Terri Windling's Blog, page 248

Out of the Woods, Part III

Sitting on the rocks at the top of the hill, Tilly's posture went suddenly rigid with concentration. I followed her gaze, then saw what she had spied...

...white cows moving through a meadow full of bluebells near the border of the woods. Tilly is usually wary of the creatures (an attitude we encourage here in farm country, where she mustn't ever chase the cows or sheep), so although she raced down the hill in great excitement, she kept a sensible safe distance from them...

...while the cows drifted slowly through the flowers, gentle ladies glowing white within a sea of blue and green.

But when she heard me coming up behind her, Tilly grew bold and decided to inch closer...and then just a little closer still...

...until a big black rock in the grass suddenly moved, and the pup nearly jumped out of her skin! It wasn't a rock, it was a black-and-white bull, glaring down at her as if to say, "Yeah, that's right, come closer, little doggie. Come closer and make my day."

After that, Tilly stuck close to my side, her ears slicked back, seal-like, in her chagrin. We turned back down the hill again, following a narrow sheep path toward home...wading through flowers...raising clouds of golden butterflies with each step we took.

The butterflies were feeding on the delicate nectar of bluebells, gorse, stitchwort, and campion....

They brushed against us as we passed through, lighting in my hair and on my hands, darting from girl to dog to flower, little whispers of color and wind.

No wonder I write fantasy, I thought as we reached our own back gate again. They say that you should write about what you know. And what I know is that the world is full of magic.

Out of the Woods, Part II

As we climb to the top of Nattadon Hill, there are bluebells everywhere, lining the path and peaking up shyly from the cover of bracken.

At the top of the hill is a bluebell field, the color so delicate among the green than my camera barely registers it...but to the eyes, it's a cloud of blue; and to the nose, an extraordinary perfume. Tilly crosses the hilltop, wading through flowers. Then she sits on a rock, looking down on the village and the rise of open moorland beyond.

Soon we will have to head down towards home, but for now we just sit and absorb it all: beauty, magic, light, wind, sun. The raw materials for art-making, myth-making, story-telling. And food for the soul.

Out of the Woods, Part I

Last week before he left, Howard and I took the pup for one last walk together on the slope of the hill behind our house. We followed a path that is one of Howard's favorites, though it is one that I don't often travel myself. I'd been heading for the cover of the woods instead, enchanted by the bluebells that had bloomed among the trees and were now pale ghosts fading back into the green. "Ah, but I know a place where the bluebells are just now hitting their peak," he told me; and he whistled for the dog, and led the way, and this is what he showed me:

There's a lesson for me here. Sometimes the things you think you're losing aren't really gone at all. You just have to come at them from a new direction...and then there they are, stronger than ever.

So I'm out of the woods, in the literal sense, and maybe in the creative sense too. As I push ahead with creative work, I am, metaphorically speaking, walking farther afield with each passing day, and if the work is not exactly easy, it is oh so interesting, which is even better.

These pictures come from the bottom of the hill, bordered by some sheep fields and an old stone wall. Tomorrow, pictures from the very top. On Thursday, down the other side.

May your own journeys be interesting too, wherever and whatever those journeys may be.

And here's what has made my day...

...the book trailer video for our new Bordertown anthology! (It's running exclusively on io9.com this week, so I can't embed it here; just follow the link.) Go watch it before you read the "making of" information below, as it's more fun to stumble upon it fresh....

Okay, you're back?

Ellen Kushner, Holly Black, and I cooked up the initial idea for video...but then Ellen ran with it, wrote the script, and, with our publisher's support, made the leap from Cool Idea to Finished Project. (See that deep, dark chasm between the two? Alas, that's where too many Cool Ideas end up unless there's a person, like Ellen, with both vision and tenacity behind them.)

Ellen got Vital Theatre on board (the company that produced her fabulous "Klezmer Nutcracker" in New York), and they, in turn, brought in some terrific young actors from the New York City school system. Bravo to everyone -- especially Ellen, who has been involved with every step of the project, but also to the kids, New York radio host Jim Freund (the grumpy old-timer in the video), the video crew, the support team at Vital Theatre, and the good folks at Random House Publishers (including the book's fine editor, Mallory Loehr), who all helped to make it happen.

The picture on the left above, by the way, is a Bordertown sketch created by Brian Froud back in 1991 (for a film project that didn't make the leap across the chasm). You'll find more sketches by Brian on the Bordertown website, on the Characters page.

And one last thing: Christopher Barzak is running a new Bordertown contest over on his blog. (Chris has a terrific story in the new book.) The prize is a one-of-a-kind Bordertown pendant by Mia Nutick of Chimera Fancies.  All the info is here.

Tune for a Monday Morning

I need a little Eric Bibb today. Last week was a little...pensive. It's a brand new day, with blue peaking through the clouds, and time to kick out the jams...

. . . which is one of those American expressions that would make my British husband look at me blankly, were he not off in Portugal right now. Tilly, who is fluent in Body Language (if not in American English), knows exactly what I mean. She's thumping her tail and looking up at me, bright-eyed and eager. Okay pup, let's roll.

This one goes out to David Amos Todd-Jones this morning. Congratulations on completing another Dartmoor Ten Tors challenge, and happy birthday!

Young David, and David now. Photographs by Carol Amos; posted with permission.

Friday's Recommendations:

* Katherine Langrish discusses troubadour knights, hawthorn blossoms, and the month of May, at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.

* Meg Harper discusses the plundering of gardens and children's literature, at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

* Libba Bray discusses the dark and difficult part of novel writing -- the part where everything goes wrong. (Howard calls this the "Dark Forest" stage of the creative process, described in a JoMA article on creating Fairy Tale Theater, while Midori Snyder calls it the "I want a divorce" stage of writing a book in her article on the creation of The Innamorati. Delia Sherman proffers sensible advice about it all in How to Survive a First Draft.)

* Speaking of Delia, she has posted a moving Meditation on Mother's Day on her blog, The Grand Tour. She also discusses the new production of Peter and Wendy, while remembering the late, great Johnny Cunningham.

*  Genevieve Valentine discusses dance and artistic obsession as depicted in the three films of Carlos Saura's Flamenco Trilogy, at Strange Horizons. I love those films.

* John Naughton asks why we don't love our intellectuals in Britain as they do in France, in The Guardian.

* Willis G. Regier has a fascinating article on The Philosophy of Insomnia in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

* Virginia Lee presents her gorgeous new painting, Three Hares Tor, over on her beautiful art blog. There are also photographs of her recent show at The Courtyard Cafe in our village, which was enchanting.

* Theodora Goss has made audio files of her magical poetry. The links are on her writing blog.

* Donna Q. shares a lovely, hushed Moment of Zen on Enchanted Spirit: Lens and Pen.

* This week's fiction recommendation is "Creation," a mythic story by the amazing Jeffrey Ford, in Fantasy Magazine.  "[The Green Man] appears in the stone work of a lot of cathedrals throughout the world," says Jeff in an interview about the story. "He was one of those mythic entities that was replaced by the Judeo-Christian pantheon, but artists and storytellers kept his memory alive, sometimes subversively, as in the cathedrals, I think because they sensed his message to us was an important one. I liked that idea of paganism lurking beneath the surface of Christianity, hiding out, watching us from behind the monolithic monotheism, whispering to us to remember where we came from."

* This week's video recommendation: Dutch artist Theo Jansen discusses the ideas behind his insanely cool kinetic sculptures: "Strandbeests" who feed on sun and wind.

* And finally, Rex and Howard have one last Friday post on John Barleycorn before Howard leaves for Portugal tomorrow. Rex will then be blogging solo for the next four weeks -- while Howard's off directing a Commedia dell'Arte version of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Porto, along with his Ophaboom partner Geoff Beale. That's Howard in the picture at the top of this post (from his early Ophaboom days), performing in Germany. Below, Howard and Geoff clowning about on the streets of Copenhagen.

Update: The Blogger server is down at the moment, and the John Barleycorn post can't go up until Blogger comes back online. I'll pop a link in just as soon as it does. Please check back later, as the JB fellows really appreciate everyone's support.

On time...

Time passes. Time changes everything -- both the things in our lives that we're grateful to move on from and the things that we try to clutch tightly and must, inevitably, someday, let go of. "We all lose everything," says the poet Marge Piercy:
We lose
ourselves. We are lost.
Only what we manage to do
lasts, what love sculpts from us...

Recently my friend Yoann Lossel, the French painter, asked me why I'm so fascinated by time, which he sees as a theme running throughout my work...most obviously in The Wood Wife, but also in other fiction and essays. Perhaps it's living a life shadowed by serious illness that makes one hyper aware of time and mortality; or perhaps it's simply one aspect of living as a mythic writer & artist: I am always looking both backwards and forwards, living in the rich past and shimmering future as well as the sensual present, in order to make art out of the experiences of my life, and to make life out of the experiences of my art.

In The Wood Wife, the sly Trickster character, Crow, explains time as it's viewed in his spirit world to the novel's protagonist, Maggie Black. Time is not a line, he tells her, it's a spiral, and we all stand at its center. From that place we can move through time in any direction we chose: forwards, backwards, sideways. But he warns her that if she's to travel through time, she must always be anchored firmly to the present; otherwise, she might lose herself in the past and be unable to return. Indeed, for me, too, it sometimes requires strong effort to remain anchored to the physical world when I'm caught up in the giddy time-travel of writing or painting. That's why, for me, a dog, a footpath, and a stout pair of walking boots are as necessary to my creative process as paper and ink and paint. Among trees and stone and weather and wind, I am rooted in the present once again.

Albert Einstein has stated: "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." But for the writer or artist, it does all happen at once. Time is not linear in art-making; we constantly walk backwards and forwards as we draw upon all of our experiences, all of our past and future selves, to create each day's work in the here and now.

"Time does not change us," the Swiss playwright Max Frisch once wrote. "It just unfolds us. "

I like this image. Perhaps as travel the road of time we're not so much aging or changing but unfurling like leaves; unfolding like flowers, petal by petal.

I'll end today with a Picasso quote (below) that makes more and more sense to me every year. And with a Stornoway song about the passage of time that's been running through my head all darn morning:

A bit of news...

The Beastly Bride (the YA "mythic fiction" anthology inspired by animal-transformation tales that I co-edited with Ellen Datlow) is a Finalist for the Locus Award.

Congratulations to everyone involved with the book.

Also, I don't think I mentioned before that two stories from the book, by Christopher Barzak and Shweta Narayan, are on this year's Nebula Award ballot. Very nice indeed.

A bluebell reprise

It's been Fairyland in the woods and fields behind our house over the last few weeks. . .but now the bluebells are beginning to fade, gently curling in on themselves. Soon they will disappear again as mysteriously as first they came. Here, then, are a last few bluebell pictures, a last few moments of lingering enchantment. . . .

I seem to be reflecting on "loss" these days. Why? I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps it's just the fading of the bluebells. Or the tiresome limits of convalescence, reminding me of mortality. It's Howard about to leave the country for a month (whatever will Tilly do without him?), and a dear relative losing his home, and the remaining threads that still tie me to my old desert life beginning to loosen. It's descent and ascent, death and rebirth, winter and spring, the cycles of sun and moon. It's loss and change clearing the ground for whatever new phase of art and life comes next. It's loss and change swaling the landscape of the soul. And so the seasons turn.

The thing is, I'm strangely content right now, though perhaps you wouldn't know it from these recent melancholic posts. Change is never easy, but I like the things change brings: new art, new stories. New beginnings.

 

                                                                      To live in this world

                                                                      you must be able
                                                                      to do three things:
                                                                      to love what is mortal;
                                                                      to hold it

                                                                     against your bones knowing
                                                                      your own life depends on it;
                                                                      and, when the time comes to let it go,
                                                                      to let it go.

                                                                              -- Mary Oliver (from In Blackwater Woods)

 

The things that save us

Weaver's Cottage kitchen, with wall murals by Brian Froud & others

Touching on the subject of "homesickness" yesterday got me thinking about loss and change and all the things we leave behind us as we journey through our years -- which are never truly lost, in an artist's life, for all of those places are alchemize into our writing, our paintings, our music...and into the most vital creation of all: ourselves. I carry all the places I've loved within me, for my bones and breath are formed of them. It seems to me that I've been a slightly different self in every town, state, or country I've lived in -- but each of them lives within me now, a chorus growing larger, louder every year. My task, as an artist, is to find harmony and not cacophony in the music they make together.

When I lived in my last house, Weaver's Cottage, I had a wise and lovely neighbor in her 90s who once said to me: "The thing about growing older, dear, is that you don't ever stop being the age you were, you just add each new age to it. So I never envy the young, because I'm still twenty years old myself, and thirty, and forty, and so on. By the time you're my age, you have so many selves to be, and draw upon, and enjoy, that I can only feel compassion for young people, who still have so very few." 

For me, I think, those past selves are firmly attached to places I have loved -- to towns and houses and mountains and cafes -- more than to chronological age. The various stages of my life are marked by an intense engagement with the land below and the view outside the window and the walls around me. Now here I am this morning in my "Bumblehill stage," my Bumblehill self, sweet Tilly nestled up against my feet, looking out the studio doorway at the sun-lit Devon hills...while all the other selves inside me are looking out too, and enjoying this fine morning along with us.

Sitting here with my morning cup of coffee, I've been thinking about my life-long habit of tumbling out of bed at an early, early hour, eager to start the day. During this period of convalescence, however, getting up has been (unusually for me) more of a struggle, and too often right now it's only the promise of a good cup of coffee that gets me up and out. I'm suddenly reminded of a line from a Jonathan Carroll novel that I associate with my "Weaver's Cottage stage" of life, for I painted it over the kitchen window there:

"Sometimes it is the smallest thing that saves us: the weather growing cold, a child's smile, and a cup of excellent coffee."

And sometimes it's the weather growing warm...a dog's goofy grin...and a cup of excellent coffee.