Terri Windling's Blog, page 5

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Storms have stripped leaves off the trees and the air grows colder by the day; it is safe to say winter is here. There has been no snow in Chagford yet, but on these dark, chill mornings I can almost taste it in the air. Let's start the week with music for the season, full of snow, hail and gusting winds....

Above: "And the Snow Did Lie" by Welsh composer Hilary Tann, performed the international Sirius Quartet (Fung Chern Hwei, Gregor Huebner, Ron Lawrence, Jeremy Harman). Tann's gorgeous multimedia piece is based on Andr�� Bergeron���s lithographs for Germaine Gu��vremont���s French-Canadian classic, Le Survenant. 

Below: "The Snows They Melt the Soonest," performed by Irish folksinger Cara Dillon (from County Derry). The song was collected in Newcastle by Thomas Doubleday, published in 1821, and popularised in the 20th century folk revival by Anne Briggs, Archie Fisher and Dick Gaughin. Dillon's rendition is from her third album, After the Morning (2006).

Above: "Bird of the Blizzard" by Scottish singer/songwriter Julie Fowlis (from the Hebrides), created for Spell Songs II: Let The Light In (2021). This is the second collaborative album based on The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, two beautiful book on language and nature by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris. Both of the albums and both of the books are highly, highly recommended. I love this new spell song...not least because I was born in the middle of a blizzard.

Below: "The Wild Geese," performed by folksinger and Scottish language advocate Iona Fyfe (from Aberdeenshire). The song is based on an old Scots poem by Violet Jacob, with music by Jim Reid.

Above: "One Star Awake" by English musicians & composers Laura Cannell (from Sussex) and Kate Ellis (from Essex). Based on the traditional Irish song "She Moved Through the Fair," this piece for violin, cello and church organ is from their Winter Rituals EP (2020). The sculpture in the video was created by Rachael Long, Sarah Cannell and Andy Jarrett, experimenting with steel and firewick to create a full-size flaming marsh pony, filmed in Norfolk last December.

Below: "Goodbye England, Covered in Snow" by English singer/songwriter Laura Marling (based in London), performing with the 12 Ensemble at the Royal Albert Hall in  2020. The song can be found on Marling's early album I Speak Because I Can (2010).

The imagery above: "Winter Sunrise" by Stanley Roy Badmin, for Ladybird Books. To see more Ladybird art, visit Helen Day's excellent Ladybird flyaway home website.

Wild prayer

After a spate of wild, stormy weather there was blue sky and a rainbow over our village. In a season of water-soaked fields and foot trails ankle-deep in mud, it felt like a blessing.

Today there is sun on Meldon Hill, though a bank of dark clouds hovers over the moor. Sun or rain, I am ready for both. Rainbow-blessed and vision restored, I'm reminded to love the earth's full palette: the delicacy of winter blue, the wet vibrancy of green and gold, but also the spectrum of color that gives us grey days, comfortless as they sometimes seem. Grey is the color of mist, mystery, mythic entrances to the Otherworld. Grey is the hidden and the unseen -- which we sometimes need to be ourselves.

In her essay collection Wild Comfort, Kathleen Dean Moore takes sorrow and the hardships of life into nature, seeking clarity, solace, and a form of prayer unattached to the religion she was raised in and no longer practices. Alone in her kayak on a small mountain lake, she is enclosed in the grey world of falling snow, cut off from sight of the land by the storm. In the thick of the snow squall, she writes:

"a frog began to sing. It must have been a tree frog, Hyla regilla. Of course I couldn't see it; I couldn't see anything but snow beyond my vanished bow. But I knew that song, and I could imagine the tiny frog up to its eyes in water, snowflaked falling on its head fiery green enough to melt the snow.

 "As long as the frog sings, I will not be lost in the squall. The song tells me where the cattails are, and the cattails mark the shore. I am sure of this much, that Earth lights these small signal fires -- not for us, but among us -- and we can find them if we look. If we are not afraid, if we keep our balance, if we let our anxious selves dissolve into the beauties and mysteries of the night, we will find a way to peace and assurance. Signal fires burn all over the land."

Here is the prayer Moore finds in the middle of the storm, and that she offers to us:

"May the light that reflects on this water be a wild prayer. May water lift us with its unexpected strength. May we find comfort in the 'repeated strains of nature,' the softly sheeting snow, the changing seasons, the return of blackbirds to the marsh. May we find strength in light that pours under the snow and laughter that breaks through the tears. May we go out into the light-filled snow, among meadows in bloom, with a gratitude for life that is deep and alive. May Earth's fires burn in our hearts, and may we know ourselves to be part of this flame -- one thing, never alone, never weary of life."

May it be so. Mitakuye Oyasin.

The two passages quoted above are from Kathleen Dean Moore's essay "Never Alone or Weary" in Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature (Trumpeter Books, 2010); the poem in the picture captions is from The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (New Directions, 2013); all rights reserved by the authors. I wrote about rainbows in my own personal symbology here, back in 2010.

The art of Kay Nielsen

On a chilly, mid-December morning, my thoughts turned to fairy tales of the north, and then to the great Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen. Here's a reflection on this great artist's work and life....

The period in art history now referred to as the Golden Age of Book Illustration occurred in London at the end of the 19th century and in the dawning years of the 20th -- growing out of the reassessment of Book Arts fostered by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts-&-Crafts movement, and aided by advances in printing techniques that made the publication of sumptuously illustrated volumes suddenly economically feasible. As a result, a number of the greatest book illustrators the world has ever known were clustered in London during those years: Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Charles and William Heath Robinson, Charles Ricketts, Lawrence Housman, Henry Ford, Jean de Bossch��re, and many others -- including a young Dane named Kay (pronounced "Kigh") Nielsen, who turned up in the city in 1911 at the tender age of twenty-five with a series of black-and-white drawings inspired by Aubrey Beardsley under his arm.

Kay had been born into an illustrious theater family in Copenhagen in 1886, growing up with the trappings of wealth and fame and a strong interest in the arts. (His father was the director of the Royal Danish Theater, his mother was a much-revered actress, and visitors to the Nielsen household included Ibsen and Grieg.) At eighteen, Kay left Copenhagen for Paris to study art in Montparnasse. It was there that he, like so many art students, discovered Beardsley's work, with its fine use of line and ornamentation and its aura of dark romance. Beardsley's drawings made a considerable impression on him, containing as it did two of the things he loved best: imagery from myth and folklore, and the strong influence of Japanese art. Under Beardsley's spell, Nielsen produced a series of morbidly romantic black-and-white drawings titled The Book of Death, portraying the tragic love of Pierrot for a young dying maiden. Moving from Paris to Beardsley's homeland, Kay mounted a major London gallery exhibition of the series in 1911. Mixed in with these darker drawings were designs for watercolors based on classic fairy tales -- the art for which the young painter would henceforth be best known.

On the strength of this work, Kay soon received his first English book commission: In Powder and Crinoline, a volume of fairy tales retold by Arthur Quiller-Couch. The book appeared in 1913, instantly garnering wide acclaim. A year later, when he was just twenty-eight, Kay published the work that would be his most famous: East of the Sun, West of the Moon: Old Tales from the Norse. With these two volumes, Kay Nielsen came out from under Aubrey Beardsley's long shadow into a style that was all his own -- one that incorporated the influence of Romantic Art, Art Nouveau, Japanese woodcuts, and Chinese prints, yet gave them a chilly Nordic elegance and a modernist look. The original paintings from these two volumes were exhibited in London in 1915 (book artists depended on the sales from such shows, for they earned very little from the published works), and then formed the core of a Nielsen exhibition in New York two years later.

In 1917, Kay traveled from New York back to Copenhagen and became, during the post-war years, deeply involved with the theater again. Collaborating with his close friend Johannes Poulson (now known as a pioneer of Danish cinema, but then a young stage actor and producer), he designed elaborate sets and costumes for Adam Oehlenschlaeger's Aladdin at the Danish State Theater, as well as for a lavish production of Scaramouche, with music by Sibelius. It was during these years, between 1918 and 1922, that the artist also created his sensual illustrations for The Arabian Nights, incorporating a melange of influences from Eastern art to the Italian Renaissance. Publication plans for the series fell through, but the paintings were shown in a London exhibition in 1924, along with new illustrations for a volume of Hans Christian Andersen tales.

Kay married his beloved, charismatic wife Ulla Pless-Schmidt in 1926, and the two of them lived in grand style for the next decade in Copenhagen -- where Kay, due to his popular books and innovative theater work, was now a celebrity just as his mother and father had been. In 1936, the theater work led to a prominent job in Hollywood, creating designs for Max Reinhardt's Everyman at the Hollywood Bowl -- then Kay stayed on at the request of Walt Disney to design the "Bald Mountain" sequence of the animated film Fantasia. When war broke out in Europe again, Ulla joined Kay in Hollywood, along with their two Scotty dogs, and the couple settled in to a new life in America. At first, it was a life as luxurious as the one they'd left behind -- but gradually, Kay's working relationship with Disney Studios deteriorated...and when he turned to his own art again he found, to his astonishment and despair, it had fallen quite out of fashion.

Then began a long stretch of years where jobs were few and far between, and Kay's once highly sought after paintings became impossible to sell. His disadvantage, notes Hildegarde Flanner, a friend and neighbor in southern California,

"lay in the narrowness of his range in a day that was suspicious of fantasy -- unless neurotic or Joycean -- that 'the Golden Age of Illustration' in which his name had been notable along with those of Morris, Beardsley, Boecklin, Pyle, Rackham, Dulac, and their brotherhood had closed, and however vital his skill in decoration, he had no ease in self���promotion. In other times his talent and reputation might have carried him without anxiety for the rest of his life, yet already in the forties of the century and his own middle-fifties his successes, both European and American, were all in the past and apparently behind him, and he was living obscurely in a mortgaged cottage in the foothill suburbs, with no prospects ahead. Apprehension about money became chronic, and also there was the crucial matter of ill health. In spite of his tall appearance of well-being, Kay was not strong and Ulla, since no one dares be sick without plenty of cash, did not mention the fact that she was threatened with diabetes."

Ulla and Kay tightened their belts, moved into the modest cottage near Flanner, and set about living with as much gentle grace and style as they could muster on a small and dwindling income. It was then that Flanner first met the couple -- astonished to find that her neighbor was the very artist whose books she had most treasured in her childhood.

"As I came to know him," Flanner writes, "he appeared to be the model of his tall heroes, and like them seemed puritanic, as much monk as painter, never quite coming out of the hieratic forest....Asked today what they recall most about him people invariably answer, 'He never said an unkind word about anyone.' "

Despite their financial worries, the Nielsen house was a warm and lively place, filled with friends, art, conversation, and the distinctively Danish customs with which they kept their homeland close. It was also filled with baby chicks, for the couple attempted to breed and raise Cornish game hens to supplement their income -- but after a while this business failed too. And still Kay's art didn't sell.

 In 1941, good fortune came in the form of Jasmine Britton, supervising librarian for the Los Angeles school system. Distressed to find an artist of Nielsen's caliber living in genteel poverty, she pulled some strings and located funds with which to hire him to create a full-scale mural for the library of the Los Angeles Central Junior High School. It was a vast undertaking, a painting on which the artist spent three long years of hard work. When the mural was finally completed, it was ceremoniously unveiled to enormous acclaim; Arthur Miller called it "one of the most beautiful wall paintings in America" in the L.A. Times. One year later, the school building was taken over by the Los Angeles Board of Education for a new administrative headquarters, and the mural was stripped from the wall as the room was converted to offices.

Enraged, Jasmine Britton threatened the School Board with a well-publicized public scandal. They agreed to transfer the mural, and a new home was found for it at Sutter Junior High School in the San Fernando Valley -- but the enormous painting had been badly damaged in the course of its careless removal and storage. A further two years of work was required to restore the art in its new setting -- a blow from which Kay's health, fragile at that time, never fully recovered. When the restorations were complete, he went on to a new commission -- a splendid altar painting for the Wong Chapel in the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. After this, however, it was six long years before he received another commission.

In the late 1940s, lacking all prospect of work, the Nielsens returned to Denmark, though life there was to be quite different from what they had known before. Where Kay had once been a celebrity, followed everywhere by the media, now he was aging, his work was obscure, and their country house, though charming, was also rustic and bitterly cold. Kay spent dark winter days wrapped in blankets, attempting to paint, as his health grew worse.

By the 1950s, the Nielsens were back in the cottage in California once more -- where good fortune appeared once again in the form of another Britton sister, Helen Britton Holland, who arranged for Kay to receive a mural commission from Whitman College. It was the last major painting he would ever complete -- for over the next several years his cough worsened, his frame grew thinner and thinner, and in 1957 he died quietly at home at the age of sixty-nine. Ulla made no pretense of wanting to go on with life now that her Kay was gone, and she died just thirteen months later of complications from diabetes. Neither knew that a revival of Kay's life work was soon about to begin.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Kay's fairy tale paintings were rediscovered as part of a general cultural reappraisal of Victorian fairy art, Pre-Raphaelite art, and Golden Age book illustration. In the latter group, Nielsen's work was ranked once again alongside Rackham's and Dulac's as the finest of the age. In America and England, Kay's pictures appeared on notecards, posters, and calendars, and facsimile editions of his various fairy tale volumes soon followed after. In the 1970s, Peacock Press, under the visionary direction of Ian and Betty Ballantine (who were instrumental in popularizing Tolkien's books in America) presented a series of trade paperback volumes honoring the works of Golden Age illustrators. Kay Nielsen, edited by David Larkin, was published in 1975, followed up by The Unknown Paintings of Kay Nielsen (featuring the artist's Arabian Nights paintings) in 1977.

Since then, Kay's work has become beloved by fans of fairy tale fiction and illustration all around the world, and a new generation of mythic artists are now as inspired by the art of Kay Nielsen as he was once inspired by Beardsley.

"Though naturally conversant with the historic advances of painting in the twentieth century," writes Hildegarde Flanner, "he remained aloof from the times in his work. Excelling in the lyrical and poetical was the ideal that absorbed him and he made no effort to modernize the subject-matter that had governed his style."

Today, we can only be grateful for the artist's devotion to "the lyrical and poetical." He maintained his own unique vision to the end, leaving his wondrous pictures as gifts to the future. I hope somewhere that his spirit, and Ulla's, knows just how much we treasure them now.

The paintings above are from East of the Sun, West of the Moon, illustrated by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957).

Music for a Tuesday morning

Let's start the week with new releases from Hudson Records, the folk & indie music label co-directed by Andy Bell & Neil McSweeney -- and named after Andy's late dog Hudson, who was truly an excellent fellow. (I got to know Hudson during my year of working with Andy on the Modern Fairies project.)

Above: "The Day We Made a Wood" by the Scottish trio Salt House (Ewan MacPherson, Lauren MacColl, Jenny Sturgeon), with American guitarist Cahalen Morrison. It's from the beautiful new Salt House EP, Working for Zeus.

"Separated by the North Sea during the pandemic," they write, "as a band we were greatly missing the thing we love most: creating music in a room together. In the depths of winter we decided to try writing new songs together on Zoom. It came with it's challenges and distractions: Ewan and Lauren grappling with mediocre broadband in the rural Highlands, Jenny disappearing off camera when she spotted orca out her window in Shetland. But most of all it kept us connected. Still unable to travel far in the spring, we sent our songs on the journey we couldn't physically -- to musicians whose work we greatly admire. Their magic and the mixes of Andy Bell brought these songs to life; songs born out of strange days, a long winter, but ultimately from a complete necessity to create."

Below: "Wood of Dreams" by Salt House, with Norwegian saxophone player Petter Frost Fadnes, from the same EP.

Above: "Fallow Ground," from the new album of the same name by two of England's finest musicians: John Spiers and Jon Boden (founding members of Bellowhead).

Below: "Goddess and Red House," instrumental compositions by Spiers & Boden, from the same album.

Above: "Craigie Hill," an emigration song from Northern Ireland performed by Scottish singer/songwriter Karine Polwart and Scottish pianist Dave Milligan, from their fine new album, Still As Your Sleeping.

Below: "Heaven's Hound" by Polward & Milligan, from the same album.

The art in this post is "Another Night Journey" and "Old Dog's Dream" by American painter Jeanie Tomanek, based near Atlanta. Go here to visit her website, and here to read about her work: "The Path of Breadcrumbs and Stones."  

All rights to the art above reserved by the artist.

Flying off

I'm away from home for a couple days, and will be back in the studio on Tuesday. 

Fairy art by Arthur Rackham.

Three writers on aging

From A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle:

"I am part of every place I have ever been: the path to the brook; the New York streets and my 'short cut' through the Metropolitan Museum. All the places I have ever walked, talked, slept, have changed and formed me. I am part of all the people I have known.  There was a black morning when [a friend] and I, both walking through separate hells, acknowledged that we would not survive were it not for our friends who, simply by being our friends, harrowed hell for us. I am still every age I have ever been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always will be in me the student crying out for reform.

"Far too many people misunderstand what putting away childish things means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grownup, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and be in my fifties, then I will really learn what it means to be a grownup. I still have a long way to go."

From an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin:

"The whole process of getting old -- it could have been better arranged. But you do learn some things just by doing them over and over and by getting old doing them. And one of them is, you really need less. And I���m not talking minimalism, which is a highly self-conscious mannerist style I can���t write and don���t want to. I���m perfectly ready to describe a lot and be flowery and emotive, but you can do that briefly and it works better. My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he���s going and he just doesn���t want to waste all that time getting there. But if you listen, if you���re with it, he takes you with him. I think sometimes about old painters -- they get so simple in their means. Just so plain and simple. Because they know they haven���t got time. One is aware of this as one gets older. You can���t waste time."

From an interview with Barry Lopez:

"Up until recently, the phrase 'my work' meant solely what I was writing. Now I'm not sure what it means. I feel a sense of urgency, a sense of national threat. Because of that I've become more involved in the past few years with higher education, with public presentations and collaborative work, with trying to advance the work of younger writers. I have to be honest with you and say I have doubts about doing these things. I feel the weight of an enormous amount of experience, travel experience in particular, which I've not written about. Sometimes I worry that without my knowing it a half-formed story will leave my imagination, as if it'd become impatient. For someone who's not a social activist, I seem suddenly to be up to my neck in such things....Maybe what I'm really working on, by writing autobiography and pursuing what I suppose is an effort at public service, is grappling with my own reputation as a writer and what to do with it. A curious thing can happen to you as a writer. You go along in your twenties and thirties and forties, writing books and articles. Then people really want to talk to you, they want to know what kind of book is coming next. They have expectations. If their perception -- your reputation -- makes you self-conscious, or anxious, it can ruin your work.

"I've seen an ambivalence emerge in some writers as they enter their fifties. You ask yourself, what am I really up to here? In a very small way I've become something of a public figure in my fifties. If you find yourself in this position, what are you supposed to do? The answer -- for me -- is to take it for what it's worth. Lend your name to worthy causes and help younger writers. Read other people's manuscripts. Try to open doors for young writers who are devoted to story and language, and who have serious questions about the fate of humanity. You say to yourself, once older writers gave to me (or didn't); now, regardless, I have to see who's coming along and how I can help them."

I couldn't agree more, especially as Lopez wisely added: "But you must draw a line in all this, too, to protect your own writing time."

The art today is by our friend David Wyatt, one of Britain's premier book illustrators (as well as the great love of Tilly's life). David lived here in Chagford for many years before the mountains of Wales claimed him last spring, and he is sorely missed. The paintings above are from his deeply magical Mythic Village and Old Goat series.

To see more of his work work, please visit his beautiful website. 

The passages above come from: "Ursula K. Le Guin: The Art of Fiction No. 221" by John Wray (Paris Review, Fall 2013),A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle (Harper San Francisco, 1972 ), and "The Big River: A Conversation with Barry Lopez on the McKenzie River" by Michael Shapiro (Michigan Quarterly Review, Fall 2005). All rights reserved by the authors' estates.

A Spell for Opening

We've been speaking about the giving and receiving of gifts in previous posts, and of shifting our perception of art and life away from our culture's fixation on the the market economy as the primary arbitrator of value, to one of gift exchange, reciprocity, generosity and community.

Today is my birthday, and I grew up in the tradition of receiving birthday presents each year  (I expect that you did too) -- but as a folklorist I'm aware that this old folk custom is not universal. In some cultures, children present gifts to their mothers, or to both parents, in gratitude for the gift of life. In others, a birthday marks the opportunity for a giveaway: food, flowers, or gifts ceremoniously distributed to everyone in the family or tribe. 

In the spirit of the latter, I want to gift you all with the poem/chant/prayer pictured above: "A Spell for Opening." It's from my little book Seven Little Tales, which is part of the Seven Doors in an Unyielding Stone series from Hedgespoken Press, curated by Tom Hirons and Rima Staines. The poem was inspired by the series' name; I loved the mystery of doors in stone. I pictured this particular door in one of my favourite places on the moor: Scorhill, a circle of standing stones. What would it take, I wondered, to find that door and open it up...?

Please accept this gift of words...and then pass on a gift of your own to someone, somewhere, some day.

The beautiful imagery in this post is by my village neighbour Simon Blackbourn, photographer and co-founder of the excellent Dartmoor Collective. Simon has spent the last ten years immersed in the wilds of the moor, photographing its colours, shapes, textures and moods, its trees, rocks, bogs, rivers, wildlife, and weather. To see more of his work, please visit his Instagram page and the Dartmoor Collective Gallery

For more on the subject of gift exchange, I recommend Lewis Hyde's seminal book The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Informs the World, and Robin Wall Kimmerer's remarkable Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants.

The photographs by Simon Blackbourn are: Back to the Stone (Scorhill), Dartmoor Hawthorn, Dartmoor Pony, and The North Teign River. All rights to the text and imagery above reserved by the author and artist. 

Magic from the hedgerows

A while back my friend and Chagford neighbour Danielle Barlow began a massive artistic undertaking: to create a new tarot deck, The Witches' Wisdom Tarot, in collaboration with Phyllis Curott. Danielle is an artist and practicing hedgewitch here on Dartmoor; Phyllis is an acclaimed American writer on all things Wiccan. Their project was an immersive one, growing slowly over many, many months: imbued with all the myth, symbolism, tarot lore and deep love of the natural world these two women carry between them.

Danielle often uses family and friends as her painting models, so when she called for models for this project I nervously agreed to help. It's not that I haven't been painted before (in this faerie picture by Brian Froud, for example, painted back in the 1990s; or this one in David Wyatt's "Mythic Village" series, 2011), but I've crossed into my elder years now -- a stage of life when the image in the mirror rarely matches the ageless self we still inhabit in the mind's eye. I'd be no faerie sylph this time, but an archetypal older woman. 

Furthermore, my health disability was at an especially low point then: I was physically frail, anaemic, shaky on my feet, not feeling particularly "magical" at all. The day Danielle came over with her camera was the day I learned the card I would be posing for: Strength. I laughed when she told me, it seemed so unlikely. "There are many different kinds of strength," she told me firmly. "Trust me, this is the right card."

Some time later I saw the finished painting (pictured at the top of this post) . . . and Reader, I admit, I cried.

Today, as the dark of winter approaches, as a new variant of Covid looms and our cultural/political discourse seems to grow more divisive by the hour, we're all in need of strength, and of the reminder that it comes in many forms. Danielle's words, imagery and hedgewitchery helped me to remember and re-imagine mine. I hope this story will do the same for you. Sometimes the quietest, deepest, most individual and paradoxical forms of strength are the ones we should value most of all.

To learn more about the wonderful Witches' Wisdom Tarot, go here. To see more of Danielle's art, including her equally lovely Green Wheel Oracle deck, go here.

"I trained in textiles, and then in horticulture," she says, "before returning to painting, my first love. These days I work primarily in ink and watercolour. I still juggle all three elements -- painting, stitching and herbalism. Deeply rooted in this ancient landscape of ours, my work draws heavily on folklore and mythology, and explores the deep connection, both physical and spiritual, between people and the land they inhabit. The spirit of this land has sunk deep into my heart, and as I wander its ancient tracks, I find myself endlessly fascinated by the shifting relationships between human, animal, plants and land. My paintings above all attempt to capture the elusive Genius Loci - Spirit of Place."

The Witches' Wisdom Tarot was published by Hay House last autumn. The artwork is copyright by Danielle Barlow, all rights reserved.

Still climbing

I've been thinking a lot about ageing lately. Perhaps it's the winter coming on, or the fact that climbing up our hill takes more effort than it used to (for me and Tilly both). Or else it's just because I turn another year older on Friday.

Other woman have walked this way before; their art and their lives inspire me and pull me on. Patti Smith is one of those women. In her second memoir, M Train, she writes:

"I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won���t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen."

Blessings on Virginia, but I, too, prefer to keep on going, my pen firmly in hand. Life can be hard, but it's also sweet, enriched by art, friendship, community. Onward, Tilly, onward. Let's go see what's over the next rise....

The quote above is from M Train by Patti Smith (Knopf, 2015), all rights reserved by the author. The art above is "Elder-tree Mother" by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).

Recommended Reading

I haven't posted a list of Recommended Reading in a while, so here are a few of the things that caught my eye over the last couple of months:

"Misogyny in Fairy Tales" and "Old Women (and Some Old Men) in Fairy Tales," two of Katherine Langrish's best fairy tale essays yet (Seven Miles of Steel Thistles)

"Grimmer Than Most Fairy Tales: Five Retellings of Bluebeard " by Rachel Ayers (Tor.com)
For a history of the fairy tale, see my essay  "Bluebeard and the Bloody Chamber." For a fairy tale literature reading list, go here.

"John Crowley's Little, Big: A Fantasy Masterpiece Turns 40" by Jonathan Thornton (Tor.com)

"Neil Gaiman's Sandman taught me to be courageous in writing" by Susanna Clarke (The Guardian)

"Puck, Dreams and the Devil" by Rob Maslen (The City of Lost Books)

"Once, Twice, Thrice Upon a Time," three fairy-tale-inspired picture books/comics reviewed by Ben Hatke (The New York Times)

"On Mistaking Whales" by Bathsheba Demuth (Granta)

"Thirteen to One: New Stories for An Age of Disaster" by Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Emergence Magazine)

"The Stories I Haven't Been Told" by Jamie Figueroa (Emergence Magazine)

"Perth Poetry Festival Keynote Speech" by Annamaria Weldon (WA Poets Inc)

"Make It a Love Story" by Sophie Strand (FB post, 14 Sept)

"" by Jack Dash and Luke Swenson (Emergence Magazine)

"The Other House: Musings on the Din�� Perspective of Time" by Jake Skeets (Emergence Magazine)

"Remember" (poem) by Joy Harjo (Emergence Magazine)

"Take Place" by Terry Tempest Williams, on the work of N. Scott Momaday (Paris Review)

"Hiraeth and Hwyl," a series of lovely essays curated by Pamela Petro (The Clearing)
...follow the link and read from the bottom post upward

"As the Seasons Progress: the Wood Engravings of Claire Leighton" by Angie Lewin (Caught by the River)

"On Stealing Time to Make Art in an Overcrowded Life" by Jackie Morris (LitHub)

"In Praise of the Meander" by Rebecca Solnit (LitHub)

And some Recommended Listening:

"Happily Ever After: Escaping the Forests of Loneliness," with Jack Zipes, Paul Quinn, and Maria Tatar (Apostrophe) 

"Kinship: Belonging in the World," a conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Hausdoerffer, and Gavin Van Horn (Point Reyes Books). You can also read a transcript here (Orion Magazine).

"Kinship & Belonging in a World of Relations," a conversation between Gavin Van Horn and Rowan White (Cultivating Place)

"Connecting to the land through traditional tales" with storyteller Lisa Schneidau (RestoryingTheEarth.com)

"From Spare Oom to War Drobe," Katherine Langerish discusses her new book about Narnia (All About Jack: A C.S. Lewis Podcast)

"The Infernal Riddle of Historical Fantasy," a terrific conversation between L.J. MacWhirter, James Treadwell, Fraser Dallachy, Rob Maslen (The Centre for Fantasy & the Fantastic) ...and in relation to the discussion of creating systems of magic when writing fantasy, I also recommend this 2012 post by N.K. Jemisin and the conversation in the comments below (recently brought back to my attention by Charlie Jane Anders). Also Lev Grossman's 2015 lecture at Tolkien's old college in Oxford: "Fear and Loathing in Aslan's Land."

"The Hare - Old Turpin, Fast Traveller," a folk music playlist of songs about the folklore of hares (Folk Radio UK) For more on hare magic: The Folklore of Rabbits & Hares and Following the Hare. For an audio drama based on Fay Hield's song "Hare Spell" go here.

The art above is "Leisure" by William Worcester Churchill, "Lettura Patricotic Reading" by Alcide Davide Campestrini, "Schoolgirls Reading" by Nikolai Petrovitch, J"osephina Reading" by Antonio Lo��pez, and "A Student, Paris," by Ethel Pennewill Brown Leach.