Terri Windling's Blog, page 219

Why one writes

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."
- Anais Nin

"Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."  - George Bernard Shaw

...And so I create a world in which I can live through stories and pictures of spirited landscapes steeped in Mystery, music, and quiet acts of women's magic. I create myself every day here in the hills amid old stone walls and buttercup fields, out of scraps of paper and fragments of verse and morning coffee and dreams underfoot and books and bees and brambles and briar roses and a black dog at my side.

"A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, sillouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?" - Cynthia Ozick

Why, it's here. Where I am. Where you are. Right now.

Solitude in the studio

Tilly on the path to the studio...

...looking out on the roll and swell of the hills.

The foxglove is in bloom and the door stands invitingly open, a trail of muddy paw prints leading within.

"The most important thing," says folklorist Clarissa Pinkola Estes, "is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life."

This morning's prayer: May we all find solitude, silence, and work space when we most need it. Which is now. Which is now.

This post is for Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, in support of Lock-down Week.

Tune for a Monday Morning

The Monday Tune today is "John Barleycorn Must Die,"  an old Anglo-Scots folksong personifying the growing, reaping, and brewing of barley. The song is believed to be rooted in the stories of Beowa, a barley god from Anglo-Saxon myth, and is best known through the version that Robert Burns published in 1782. 

The little video above is an introduction to the characters in John Barleycorn Must Die, a graphic novel by Howard & artist Rex Van Ryn. The imagery comes from the JB Tarot deck. The song was recorded by David Wyatt (artist, and musician with Nosey Crows), who also played many of the instruments on the track. The vocals are by Howard and Amal El-Mohtar (writer, folklore scholar, and editor of Goblin Fruit), with fiddle by John Young and "scythe scraping" by Rex.

The video comes from today's John Barleycorn blog post, celebrating Howard & Rex's return to the Internet after a period of hiatus (due largely to the Life Stuff that Howard and I were dealing with). The lads haven't been idle in the meantime. Next week's post is a discussion with Brian & Wendy Froud on artistic collaboration; after that, they talk to Amal about stories, symbolism, and reading Tarot. The comic itself is slated for summer publication...which is very soon now. Three cheers for it all.

That for which we are designed

Periodically my husband and I go on a "news fast," banning newspapers, radio news, and Internet news sites from the house. Although we're both interested in contemporary politics and culture (and I'm seriously addicted to reading The New Yorker), sometimes it's also a political act to deliberately disengage with the wider world (as filtered through mass media, with its heart-numbing emphasis on crisis and consumerism) in order to engage more fully with one's own community, family, landscape, and the art they inspire.  

"In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway," Alistair Cooke once said. "So it would be a crime  against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to  fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby."

And to drink good tea. And to make good music. And to share our lives with each other, and a good dog. Let the June News Fast begin.

On saying goodbye

Lunar Hine has published a very beautiful post about saying goodbye to her husband (and my friend, folklore colleague, and Nattadon Hill neighbor) Thomas Hine -- who died, much too young, earlier this year. One of the last things Thomas did, from his sick bed, was to contribute his art to the auction that raised money for my own family crisis -- contributing to my ability to carry on when he wasn't able to do that himself for very much longer himself.  That was just so...Thomas. Quiet, gentle, and generous of spirit.

Life. Death. Supporting each other. Raising the next generation and carrying on...that's truly what village life is all about.  Many thanks to Lunar for the reminder today.

Nonsense and fantasy

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities." - Dr. Seuss

Photos above: Three more of the queen figures & scarecrows scattered around the village for the Queen's Jubilee, including a Queen Bee. (The green door next to the flower shop, by the way, was the door to my old studio at 42 The Square. If you like pictures of studio spaces, pictures of it can be found in my Studio Picture Album.)

Passageways and gates

An iron gate to two old thatched cottages. (There's a small stream that runs just behind the wall.)

Wooden churchyard gate, at the end of the path leading to the village Cross Tree.

A narrow passageway through the Drang (an old Devon word for "alley")

A glimpse through an iron gate in the Drang, looking into a cobbled courtyard.

A friend's green iron gate on New Street, with poppies.

The old wooden gate to our house, Bumblehill (and our crooked little U.S. postbox).

"The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jubilee Weekend in a Dartmoor village (Part 2)

The Two Hills Race is held every year (this is its 35th), following a moorland track that runs up and down the two large hills that embrace our village.  It's a gruelling track, 3.45 miles long, through bracken and brambles and a notoriously muddy bog (in which shoes are regularly lost) and occasional encounters with stray cows and sheep...but every year friends and neighbors of all ages do it, and I think they're entirely mad, and heroic.

This year, a herd of wild ponies from the moor grazed placidly at the bottom of the first hill at the start of the day, but they'd courteously moved aside to a nearby field when the race got going. Don't let the picture above fool you, that hill is much higher than it looks, with a tor at the top overlooking the village, the valley, and the moor. It's even higher than the tall hill we live on, Nattadon (below), the second hill in the race.

It was a beautiful, crisp morning of alternating cloud and sun, with runners and supporters gathered on the cricket green. The racers ranged from small children to folks over 50, and one valiant cow.

And suddenly, they're off! (Go cow! )

While the rest of us watched without raising a sweat, the long string of runners climbed 1076 feet upwards at an astonishing speed. That's Howard and Tilly in the picture above, with artists  Steve Dooley and David Wyatt, musician Peter Shields, and my mother-in-law, theatrical costume designer Jenny Gayton. Below, if you click on the picture to enlarge it and then look very, very closely, you can see tiny little figures snaking up the path to the top of Meldon...

...while Tilly sat quietly (mostly) and watched it all with absorbing interest.

The fastest runners returned in under half an hour, while the others straggled in throughout the following hour...the cow last of all. Our job was to cheer every single runner returning, for just to make it to the end of the race is a triumph. Here's my god-daughter, Ely Todd-Jones, below, on the last stretch to the finish line....

And Howard's band-mate Jenny Dooley, who won the race in her catagory...and then went on to play a full gig with the Nosey Crows that night. (Myself, I would have been lying prostrate on a sofa for days afterwards.)

Speaking of the Nosey Crows, the day ended with music and dancing in the village Square, while children pranced about and folks spilled out of the pubs to listen, beer glasses in hand. First up was The Cuckoo Club, warming up the crowd with a sexy mix of swing, jazz, latin, and blues: Bobby Gilbert on piano (he, too, had run the Two Hills race earlier), Howard on percussion and backing vocals, and three-part harmonies from the amazing Susie Yorke with Poppy Burgess and Demelza Riddell. (That's Susie in the middle below.)

Next, Nosey Crows: David Wyatt on lead guitar and bouzouki, Steve Dooley on percussion, with vocals shared by Jenny Dooley and Howard (on rhythm guitar, cajón, and washboard). The Nosey Crows have a Facebook page now, by the way, if you're interested in keeping track of what they're up to....

As night fell, the gig ended with '50s dance music from another good local band, The Diamond Geezers -- but I was too busy dancing by then to take pictures (and my camera's not so good with night-time shots).

Afterwards, a huge beacon bonfire was lit at the top of Meldon Hill, and other high places around the moor. Tilly and I watched it flare up from below, as we made our way sleepily homeward...zzzzzz....

Jubilee Weekend in a Dartmoor village (Part 1)

The celebration was opened on Saturday morning by the official Town Crier...

 ...followed by the thundering samba rhythms of Beat Route (an all-age drumming group) as they processed into the village Square...

...and then up the High Street...

...past queen-themed statues and scarecrows (which are scattered all around the village)...

...to the Cross Tree by the old church cottages....

...where the yellow roses are in bloom.

Meanwhile, back in the Square, there were Morris Dancers...

and Broom Dancers...

and Maypole Dancers...

...followed by a cup of tea at Blacks, served up with mid-day jazz from Hot Club du Square.

We finished just in time to see William Todd-Jones (on stilts, as is his wont) leading a procession of children from the village school, wearing costumes and carrying puppets they'd made during the last week in a workshop with Todd and Wendy Froud.

The young puppeteers gave two exuberant performances in the Square...and while I confess I couldn't really make out the story from my place in the crowd, it sure looked lively: full of music and color and hares on stilts and leaping horse puppets and singing puppet cakes and packs of cards. Towering over it all was the Queen, of course...and another character who was described to me as the "Mad Tinner" ... but I might have gotten that all wrong!

Afterwards, we whisked off to a village nearby (even smaller and more picturesque than ours), where Howard and Beat Route had another gig that night -- but it was absolutely tipping down with rain by then, so I have no pictures, alas. You'll just have to image a very wet group of drummers, who seemed to be doing a rain dance as the rain fell harder and harder. (The Queen can blame them for the weather on Sunday, turning her River Pageant into a painting by Turner.)

Part II tomorrow....

Look what Tilly found on the hill behind our house....

What a clever dog! Click on the pictures if you want to see them more closely . . . and visit Wendy Froud's enchanting blog to learn more.

Monday is a holiday here in England, so I'll be out of the office and back online on Tuesday. This weekend marks the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and although we're not a particularly Royalist family we'll still looking forward to the local festivities, which are also a celebration of Dartmoor village life. Wendy and Todd (film puppeteer William Todd-Jones) have been making puppets with kids at the village school in preparation for a Puppet Parade; the annual Two Hills Race takes place on Monday morning (our hill being one of those two hills); and both Howard's bands (Nosy Crows, the alt-folk band, and Cuckoo Club, the alt-swing band) are playing Monday evening in the village square. Tilly and I will be there with bells on. (Literally? You never know...) Fingers crossed for good weather.