Terri Windling's Blog, page 95

I woke up with a bad cold this morning, so I'm afraid t...

I woke up with a bad cold this morning, so I'm afraid there's no post today. I hope to be back in the studio tomorrow as I've Got a Lot to Do. Fingers and bunny paws crossed.

"As far as her mom was concerned, tea fixed everything. Have a cold? Have some tea. Broken bones? There's a tea for that too. Somewhere in her mother's pantry, Laurel suspected, was a box of tea that said, 'In case of Armageddon, steep three to five minutes.'"   - Aprilynne Pike (Illusions)

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Two years ago, The Houses of Parliament's 2015 Anniversaries Programme commissioned the English Folk Dance & Song Society to come up with a project to celebrate 800 years of British democracy. That project was Sweet Liberties, an evening of folk music by Sam Carter, Martyn Joseph, Nancy Kerr, and Maz O���Connor. As an article The Guardian described it:

"In a year that marked the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta and 750 years since the Simon de Montfort parliament, the four celebrated the pursuit of democracy and sung songs new and old, written about the rights and liberties that people have fought to achieve and protect over the centuries. 'The topics in our songs all deserve to be celebrated -- but we���d also like to highlight some uncomfortable truths which matter to vulnerable people today,' says Kerr. 'Folk music reflects the creativity of working people, who often used it as a political voice. This kind of project could link present concerns with previous radical struggles and help us find a new collective voice.' "

(The article is worth reading in full, which you can do here.)

Sweet Liberties was created before the EU Referendum (or the presidential election in America) -- but re-visiting the music now, it seems more relevant than ever. Here are four songs from the Sweet Liberties concerts, doing what folk music does best: carrying our stories and our history. And strengthening hearts for the fight to keep our "sweet liberties" today.

Above: "Sing John Ball," the Sydney Carter classic, performed at Cecil Sharp House in London (November, 2015). Carter, Joseph, Kerr, & O'Connor are joined in these concerts by Patsy Reid on viola & violin and Nick Cooke on melodeon.

Below: "12 Years Old," written and introduced by Joseph Martyn.

Above: "Broken Things," written and performed by Maz O'Connor.

Below: "Am I Not a Man and a Brother," written and performed by Sam Carter.

Above: "Fragile Waters," an updating of selchie ballads in an age of environmental concerns, written and performed by Nancy Kerr. (Please don't miss her new album, Instar, which explores many of the same topics we're concerned with on Myth & Moor, and is truly lovely.)

And to end with: "One More River to Cross," written and sung by Sam Carter.

The Long Tale

"[W]e have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is ... just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable. Not easy -- it will probably be hard, and may be steep and thorny or wet and muddy or beset by badgers, but to not follow it is inconceivable because it is mine."   - Amal El-Mohtar

The quote above comes from "Tapping the Long Tale," a lovely piece Amal wrote in 2011, which I recommend reading in full.

I'm thinking today about all the places I have travelled through (literally and creatively) as I've followed my own Long Tale...and wondering where it will take me next....

Where will yours take you?

The illustration above is by Arthur Rackham.

Secrets revealed....

At last, dear people, here is the little project I've been working on (in addition to my manuscript-in-progress, of course, which remains on-going).

You'll have noticed that Myth & Moor has a brand new look, as I hadn't updated the blog in years. I've also updated my author website, as that was getting pretty darn old too.

But what you'll find here is much more than that, as you'll discover if you follow the links on the right-hand side of the page. I've made a large number of essays and articles on myth, fairy tales, and mythic arts available here. Some come from the old Journal of Mythic Arts, others have never been online before -- presented with new art, recommended reading lists, and other resources. I want this work to be freely available to all readers interested in myth and mythic arts.

We've talked about "gift exchange" on this blog, and how certain stories and certain kinds of art pass as gifts through the generations. This is my gift to the mythic arts field: articles on these things we love, put out there for anyone who may be interested, or seeks information, or who simply needs to find them.

I remember being a young girl myself who needed to know about myth and fantasy -- back in the days before the internet, before easy access to fantasy books or fairy tale scholarship, before the mythic arts community existed, before I ever dreamed there could be such a thing.

This site full of articles, art, and other resources is for that young girl, and  every young person like her. But especially it's for you.  I hope it's useful. I hope it's enjoyable. I hope you will accept this gift from me ... and that it has been worth the wait.

The walk off the cliff...

I'm ready now to show you the Secret Something I've been working on -- which, I hasten to add, isn't a huge or elaborate Secret Something, but one I hope you will like nonethess.

Then I woke up this morning and suddenly realized that today is Black Wednesday: the day my adopted country walks off a cliff. Our unelected far-right-wing government has trigged Article 50, the legal beginning of our exit from Europe. I knew this day was coming, of course, but the amount of grief I'm feeling has stunned me nonetheless. My husband and daughter are losing their European citizenship, and we (along with so many millions of others) are losing the country we love.

Tomorrow I'll be back here with stories, art, mysteries revealed, and rambles through this beautiful place we call home. But today I must grieve for all we are losing, for the dark place where we are standing, and for all the ways that life is going to get even harder for those of us in the arts. I'll try to step into that darkness with faith, like the figure in Jeanie Tomanek's painting above. I'll strive to build ladders to help the most vulnerable among us, or at least hold my arms out to cushion their fall. I'll continue to work to build a better world through art, activism, community, and love.

But today, dear friends, I'm just devastated. Today is a day for grieving.

The paintings above are "Faith" and "Endurance" by Jeanie Tomanek; all rights reserved by the artist.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Above: A classic British folk song, " Whilst the Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping," performed by the great Chris Wood and Andy Cutting at the Southwell Festival. (I woke up with the first line of the song running through my head: Oh, I have a dog and a good dog too.... Tilly loves that part.)

Below, so the poachers don't get the last word:  "I Am the Fox," performed by Nancy Kerr (whose work I just love) and James Fagan (of the The James Brothers) at the Bath Folk Festival.

 

Above: Nancy Kerr and James Fagan again, performing their gorgeous song "Queen of Waters."

Below: "Seven Years," a beautiful tune by Andy Cutting, performed by Cutting with Martin Simpson and Nancy Kerr.

And one more: "Atheist Spiritual: Come Down Jehovah," written and performed by Chris Wood. I'm not an atheist myself (I'm an earthy old pagan), but this song speaks to me deeply nonetheless.

Retreating....

Howard is up in London this week (teaching puppetry) and our house is remarkably quiet. So I'm using this opportunity to take a "Work Retreat" over the next few days, focused on getting my little Secret Project finished at last.

The Secret Project has taken longer than I ever expected -- but then, it's just a side project, not my main job (which is a manuscript-in-progress), so I've been piecing it together in fits and starts, before and after my regular work day. I've turned into a Studio Hermit this month, with little time left for anything else -- so it's high time to get the SP done. (And the manuscript too. But that's a another story.)

Please wish me luck. Tilly and I will see you all again on Monday.

A morning coffee break in the woods, with good companions

The two Virago fairy tale books edited by Angela Carter are essential reading in the fairy tale field; as is Carter's reworking of the tales in her brilliant, influential story collection The Bloody Chamber -- the text (I'd argue) that sparked the "adult fairy tale literature" revival we've been enjoying for three decades now.

Carter was younger than I am now when she died of lung cancer in 1992. She'd finished compiling the manuscript for her second Virago fairy tale collection, but illness prevented her from writing the introduction she'd planned. Only these short notes for it remain:

* 'Every story contains something useful,"
says Walter Benjamin

* the 'unperplexedness' of the story

* "No one dies so poor that he does not leave something behind," said Pascal

* fairy tales -- cunning and high spirits

"Fragmentary as they are," fairy tale historian Marina Warner points out, "these phrases convey the Carter philosophy. She was scathing about the contempt the 'educated' can show, when two-thirds of the literature of the world -- perhaps more -- has been created by the illiterate. She liked the common sense of folk tales, the straightforward aims of their protagonists, the simple moral distinctions, and the wily stratagems they suggest. They're tales of the underdog, about cunning and high spirits winning through in the end; they're practical and they're not high-flown. For a fantasist with wings, Angela kept her eyes on the ground, with reality firmly in her sights. She once remarked, 'A fairy tale is a story where one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.'

"Feminist critics of the genre -- especially in the 1970s -- jibbed at the socially conventional 'happy endings' of so many stories (for example, 'When she grew up he married her and she became the tsarina'). But Angela knew about satisfaction; and at the same time she believed that the goal of fairy tales wasn't 'a conservative one, but a utopian one, indeed a form of heroic optimism -- as if to say: 'One day we might be happy, even if it won't last.'

"Her own heroic optimism never failed her -- like the spirited heroine of one of her tales, she was resourceful and brave and even funny during the illness which brought about her death. Few writers possess the best qualities of her work; she did in spades."

In the same essay, Warner paints this wonderful portrait of Carter:

"She was a wise child herself, with a mobile face, a mouth which sometimes pursed with irony, and, behind the glasses, a wryness, at times a twinkle, at times a certain dreaminess; with her long silvery hair and ethereal delivery, she had something of the Faerie Queen about her, except that she was never wispy or fey. And though the narcisissim of youth was one of the great themes in her early fiction, she was herself exceptionally un-narcissistic.

"Her voice was soft, with a storyteller's confidingness, and lively with humour; she spoke with a certain syncopation, as she stopped to think -- her thoughts made her a most exhilarating companion, a wonderful talker, who wore her learning and wide reading with lightness, who could express a mischievous insight or a tough judgement with scapel precision and produce new ideas by the dozens without effort, weaving allusion, quotation, parody and original invention, in a way that echoed her prose style. 'I've got a theory that...' she'd say, self-deprecatorily, and then would follow something no one else has thought of, some sally, some rich paradox that would encapsulate a trend, a moment."

I wish I'd known her.

Last month, Howard and I went to see Strange Worlds, the Angela Carter exhibition at the RWA in Bristol...and I'm afraid we found it rather disappointing. Here's what I can recommend, however: the new biography of Carter,  The Invention of Angela Carter, by Edmund Gordon; Angela Carter & the Fairy Tale (a special issue of Marvels & Tales), edited by Cristina Bacchilega; and Marina Warner's article "Why The Bloody Chamber Still Bites" (The Scotsman).

Along with Carter's splendid work itself.

The passage above by Marina Warner is from her introduction to The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (Virago Press, 1993). The Angela Carter quotes in the picture captions are from her introduction to the first Virago Book of Fairy Tales (Virago Press, 1991). All rights reserved by Dame Warner and the Carter estate. The Little Red Riding Hood illustration is by G.P. Jacomb Hood (1857-1929).

Lloyd Alexander on blessings in disguise and the value of fantasy

Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, served in military intelligence during World War II, studied at the University of Paris after the war, then worked in advertising and journalism (as a cartoonist and layout artist) while launching his career as a novelist. He initially wrote books for adults, but when he finally found his way to children's literature, he had found his true home. Generations have now grown up with his Prydain Chronicles and other extraordinary novels, which are classics of the fantasy field.

"I have to smile, remembering myself as a very much younger man," Alexander recalled in his Newbery Award acceptance speech (for The High King in 1969). "I was still looking for a way to say -- whatever it was, if anything, I had to say.

"Although it didn't feel that way at the time, those years were a blessing, heavily disguised. Or, say, the kind of gift the enchantresses Orddu, Orwen, and Orgoch bestow on the unwitting recipient. Perhaps we have to serve an apprenticeship to life before we can serve one to art. We can't begin doing our best for children until we ourselves begin growing up.

"I still can't say,  precisely what unreasonable reasons brought me to write for children -- beyond saying I simply wanted to. Even though I can't analyze what led me to children's literature, I do know what I found there. For me, a true form of art that not only helped me understand something of what I wanted to say but also let me discover ideas, attitudes, and feelings I never suspected were there in the first place....

"At heart, the issues raised in a work of fantasy are those we face in real life. In whatever guise -- our own daily nightmares of war, intolerance, inhumanity, or the struggles of an Assistant Pig-Keeper against the Lord of Death -- the problems are agonizingly familiar. And an openness to compassion, love, and mercy is as essential to us here and now as it is to any inhabitant of an imaginary kingdom."

Which confirms my belief that we need literature now, and especially fantasy literature, more than ever.

The text above is from Lloyd Alexander's acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal in 1969; all rights reserved by the author's estate.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Today, the music of Rebekka Karijord, which seems to echo the introspective mood I'm in as the week begins....

Karijord is a Norwegian singer/songwriter, and composer for film & dance performances, based in Sweden. She has a new album out this year, Mother Tongue -- partially inspired by the traumatic arrival, three months early, of her first baby. It's darker than her early work, and very beautiful.

Above: "Home," from the new album. This one's for Howard.

Below: "Wear it Like a Crown," an old favorite from her previous album, The Art of Letting Go.

Above: "Paperboy," performed live in Paris -- a simple rendition, just harp and voice.

Below: "This Anarchistic Heart," performed live in Stockholm. 

The art above is "El Flautista" by Spanish painter Remedios Varo. I love her work, which partially inspired one of the characters in my desert novel, The Wood Wife. I recommend "The surrealist muses who roared" by Joanna Moorhead, a Guardian article about Varo and her best friend, English painter Leonora Carrington -- published back in 2010, before Carrington's death the following year. There's also a very good biography of Varo: Unexpected Journeys by Janet A. Kaplan.