexican-American singer/songwrite Ingrid Chaves (via Chantal Simon). Born in New Mexico and raised in Georgia, Chavez now lives in Minneapolis.

Art above: A Dartmoor river drawing by Alan Lee, and a Dartmoor river photograph by Helen Mason

The colors of autumn

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I
love - that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting
about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the
pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very
footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give
us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious
autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly
about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”   - George Eliot (from a letter to Miss Lewis, 1841)

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the
day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves
and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the
thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar
and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that
season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt
at description, or some lines of feeling.”    - Jane Austen (from Persuasion, 1817)

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (The American Notebooks, 1842)

Tilly agrees.

Listening to a deeper way

From "Walking" by Linda Hogan (from Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World):

"John Hay, in The Immortal Wilderness, has written: 'There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.'

"Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one
language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood
forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or a heart coming from the
ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of
knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that
disappeared back to the body....

"Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who
came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky,
watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain
angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written
records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of
the world around them and the immensity above them.

"Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating....It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands."

In the quiet of the early morning

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery." ― Anaïs Nin

On Your Desk: Michelle Barnett

Today's workspace photos come from Michelle Barnett, a very talented young illustrator and animator in the English Midlands. She says:

"I was born in Norfolk, England, but currently live in Leicestershire where I rent a room from a friend. We just moved
in a month ago and I love it. I'm ten seconds from a park (which you can see out my
window), ten minutes walk from a canal, and ten minutes drive from a
lot of big empty fields. I'm told that an aspiring illustrator should go
to London to find work, but I refute that idea rather strongly. If I
don't have my daily fix of green growing stuff I get very cranky.

"I'm an Illustrator Dabbling, which is
to say that at the moment I have a day job and will take whatever
comes my way to do in the evenings and weekends (all experience is useful
experience and beggars can't be choosers). So I've done storybook drawings, logos and branding, birthday
cards, worksheets and painted canvases, but what I like most are narrative
illustrations. I love the editing options digital art gives me, but I've
always found I think best when I'm doing things manually. Something about the feel of a pencil under your fingers, the pressure
on the page, the inevitable mess I make when I do anything practical, helps me
get to grips with my subject.  Basically I make a tangle with my
hands, then use my computer to tuck in the stray threads.

"At the moment I'm finishing off a
personal project, upcycling a garishly purple bookshelf into something a
bit more to my taste.  I've been chipping away at it in the evenings,
painting on dancing bears, wasp salesmen, frog people and accordion
players. You can see part of it here on my desk, ready to have
ruddy-coloured oak leaves hand-printed onto it, then be varnished and finally
assembled into a bookshelf again.  I can’t blu-tak pictures up on the
window, but the small frame on the top left is a print of Rima Staines' Atching
Tan, which I picked up when I had the privilege of meeting her this
summer.  How awestruck I was!  I have another print by her, and
some by others, hiding somewhere in a pile but as yet nowhere to put them.

"These pictures show my desk mid-bookshelf project. 
This is a reasonable level of tidiness for my desk.  I like to keep
things organised...until I start work, at which point I need mess. 
Unpacking the art materials helps me unpack my ideas as well, spreading the
contents of my brain out so I can see them.  I've become very good at
stacking objects into increasingly precarious pyramids as my desk becomes
more and more cluttered while I work, and then packing it all away again when I
finish for the day.

Above is a close-up of my reading corner, which I was
determined to have in my new room.  The cushions were upcycled from some
battered old ones by Amy Allwright.  This is just my 'core' selection of
books, the vital ones that travel with me and get switched (with the rest
still at my parents house in Norfolk) whenever I go home.  As well as
my grown-up books you'll notice that at least a third of them are written for
young folk.  I think they often get the better stories, so I steal
them.  The current cycle includes Rosemary Sutcliffe, Neil
Gaiman, and Dianne Wynne Jones.  Also up here are other knick-knacks; a
spoon hand-carved for me by a friend (I'm still trying to bring myself to use
it to eat.  It's too beautiful!), a big sappy pine-cone from the Weird and Wonderful Wood festival that
still smells fantastic, a collection of robots.... Everything to keep an active mind happy. "

Below is Michelle's video documenting the process of creating her charming and wonderful "Folklore Bookshelf" -- but be warned! You're going to want one too! (I know I sure do.)

To see more of Michelle's magical artwork, please visit her blog: Out There.

Recommended Reading:

Please don't miss "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter" by fairy tale scholar Marina Warner, which is over on the Paris Review site.

Warner writes: "Angela Carter...refused
to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the
whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and
with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun,
soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life.
From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of
Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her
experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West
Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in
romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and
Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the
form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state
and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself."

So very true. In the mythic arts field we owe an enormous debt to Angela Carter, whose influence on contemporary fairy tale literature remains unsurpassed to this day.

Art above: "Little Red Riding Hood" by Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

The secrets of trees

From "A Different Yield" by Linda Hogan (from Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World):

"A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen
listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking
their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I've
envisioned that woman's silence, a hearing full and open enough that the
world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her,
whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf."

This is what I aspire to, a hearing just so open and full.

"It is the last thing we learn, / listening to the creature world... "   - Jane Yolen

"Listen, listen, listen..."  -  Phyllis Holliday

Above: Trees growing out of an old stone boundary wall dividing hill from wood. The Days of the Dead (Nov. 1 - 4) are a time when the boundaries between Worlds are easily crossed....Quiet, now. Listen.