Terri Windling's Blog, page 208

Tunes for a Monday Morning

This morning, two beautiful songs from Irish singer Karan Casey:

Above, "Love is Pleasing," performed in the Folk Alley studios in 2010. (The other musicians, alas, are not named.)

Below, "Beat of My Heart," performed for the Highland Sessions in 2007, with Niall Vallely on concertina, Donald Shaw on piano, Iain MacDonald on bodhrán, Allan MacDonald on mouth organ, Allan Henderson on fiddle, Dermot Byrne on button accordion, Steve Cooney on guitar, and Trevor Hutchinson on bass.

The magic of stories....

Heads up, folks. There's a gorgeous interview with Amal El-Mohtar that's just been posted on the John Barelycorn blog, discussing stories, words, language, and the magical "language" of the Tarot. Here's a taste:

"Coleridge wrote a poem called
‘The Eolian Harp,’ " Amal says, "in which he explored the notion of music slumbering on
its instrument. It's a gorgeous poem! It moves through thoughts and
moods of the soul as if we're all but harps waiting for a breeze to pass
through us to animate us. I feel the same way about art: that it is
something that on many levels colonises you, gets inside you and changes
you from the inside out. I find that happens with books, too. After
I’ve read a book, for a couple of days afterwards I think in the
patterns of the book’s writing, because the act of reading is an act of
organising your own thought process. If you are reading someone else’s
writing, you are having to organise your perception along someone else’s
structure. So if I read a book by Terry Pratchett, a few days later
there is still a little Terry Pratchettness to my thoughts. When I read
something by Catherynne Valente, for quite a few days there is a kind of
‘jewelled’ quality to my thoughts. To read a book is to let someone
else reach inside me and reorganise me. As a writer, I find it very
difficult to start writing immediately after having read another
writer's book. I have to digest it first, and let the influence pass…."

Amal, of course, is the author of The Honey Month (highly recommended) and many other mythic works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She's also co-editor the poetry journal Goblin Fruit...and a great friend of Tilly's, as you can see above.

Mist and myth

I have another small dish to add to the "Mother Tongue" Moveable Feast (on land, language, art, and storytelling).  In this short excerpt from A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wilderness, Martin Shaw discusses the four years he spent living outside on a mountain in Wales:

"With zero practical experience of living outside, I made endless mistakes....Gary Snyder I was not. Axes were blunt, jeans constantly caught on barbed wire fences, snares empty.

"Dreams came nightly like rowdy bears crashing into days where I struggled to cope with hand tools, tried to light wet wood, shivered between continual extremes of hot and cold. I was a righteous mess with no apparent skills. Somewhere in this process, the threads between the human community and where I found myself grew thin. I couldn't find the vocabulary to articulate the changes I was experiencing. I felt intensely vulnerable and very lonely. What I looked for was some archaic language that would expand words and frame images so beautifully that I felt connected to human folk as well as kestrals and mud. What I found was myth.

"Myth is promiscuous, not dogmatic. It moves like a lively river through swarthy packs of reindeer, great aristocratic families, and the wild gestures of an Iranian carpet seller. Myth is not much to do with the past, but a kind of magical present that can flood our lives when the conditions are just so. It is not just the neurosis of us humans trying to fathom our place on earth, but sometimes the earth actually speaking back to us. That's why some stories can be hard to approach, they are not necessarily formed from a human point of view."

I'm still out of the office, but here's another lovel...

I'm still out of the office, but here's another lovely article that I want to recommend to you: Philip Hensher's paean to the handwritten word, "Why Handwriting Matters."

"I've come to the conclusion," he says, "that handwriting is good
for us. It involves us in a relationship with the written word that is
sensuous, immediate and individual. It opens our personality out to the
world, and gives us a means of reading other people. It gives pleasure
when you communicate with it. No one is ever going to recommend that we
surrender the convenience and speed of electronic communications to pen
and paper. Though it would make no sense to give up the clarity and
authority of print which is available to anyone with a keyboard, to
continue to diminish the place of the handwritten in our lives is to
diminish, in a small but real way, our humanity."

I agree. I love handwriting so much that it drifts from my letters and notebook pages into my drawings, paintings,  collages...and then onto the walls of houses and studios...a gentle scattering of poems, quotes, half-legible tales, slipping into and out of our dreams....

Art above: Carl Larsson's painting of his diningroom at "Little Hyttnäs,"   and my "Fairies in the Meadow" (a detail from a larger collage)

Thank you all for the kind "get well" messages. I'm a...

Thank you all for the kind "get well" messages. I'm a little better today, and hope to be back very soon. In the meantime, please don't miss "A Thousands Mornings," a lovely little piece on NPR about Mary Oliver and her poetry.

"The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone," she says, "...and I think it is very, very dangerous for our future generations, those
of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its
pristine state, but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual
thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to
be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?"

Art above by Carl Larrson.

Sorry folks, I'm out of the office again today, still...

Sorry folks, I'm out of the office again today, still not quite over flu...

Art above by Carl Larrson.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Artist Jackie Morris has been discussing folk music over on her Facebook page, and in one thread she asked readers to name their favorite folk songs. One response came from Scottish folk musician Karine Polwart, whose recommendation was "Lord Bateman" (Child Ballad 53) as performed by Chris Wood. "This mightn't be my actual favourite ballad," she said, "but it's possibly my favourite rendition."

It's one of my all-time favorites as well -- I adore Wood's voice, as rich and smooth as fine whiskey, along with his superb musicianship. Above is his gorgeous "Lord Bateman," recorded on his 2005 album, The Lark Descending.  Below, Wood performs one of his own fine songs, an "atheist spiritual" called "Come down Jehovah."

The third tune today comes from Karine Polwart herself, for she's another one of my favorite musicians. Here, she discusses and then performs her  song "Salters Road," from her beautiful new album, Traces.

Also via Jackie's folk music discussion, I've learned about Jon Boden's fabulous website, A Folk Song a Day. If you don't already know about this site, be warned. It's completely addictive.

Traveling through time...

I know we have a lot of Carl Larsson fans here, so I'm eager to share this gem that Grace Nuth found on Vimeo: a period film of the great illustrator himself, at home in Sundborn with his family and pooch. Amazing.

For a larger version of the film, go to the Vimeo page here.

On Your Desk

The next workspace in the "On Your Desk" series belongs to Australian writer and artist Josephine Pennicott. Josephine is a multi-award-winning author of mystery, crime, and fantasy novels, including four of particular interest to mythic fiction readers: the darkly enchanting "Circle of Nine" trilogy, which draws upon Persephone/Kore myths, and Poet's Cottage, a terrific mystery inspired by the life of children's author Enid Blyton. Josephine was born in Tasmania, spend her early years in Papua New Guinea, and now lives in inner-city Sydney with her husband and daughter. To learn more about Josephine's writing, art, and life, visit her blog: Tale Peddler.

Here's her description of the charming "writing shed" in her garden, pictured above:

"No matter what time of day or evening, it is always tranquil in
my garden office shed. There’s no internet connection or telephone. Instead
there’s the rustle of trees and sounds of birds. I can hear currawongs, magpies
and the occasional plane passing over.
When it rains, the shed becomes womb-like and cosy. But in
the humidity of Sydney it is also a good place to be, in between large cool
palms and a tea-tree.

"Inside my garden writing shed I’m surrounded by past, present
and future project inspirations. At the moment there are a lot of books on
1940s Australian artists as I’m writing a mystery novel in that time period. The blue butterflies on the window remind me of my father who died
last year and who encouraged me to live a creative life. The Thesaurus he bought
me when I was seventeen is always at my side to remind me of our shared love of
words.

"There are several awards placed around the office that my
writer husband, David Levell, and I have won; and an old china teapot which has
flowers in it to honour the muses.  On the wall is an inspiration board of photographs and images for
my current book, including lots of photos of the Australian bush.

"Also in the shed: Piles of scrapbooks with clippings from newspapers. Crystals.
Jean Cocteau prints from Menton. A tribal mask from New Guinea, where I spent my
early childhood. A limited edition print of “Charles Dickens’ Dream,”
signed by a descendant. My muses in the form of photographs of Agatha Christie,
Daphne du Maurier, Enid Blyton and the wonderful Elizabeth Taylor, who is the patron saint of my shed. A framed certificate for love of reading
which I received from Bulae Primary School in Lae, New Guinea. Nothing has
changed so many years later; I still love words and books.

"Above the desk is a beautiful Laura Ashley wallpaper which features birds and butterflies. My German publisher used it for the cover jacket of Dornen Tochter (the German version of Poet’s Cottage); I love the fact they used my wallpaper. In the photo above, you can see the bag that Ullstein Publishing made for the book, inspired by my writing shed.

"Our house is a small brick historic worker’s cottage, and so
the garden shed is necessary for space. I share it with my husband, but
luckily he's accustomed to my penchant for florals and pretties. My workspace
doesn’t actually reflect some of my current writing, mystery and crime (which can
get very dark, tinged with gothic and supernatural elements), but it’s my frou
frou refuge where I truly feel not only inspired but at peace."

All readers of this blog are
welcome to contribute to the "On Your Desk" series. You'll find more
information (and the address where you should send your photos) at the bottom of
the first post of the series. Please view the full series
to get an idea of what kind of material to send in. If you've already
contributed to the series, but you've changed your workspace, you are
welcome to contribute again.

It's Publication Week!

Last night was the Book Launch for After (the latest anthology from me and my editorial-partner-in-crime Ellen Datlow) at Books of Wonder in New York City. Since I mixed up my days and didn't mention it here in time, I hope those of you who were interested in it heard about it anyway! And there's another reading coming up in New York on the 20th of November if you missed the first one. (And this time, I'll be there too.)

If you'd like to know more about the editing process behind the book (or why I edited a dystopian anthology in the first place -- admittedly a bit of a stretch for me), Ellen and I talk about it this week in the "Big Idea" column on John Scalzi's always-interesting blog, Whatever.