Terri Windling's Blog, page 244
July 8, 2011
Friday recommendation:
"Gardien des songes" by Yoann Lossel
I'm popping in quickly today to say that Part II of "Around the Table With Yoann Lossel and Claire Briant," is up on John Barleycorn today, full of good talk about myth, landscape, and the making of creative and ethical choices.
As for me, I'm doing much better and will be back on Monday. Thanks, once again, for all the kind "get well" messages -- and have a good weekend.
July 6, 2011
"Portrait of a Writer with Flu" by Howard Gayton
"Sickne...
"Portrait of a Writer with Flu" by Howard Gayton
"Sickness comes on horseback but departs on foot." ~ Pennsylvania Dutch Proverb
Thank you to everyone who left me "get well" wishes in the Comments section of my last post. I'm starting to feel better, and I'll be posting here regularly again once I'm back in the office and have caught up on the work I missed...if not by tomorrow, then certainly by Monday.
Teleri: Thank you for the German expression ""betüddeln lassen," which I'd not heard before despite coming from a large German-American family on my mother's side. (We are Pennysylvania Dutch, which isn't Dutch at all -- it's a language corruption of "Pennsylvania Deutsch.") By the way, I hope you saw that I did eventually answer your question about notebooks.
Working from the sofa, while Tilly helps. (Photograph by ...
Working from the sofa, while Tilly helps. (Photograph by Howard Gayton)
Thank you to everyone who left me "get well" wishes in the Comments section of my last post. I'm starting to feel better, and I'll be posting here regularly again once I'm back in the office and have caught up on the work I missed...if not by tomorrow, then certainly by Monday.
Teleri: Thank you for the German expression ""betüddeln lassen," which I'd not heard before despite coming from a large German-American family on my mother's side. (They are Pennysylvania Dutch, which isn't Dutch at all -- it's a language corruption of "Pennsylvania Deutsch.") By the way, I hope you saw that I did eventually answer your question about notebooks.
July 4, 2011
July 3, 2011
Tunes for a Monday Morning
Happy Birthday to the beautiful, complicated, maddening, extraordinary, tragic, hilarious, incredibly friendly and unbelievably diverse country I come from. . . whose water, soil, air, and ideals formed my blood, bones, and spirit.
I grew up with John Mellencamp's music, and it embodies for me the essence of that particular slice of left-leaning working-class America that my Pennsylvania brothers and I come from: those big-hearted, union-joining, hard-working, open-minded, racially/culturally mixed, quick-witted, generous-spirited men and women that are the backbone of so many communities all across the country. (Mellencamp himself has done a lot of work for rural poverty issues and is one of the founders of Farm Aid.) These tunes go out to all of my brothers. Drink a beer for me today.
Above, Mellencamp's "Our Country" video from 2006. Below, classic Mellencamp from the '80s.
Tune for a Monday Morning
Happy Birthday to the beautiful, complicated, maddening, extraordinary, tragic, hilarious, incredibly friendly and unbelievably diverse country I come from. . . whose water, soil, air, and ideals formed my blood, bones, and spirit.
I grew up with John Mellencamp's music, and it embodies for me the essence of a certain slice of pickup-truck, working class America: those big-hearted, left-leaning, union-joining, hard-working, open-minded, racially/culturally mixed, quick-witted, generous-spirited men and women that are the backbone of so many communities all across the country. This song goes out to my brothers in Pennsylvania. Drink a beer for me today.
June 30, 2011
Friday recommendation:
Don't miss the fabulous "Around the Table' discussion with French artists Yoann Lossel and Claire Briant (whose desks were featured here a couple of weeks ago), which will appear sometime this morning (UK time) on the John Barleycorn blog.
The photo above is of Yoann and Claire near their home in Brittany (photographed by fellow artist David Thiérrée).
The photos below are of our Tilly with writer & Goblin Fruit editor Amal El-Mohtar: the first one taken at the top of the hill behind our house last Saturday; the second one from September, 2009, when Tilly was just a pup. Amal hails from Canada but is currently living in Cornwall, not far from here, while she works on her PhD (involving fairies!) at the Cornwall campus of the University of Exeter.
As for me, I'm away with the fairies today, and will be back on Monday.
The other thing that I love about a notebook...
...is that it's so effortlessly portable, without a laptop's weight or limited battery life. That's essential for a writer like me whose best ideas tend to come at dawn, and who can often be found at that potent hour on a favorite rock in a favorite circle of trees in the woods behind my studio...
...with a cup of coffee, a book, a pen, and a fresh notebook (or two, or three). Tilly sits beside me, reading the wind as I read and scribble in my clumsier human fashion. Soon the sun finds us, climbing over the trees, the old stone wall, and the hills beyond.
"The dawn," notes John O'Donohue (in the book pictured in the photos above), "is a time of possibility and promise. All the elements of nature: stones, fields, rivers and animals are suddenly there anew in the fresh dawn light. Just as darkness brings rest and release, so the dawn brings awakening and renewal. In our mediocrity and distraction, we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous universe. Each day the dawn unveils the mystery of this universe. Dawn is the ultimate surprise: it awakens us to the immense 'thereness' of nature."
O'Donohue decribes dawn as a "threshold" time, with a touch of magic, even holiness, in the mysterious daily movement from dark to light. He then laments that "the urbanization of modern life has succeeded in exiling us from this fecund kinship with mother earth. We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world."
He's speaking in generalities, of course -- but on a personal, individual level, that needn't be true. Dawn was still a potent, fecund, creative time for me during the years when I lived in big cities, and I had my sunrise-places and rituals there too. In New York City, you'd find me and my notebooks at particular cafes with good strong coffee and a clear view of the lightening sky. In Boston, I'd be by the docks of Boston Harbor in my North End neighborhood, sometimes sitting on the rocks of Pilot House Park with cold bay water slapping below my feet, sometimes perched on the concrete rim of the outdoor seal pen at the old Aquarium (coffee in hand; books and notebooks weighting down my knapsack), sharing the first quiet hour of my day with the seals (who came to know me well) just as today I share it with young Tilly.
Magic, of course is everywhere, just as nature itself is everywhere; and even in the city dawn can be a time of wonder and inspiration.
June 28, 2011
Paper and Ink
In response to the comments on my last post, the photograph above shows the working notebooks I have on the go right now, eighteen of them in all -- the number, of course, fluctuating with whatever I am working on in any given season. The cheap, tattered notebooks stacked on the desk above are for various editorial projects (anthologies, etc.), and I don't tend to save them when the projects are done. The nicer hardback notebooks (on the shelf in the photo above, and scattered across the table in the photo below) are for various writing and art projects, and those I do save.
Computers, I admit, are incredibly useful things -- but to my mind nothing beats paper and ink for jotting down ideas, roughing out a plot, or capturing stray wisps of inspiration. Now, my husband is a write-it-on-a-scrap-of-paper-and-then-lose-it kind of guy. He trusts in memory, and luck. Me, I'm a hoarder of words and stories, and I like them bound and labeled, where I can find them. We lose too much in life as it is: Memories. Places and people we've loved. The selves we once were, or wanted to be. Dazzling ideas that burned brightly for a time and then just faded away: the books never written, the paintings never painted, stories lost in the winds of time.
So yes, I'm a hoarder of words, of notebooks, of sentence fragments salvaged from the restless winds. Muse willing, those stories will reach completion. Muse willing, someday I'll pass them on to you.
June 27, 2011
So simple. So true.
"Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has to say." -- Vivian Gornick, The Situation and
the Story
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