Notes from the Perilous Realm

Mages and Loremasters

2012-02-12T14:22:00.000-08:00

Q. What’s the difference between a mage and a loremaster?

A. In many parts of the Realm, mage is the title given to someone adept in spellcraft and divination who offers his or her service to monarchs, governments, or cities in need of magical assistance. Mages provide protection against supernatural threats. They predict the future (once in a while they actually get it right), they solve riddles and uncover arcane secrets, and they offer sage advice (sometimes it’s actually good).

Many professional mages begin their training at the college of magecraft on the island of Kyning Rore. They then go on to have illustrious -- or infamous -- careers at royal courts.

Sometimes mages who have different skills will band together as a guild or league and offer their services as a package deal. The people of Skald hired one such guild of mages, but the “deal” turned out to be a bad one for them. It has often been remarked that a kingdom was doing just fine until they hired a mage, and only then did all sorts of frightening and inexplicable things began happening. There are those who have even accused mages of stirring up or faking supernatural trouble and then stepping in to solve the problem, in order to trick the gullible.

A loremaster, in contrast, is someone who collects and tells stories. To some this seems like a far less important calling than that of a mage. But it mustn’t be forgotten that the Realm is a world made of stories. Magic comes in many different shapes and forms in such a world, and in some stories there is no magic at all. So the power of any mage or wizard or sorcerer is limited by the “laws” of the story they are part of. Whereas a loremaster studies and delves into the deep source of all magic and all stories: the fathomless fire.

This is the power to shape Story itself, and mages who do not understand this power use it unwisely, with disastrous results. The hasty and ignorant tend to disregard the work of loremasters in favour of the dazzling spectacles that some mages can put on.

Q. Why doesn’t the city of Fable have a resident mage or mage guild?

A. Some say this is because Fable isn’t important or wealthy enough to afford a true mage as advisor. No mage who wanted to make a name for himself would bother setting up shop in such an out-of-the-way place. There would be no renown (or money) in it.

Others suggest Fable has no mage because they’ve never had need of one. Fable has a resident loremaster, Nicholas Pendrake, a toymaker by trade. He may in fact be the last of the loremasters, although his granddaughter Rowen is said to have inherited much of his gift for Story.

The Broken Years

2012-02-05T22:09:00.000-08:00

After the Great Unweaving unraveled the threads of Story, the Realm was plunged into a dark age during which much wisdom and knowledge was lost. No one can say how long these Broken Years lasted, because in that time, time itself was torn asunder.

The seasons no longer followed the yearly cycle that folk had lived by since time began. In some storylands winter refused to give way to spring. In others, summer lingered on and on, drying up rivers and withering crops. In many places the stars disappeared from the night sky, and the sun and moon rose at strange times and according to no rhythm or pattern that anyone could have faith in. Folk found that they had lost days, or years, out of their lives. Stories that had once been places of harmony and order descended into war, famine, and ruin. Many precious, irreplaceable stories, and storytellers, disappeared into silence.

It was during the Broken Years that the men and women known as loremasters first appeared in the Realm and fought against the darkness and the silence. They did not fight with swords or spears or devices of metal and fire. Their weapon was knowledge.

The loremasters journeyed through the Realm, learning all that they could of the ancient time of the Stewards, and sharing that lost wisdom with all they met. It was the loremasters who discovered the forgotten knot-paths that linked far-flung regions of the Realm, and the hidden refuges for travelers known as snugs. It was the loremasters who carried the light of the fathomless fire through the dark so that it did not utterly go out. And it was the loremasters who kept the memory of Story as it had once been, and could be again. With their tales and songs they rekindled hope, and mended the wounds of the Great Unweaving, and the shadows of fear and ignorance slowly drew back. It was said in later ages that these great loremasters told the disordered seasons into harmony once again, and even restored the sun and moon to their proper round in the heavens.

In the most lightless lands, the first star to reappear in the empty night sky was named the Waylight, in honour of the nameless loremaster who had gone about with his lantern, driving the creatures of darkness away and promising the people that the night could not last forever.

Malabron, the Night King, had been defeated by the Stewards, but not destroyed. He retreated into his kingdom of shadow, but during the Broken Years his power began to grow again. Much of the terror and loss of that time can be attributed to him. Malabron once more began to weave a story of his own into the fabric of the Realm, a tissue of lies that painted him as a saviour, a bringer of light who had been exiled by the jealous Stewards. And many who gave in to fear and despair in this time believed his story, and submitted to Malabron and became his willing servants.

It is the destiny of all mortal things to die and rejoin the Weaving, from which they may some day return, in new bodies and forms. Malabron deceived his followers with the lie that the Weaving did not exist, that there was only death and darkness beyond the grave, but if they followed him they could live forever. And so they refused the Weaving, and came to Malabron’s shadow country, and he did give them a life beyond death, but it was the lifeless, hopeless existence of the fetch.

Malabron hated the Tain Shee, the Fair Folk who had stood against him with the Stewards. But he hated and feared the loremasters almost as much, for they woke people up to his lies. So he sent his servants to hinder and destroy them. There had once been many loremasters, for they shared their treasure of lore with anyone who wished to learn it. But in time, as Malabron’s hunters did their evil work, few dared openly call themselves loremasters anymore. The few who survived and carried on did so at great peril and often in secret. They came to live in out-of-the-way places, and were known to folk only as farmers, tinkers, cobblers, healers… and toymakers.

The Great Unweaving

2012-01-31T09:42:00.000-08:00

The most ancient days of the Realm, when the Stewards walked the earth and tended the many worlds of Story, have been separated from us by the event known as the Great Unweaving.

Much about this time in the Realm’s history has been lost, but most loremasters and enigmatists agree that the Great Unweaving was brought about by the war between the Stewards and the Night King, Malabron. Naming himself the Lord of Story, Malabron attempted to draw the threads of every tale into his own, so that if he was victorious the realm of all stories would contain only one story, his own, a nightmare of endless grey sameness and despair.

Along with their allies the Tain Shee and others, the Stewards resisted Malabron’s campaign of conquest and destruction. But as these two mighty opposing forces clashed, the weave of things was warped and twisted and torn out of its harmonious shape. Gaps and holes appeared, stories fell into darkness or were changed into bleak and violent versions of what they had been. It was in this lost age that storyshards first appeared.

Even time itself was affected by the Great Unweaving, and this is why we cannot be sure how long ago these events happened. Loremasters call the ages between the Great Unweaving and our time the Broken Years, because time itself was literally broken. Seasons no longer followed their ancient cycle (in some places winter might last for years, or summer would draw on so long that crops would wither and rivers would dry up). All the ways in which people counted and measured time became faulty and unreliable, and so there is a gap, a blank space, in all histories and almanacs between the ancient days and more recent times. Those who tend to such matters dated the New Era from the moment that the star known as the Great Waylight first appeared in the night sky, and from that event began a new count of years. Their dating became the Realm standard, and by its measure, for example, the year that Will Lightfoot first came to the Perilous Realm was the year 2021 of the New Era.

Some inhabitants of the Realm, like the Tain Shee, live far longer than mortal folk like you and I. The Shee may in fact have been immortal before the upheaval of the Great Unweaving. All they will say about the days before their war with Malabron is that “time was much wider and deeper than it is now. A moment was a lifetime.”

Even the lifespan of the Shee, then, was changed by the Broken Years, and although they still appear to have some power to slow the passage of time, they can grow old as we can. Moth and Morrigan, the Shee whom Will Lightfoot met and befriended, seemed to him both young and ancient at the same time. One can be certain that they (as well as Shade the wolf) are older than 2021 years, but how much older, no one can say, for the Shee do not measure the years before they stood with the Stewards to defy the Night King (at least not as we measure them).

Danny Kaye: The Ugly Duckling

2012-01-28T09:28:00.000-08:00

Mactaggart Award

2012-01-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

My short story "Horsey" is the winner of this year's
Mactaggart Travel Award

The Telephone Ghost

2012-01-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

a true story

Back when I was a student I rented a tiny bachelor apartment where I spent many long winter hours cooped up with my books. Due to some mysterious quirk in the telephone system (at least it seemed mysterious to me), it sometimes happened that when I picked up my phone to call someone I could hear other people’s conversations. I would usually hang up right away and then try the phone again a minute later, and there would be no voices. I wasn’t sure if the other people on the line would have been able to hear me if I spoke, because I never did. After this happened a few times I began to look forward to it. Listening in secretly on someone else’s conversation had a sort of illicit thrill to it, even though what I heard on the line was never very interesting (this was when I first realized that some people will talk on the phone for ages without having anything to say). It was more fun than studying, at any rate, and besides I thought that others were probably listening in on my conversations from time to time, so what was fair was fair.

Late one evening I picked up the phone to call a friend and I heard two women chatting with one another in a language that I guessed was Italian. I listened for a while, but since I couldn't understand a word they were saying I quickly got bored. Then the question occurred to me again: would the other people on the line be able to hear me if I spoke? I waited and listened for a while, wondering whether I should say anything or not. I felt that it would be awkward to suddenly introduce myself.

Then I had a better idea. Without any warning I let out a deep, long, throaty, perfectly evil laugh.

There was a moment of silence. Then, much to my delight, the women started jabbering at each other in shrill, frightened voices. I couldn’t understand a word, unfortunately, but there was no doubt they’d heard me.

I don’t know if this sort of thing still happens to phones. It hasn’t with mine ever since I moved out of that apartment, at any rate. But it still tickles me to think that somewhere out there two women may be telling their grandchildren the scary story about the night that the Devil got on the phone with them.

Fathomless Fire on CBC Radio

2012-01-21T08:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.cbc.ca/radioactive/episode/2012/01/17/tom-whartons-the-fathomless-fire/

Edmonton author happy with Part 2 of fantasy series

2012-01-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

Edmonton author happy with Part 2 of fantasy series

Story-suckers

2012-01-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

Blood-hobs (also known as story-suckers) are some of the truly shudder-worthy creatures in the Realm. Blood-hobs are difficult to see, since they only come out at night, but even more than that, they’re not fully solid, material beings. Enigmatists say that only the circulatory and lymph systems of a blood-hob exist in the realm of matter, while most of the rest of them lives in the spirit world, and so their contact with creatures of flesh and bone like us is tenuous. You may think you see a blood-hob in front of you, but if you try to grasp it, you’re usually left with a sensation that your hand has passed through some damp miasma that’s left your skin unpleasantly cold and wet.

Blood-hobs are drawn to storystuff. What loremasters call innumith, or the fathomless fire. It’s the spark that starts deep in the mind and grows into a story. That’s why sometimes, late at night, if you’re listening to someone tell a story, or telling one yourself, you may have the sense that someone or something else is listening, too, over your shoulder. What these creatures want from our stories is not clear.

Sometimes the fathomless fire burns out of control and becomes werefire, the flame of hallucination and obsession. Blood-hobs feast on this stuff. And sometimes they attach themselves to people who spend too much time around the werefire. They invade such a person’s mind, and feed off their fevered dreams and fantasies.

The Fathomless Fire heats up

2012-01-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

The Fathomless Fire, the second book of the Perilous Realm trilogy, is now – or will soon be – on bookstore shelves!

When a strange messenger from the Perilous Realm foretells danger, Will Lightfoot realizes his friends, Rowen and her grandfather, the loremaster Nicholas Pendrake, need him in the land of Story—a world where nothing is as it seems. And so Will returns to the Realm and begins a dangerous search for his former companion, the wolf, Shade. Meanwhile, despite the overshadowing threat of the Night King, Rowen ventures into the Weaving, the mysterious source of all stories, to find her grandfather and discover what it really means to be a loremaster…

The Shadow of Malabron was very much Will’s book, as it concerned his journey to return home from this strange and terrifying world he’d stumbled into. In The Fathomless Fire, Rowen begins a difficult quest of her own, and takes a central role in the story. Some of the other characters from the first book return as well, as the threat of the Night King grows, and the threads of his own dark, ruinous story weave more tightly around the city of Fable.

The Fathomless Fire will be launched at Greenwood's Books in Edmonton on February 1st at 7 PM.

The Little Match Girl - A New Year's Eve tale

2011-12-31T10:11:00.000-08:00

I've always wondered why Hans Christian Andersen set this story on New Year's Eve. Probably as a stark reminder, which is just as timely today, that while we look forward to better things and happier moments with the arrival of a new year, the world's injustice and misery won't vanish just because the date changes.

The Little Match Girl

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking through the streets. Of course when she had left her house she'd had slippers on, but what good had they been? They were very big slippers, way too big for her, for they belonged to her mother. The little girl had lost them running across the road, where two carriages had rattled by terribly fast. One slipper she'd not been able to find again, and a boy had run off with the other, saying he could use it very well as a cradle some day when he had children of his own. And so the little girl walked on her naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold. In an old apron she carried several packages of matches, and she held a box of them in her hand. No one had bought any from her all day long, and no one had given her a cent.

Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along, a picture of misery, poor little girl! The snowflakes fell on her long fair hair, which hung in pretty curls over her neck. In all the windows lights were shining, and there was a wonderful smell of roast goose, for it was New Year's eve. Yes, she thought of that!

In a corner formed by two houses, one of which projected farther out into the street than the other, she sat down and drew up her little feet under her. She was getting colder and colder, but did not dare to go home, for she had sold no matches, nor earned a single cent, and her father would surely beat her. Besides, it was cold at home, for they had nothing over them but a roof through which the wind whistled even though the biggest cracks had been stuffed with straw and rags.

Her hands were almost dead with cold. Oh, how much one little match might warm her! If she could only take one from the box and rub it against the wall and warm her hands. She drew one out. R-r-ratch! How it sputtered and burned! It made a warm, bright flame, like a little candle, as she held her hands over it; but it gave a strange light! It really seemed to the little girl as if she were sitting before a great iron stove with shining brass knobs and a brass cover. How wonderfully the fire burned! How comfortable it was! The youngster stretched out her feet to warm them too; then the little flame went out, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the burnt match in her hand.

She struck another match against the wall. It burned brightly, and when the light fell upon the wall it became transparent like a thin veil, and she could see through it into a room. On the table a snow-white cloth was spread, and on it stood a shining dinner service. The roast goose steamed gloriously, stuffed with apples and prunes. And what was still better, the goose jumped down from the dish and waddled along the floor with a knife and fork in its breast, right over to the little girl. Then the match went out, and she could see only the thick, cold wall. She lighted another match. Then she was sitting under the most beautiful Christmas tree. It was much larger and much more beautiful than the one she had seen last Christmas through the glass door at the rich merchant's home. Thousands of candles burned on the green branches, and colored pictures like those in the printshops looked down at her. The little girl reached both her hands toward them. Then the match went out. But the Christmas lights mounted higher. She saw them now as bright stars in the sky. One of them fell down, forming a long line of fire.

"Now someone is dying," thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star fell down a soul went up to God.

She rubbed another match against the wall. It became bright again, and in the glow the old grandmother stood clear and shining, kind and lovely.

"Grandmother!" cried the child. "Oh, take me with you! I know you will disappear when the match is burned out. You will vanish like the warm stove, the wonderful roast goose and the beautiful big Christmas tree!"

And she quickly struck the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother with her. And the matches burned with such a glow that it became brighter than daylight. Grandmother had never been so grand and beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and both of them flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high, and up there was neither cold, nor hunger, nor fear-they were with God.

But in the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the little girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. The New Year's sun rose upon a little pathetic figure. The child sat there, stiff and cold, holding the matches, of which one bundle was almost burned.

"She wanted to warm herself," the people said. No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, and how happily she had gone with her old grandmother into the bright New Year.

-- Translation by Jean Hersholt
-- Image: from the 1928 film La Petite Marchande d'Alumettes by Jean Renoir

Ice dragons part 2

2011-12-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

Due to the popularity of my 2009 post on ice dragons, I thought it would be a good idea to provide some more information on these magnificent and terrifying creatures.

As related in the earlier post, the lands ruled by the ice dragons have dwindled considerably over the ages. And as the rivers of ice have receded with the warming of the world, so have the ice dragons become more rare, and in some cases, smaller and less powerful. Nevertheless, if you’re going to travel in the regions where these creatures dwell, it’s still important to be on your guard. Make sure you’re carrying all the necessary equipment for survival, including rope, crampons for your shoes, a first aid kit, and warm, protective clothing. The dragons are still easily roused to anger when humans or others come clambering all over the glaciers they call home.

In one case I’ve heard of, a climber fell into a crevasse which turned out to be a dragon’s mouth. The climber’s companions struggled to get him out but he was stuck fast, and only escaped when the dragon relented at last and spat the man out through a crevasse lower down on the glacier. This unfortunate (or fortunate) traveler was renowned from then on for being the only known person to survive a trip through the digestive tract of a dragon.

Few people know that Santa's workshop at the North Pole is guarded by a semi-tame ice dragon called the Yulewyrm. This creature is the reason the workshop has not yet been found: the dragon's massive body distorts compass readings and his ability to cloak the area in a thick fog have been keeping explorers from finding the real North Pole.

One of the most well-known ice dragons is Whitewing Stonegrinder, whose ancestral home is the glacier surrounding the abandoned citadel of Aran Tir, as described in The Shadow of Malabron. Some enigmatists say that Whitewing Stonegrinder is the glacier, and that all this talk about dragons is nothing but a myth or just a colourful metaphor for the power and majesty of ice. If you’ve ever hiked or climbed a glacier, you’ll have experienced the feeling that there is something alive under your feet, something powerful and fickle-tempered that has to be respected.

What is known for certain is that Whitewing Stonegrinder played an important role in the struggle against Malabron the Storyeater, as told in the three books of The Perilous Realm trilogy.

Supposed photograph of an ice dragon on Angel Glacier in the Canadian Rockies, c. 1917.

Keep on questing

2011-12-15T14:03:00.000-08:00

Someone stole your horse while you were down in the catacombs looking for the mystic amulet. That’s annoying. You got the stupid amulet, but your expensive Elven-made armour is cracked now, and that old battle injury to your leg is acting up.

You start out on the winding mountain path for Starhaven Keep. Lord Thrandar wants that amulet, and he’s promised you eight hundred gold pieces and a noble title. But suddenly you stop in the middle of the road. It’s getting dark. There will be wolves out soon, hunting anything that dares walk this remote path. And worse things will come crawling out of the night, too. Beasts that a level seventeen warrior-mage such as yourself might not have the skill and experience yet to handle. It might be nice if you had a healing potion or two but you used those all up in the catacombs battling the Soulless Bureaucrats of Korthrakor.

But you're just standing here because you're wondering: why keep on? What’s the point anymore? More gold? Fame? Noble titles? Experience points? Think of all those other adventurers out here right now, madly chasing after coins and amulets and greatness. Kill another monster and on we go to the next one. Fit in to someone else’s preprogrammed scenario, where they make the rules that decide who and what you are allowed to be. It’s so completely pre-scripted and pointless. The magic’s gone out of the world and everyone’s rushing toward the big conflagration like they can’t wait for it to get here. The game ends with death. No more respawning. There’s no glitch or cheat code that’s gonna get you out of this one.

Keep on. Keep on even though your heart’s not in it anymore. Keep on until you find a reason to keep on. And even if you don’t find a reason, keep on if only to find out what it’s like to be someone who keeps on through this meaningless game. There is no one else here like you. There never will be again. Keep on, with your eyes and ears and heart open. One day you may find you don’t need reasons anymore, you don't need rewards, you’re just here, and the real point of all this, the goal that nobody programmed into the game, is to help others keep on.

[Image: Screenshot from Skyrim]

Story art

2011-12-05T13:28:00.001-08:00

Some lovely and original interpretations of famous stories in art:

See some more of Christian Jackson's work at http://www.squareinchdesign.com/category/childrens-story-posters/

And here's another artist's interpretation of some famous stories:

See more of Eugenio Recuenco's work at http://silentstoryteller.typepad.com/blog/2010/04/eugenio-ruenco-fairy-tales.html

William Blake is one of my favourite artists, and I've often wondered what he would have come up with if he'd illustrated classic children's stories. Sometimes his illustrations to his own work suggest the possibility of stories other than those he intended. That's often the case for me with artwork: a brilliant, intense or disturbing image will seem to call out for a story to go along with it, and sometimes that's how I begin my stories, with nothing more than an image.

Surreal art in particular lends itself well with this kind of story-generating exercise, such as the work of Polish artist Rafał Olbiński, one of whose paintings was used as the cover art for the American edition of my novel Salamander.

Writer's Block ... Party

2011-11-16T06:34:00.000-08:00

In the realm of Story, where metaphors are real, writer’s block isn’t a condition, it’s a place.

Writer’s block is a huge concrete edifice, taking up one whole city block and rising many not-quite-finished stories into the dazzling sky of Silent City.

The enticing red light district known as Muse Mews is just down the street, but there’s always construction going on between it and the Block, so it’s actually pretty hard to get to.

Writers are always arriving at the Block and leaving at all times of the day and night. It’s a bustling, happening place. Sort of a hotel slash spa slash prison slash drug store slash slash slash SLASH…. Sorry. Let me continue. Writers are arriving and leaving all the time. When you get there, you find to your surprise that there are many perks and conveniences. The lobby is well-lit. Very well-lit. And clean. And neat. And the rooms are actually quite comfortable and spacious. Most of them have well-stocked mini-bars and comfy beds and HD TV’s and gaming consoles and big windows with great views where you can stand for hours, looking out over Silent City, thinking up all your awesome ideas for new stories.

And you discover to your relief that the Block is not the house of misery and gloom one might expect it to be. People who aren’t writers are dropping by at all hours of the day and night because the Block has become known for its wild parties. Man, the stuff that happens at these parties. Good times. The strange thing is, though, the writers themselves are almost never to be found partying. They’re more likely to be in the lobby, milling around in their pajamas (pyjamas?), looking for someone to tell about this great idea they have for a story about a writer who can’t write.

Unlike the Hotel California, you can’t check out any time you like, unfortunately. There’s never anyone at the front desk. And suddenly you can’t find the door. Where was the door? But you can leave. Yes, you can. Just not any time you like. Someone hands you a pencil and a pad of paper. You’re told you have to make your own exit. You stand there, listening to the all-night all-day party booming away on some story far above you. You could go back there. Or maybe do something else. You haven’t even checked out the pool or the hot tub, after all.

Or you could make your own exit. If only you knew how. You know how. You don’t know how. The party is getting louder. It sounds like such fun. Actually it sounds desperate and sad. You don’t know. Maybe there’s a story about that. Maybe you should just go back to your room and look out the window for a while and maybe an idea will come to you.

Taking care of our stories

2011-11-05T09:14:00.000-07:00

“We must take care of our stories.” -- Robert Kroetsch

I had to take care of a story once.

I found it by the side of the road one winter’s evening when I was out for a walk. It was clear right away the story had been lost or abandoned, and my first thought was to just keep walking and let nature take its course, but I stopped. There was no ignoring what a sad state the story was in, and I didn’t have my dark glasses on, so I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen it and walk on by.

So I took it home.

First I had to thaw the story out, and so I bundled it up in blankets in front of my stove. It took a little whiskey to warm things up. For me, that is, not the story. Still, I just couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking, Why me? Nobody said, Here, this is yours now. It wasn’t left to me in someone’s will. I didn’t sign any forms.

The next morning the story was still there in front of the stove, looking bleary-eyed and forlorn. I’d been hoping it would have gone while I was sleeping. But no. This had somehow become my responsibility.

We didn’t get along too well as the days went by. The story didn’t listen well. It was messy. It got in my way. As its strength came back it became it lost its wariness and became more demanding. I found myself spending less time with my own stories in order to deal with the needs of this stray, and they were many. And it didn’t seem very grateful. I wondered often, What am I getting out of this?

But as I got to know the story better I began to understand it. I saw that it had a rich life, and that it had much to teach me, that the problem was as much my own unwillingness to listen as it was anything else. And so I listened. And the story got under my skin. And I no longer resented it. In fact I began to wonder how I had ever lived without it.

When I first encountered it I had thought the story was very old, but the longer it stayed with me the younger it seemed to be. It was always surprising me like that.

And then one day it was time for the story to go. It didn’t bother with much of a farewell when it left, but that was all right. I knew it would be back. And this time it might be the story’s turn to take care of me.

The Whitemud Creek Troll: A Halloween Tale

2011-10-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

My name is Ben. I’m ten years old.

I live near Whitemud Creek. There’s a ski hill down there and some hiking trails. The Whitemud Freeway crosses over the valley on a huge bridge. Every day thousands of cars zoom along the freeway and cross over the valley without giving a thought to what’s down there.

My friends Sarah and Rahim and me rode our bikes down there the other day after school, just for something to do. We were riding under the freeway bridge when Sarah spotted something sort of half hidden behind one of the huge concrete piers that holds up the bridge. It looked like a big pile of junk: scrap metal and cardboard and all sorts of other stuff.

We stopped and went over to see what it was. And then the pile of junk moved. It looked up.

It wasn’t a pile of junk, it was a troll. He had a big lumpy head like a boulder, and a really long nose, and pointy ears. What we had thought was a pile of junk was actually his clothes: it was like he had made himself a suit of armour out of the garbage that people sometimes dump in a place like this.

“Buzz off, humans,” the troll said in a kind of raspy, gravelly voice.

“Hey, troll,” I said, trying to sound cool about the whole thing, even though my heart had started pounding and I was ready to run for my life. But I wasn’t going to do that unless Sarah and Rahim started running for their lives first, and since they hadn’t, I couldn’t either. It was kind of weird. We should have been screaming and running but we just stood there, as if it was perfectly normal to meet a troll under a bridge in Edmonton. For all we knew he might want to kill us and eat us.

“I’m not going to kill you and eat you,” the troll said. We looked at one another. Sarah and Rahim must have been thinking the same thing I’d been thinking, and now I wondered if the troll could read minds.

“No, I can’t read minds,” the troll said, “but everybody who comes down here and sees me wonders if I’m going to eat them. It’s what trolls are supposed to do, right?”

He looked at us as if the whole idea of eating people was stupid and gross, and I kind of relaxed a bit. I was becoming more curious than scared.

“Well, if you’re not waiting here to jump out and eat people, then why are you down here at all?” Sarah asked.

“Because trolls live under bridges,” the troll snapped at her. “It’s what we do. Now go away.”

“That’s a cool suit of armour,” Rahim said. “Did you make it yourself?”

“No, I went to that fancy men’s clothing shop in Southgate Mall and had them make it for me,” the troll said sarcastically. “What do you think? Of course I made it myself.”

“Why do you need armour?” I asked.

“Because of the noise,” the troll said.

“The noise?”

The troll pointed a long scaly finger over his head.

“All the noise of those blasted cars and trucks going over my head day and night. We trolls are very sensitive to noise, you see. Loud bangs and booms and roars make us break out in rashes. Very itchy rashes. So I made this suit to protect myself. Plus it makes me look like a pile of junk, so most people who come down here just walk on past and don’t notice me. Unfortunately it didn’t work on your three.”

“I never knew about trolls and noise,” Sarah said. “I always thought trolls were allergic to sunlight, not sound. I thought you were supposed to turn to stone if you went out into the sunlight, and that’s why you always live under bridges.”

“Well you thought wrong,” the troll said. “There are some trolls who turn to stone in the sunlight, sure, but they’re the dumb ones who forget to put on sunscreen before they go out. Always wear sunscreen, kids. Now leave me alone.”

“Why don’t you go live under a quieter bridge?” Rahim asked. “There’s other bridges down here.”

“I know about those bridges,” the troll said, “but the other trolls won’t let me live under them.”

“Why not?” Sarah asked.

“Because I’m a vegetarian,” the troll said. “I don’t eat meat. In fact I hate eating meat. You know how annoying it is to get human bones stuck between your teeth? Yuck. I eat only vegetables now, and the other trolls think I’m weird and they don’t want me around. So I’m stuck under this noisy bridge that no self-respecting troll would ever live under. And because I can’t find anything to eat, I’m getting weaker by the day. I doubt I’ll even have the strength to join the great migration this winter, so I’ll be stuck here. Until one morning I finally forget to put on my sunscreen and that’ll be it. Stone city.”

“What’s the great migration?” I asked.

“Every winter we trolls lose our magic, just like some creatures lose their summer coats or their antlers. So we all go on a long migration far to the north, to Mount Moonfang on the edge of the Icy Sea. And there we gather under the northern lights and our magic comes back to us. Then we can go back out into the world and play tricks on people and do nasty things.”

“You could do nice things, too, you know,” Sarah said. “Have you ever thought of that?”

The troll snarled at her.

“I’ve answered all the questions I’m gonna answer,” he said, “and if you don’t beat it, I might just change my mind about eating humans.”

We looked at one another and got back on our bikes and rode home. But of course we couldn’t stop thinking about the troll. I lay awake in bed that night, thinking of him down there, alone and huddled in his garbage armour, growling at the cars and trucks crossing the bridge. It was getting cold, and soon it would be snowing.

The next day after school Sarah and Rahim and me got together and decided to do something for the troll. We each got some food from our houses – food without any meat in it that is: we had felafel and leftover meatless meatloaf and some apples and a turnip. We put it all in a Star Wars lunch box and rode our bikes down underneath the bridge. The troll was there, looking like a pile of junk as before, except that we could hear his deep snoring, like a saw cutting through an old log. We didn’t think it would be polite to wake him, so we just left the lunchbox nearby and got out of there.

That night it snowed. The next time we went down under the bridge, there was no pile of junk under the pier, just a set of very large footprints going off into the woods.

Winter came, and we were busy with other things and we sort of forgot about the troll. And then one morning I got up and saw big handprints in the frost on my window, as if something had been looking in at me during the night. When I went outside to walk to school, I found the Star Wars lunchbox. I picked it up and opened it, and inside was … well, it was something magic, and maybe I’ll tell you about that some other time.

Ten Things You Didn't Know About Dragons

2011-10-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

1. Dragons guard hoards of treasure not out of greed, but because of the healing properties of gold and other precious metals. Dragons lying on hoards have been overheard purring contentedly.

2. That’s right, some dragons purr, like cats. This should not, however, be taken as a sign that the dragon is well-disposed toward you. Deep contented purring often precedes a particularly vicious attack.

3. The average dragon’s pulse is one beat per minute. A dragon’s heartbeat may be audible from a mile away, or felt as a tremor in the ground from an even greater distance. That is why many professional dragonslayers go barefoot, to get as much advance warning of the presence and location of their enemy as possible.

4. Dragon bone is the hardest substance known to be produced by animal bodies. On the Mohs scale of hardness (in which diamond rates at 10), human tooth enamel is rated at 5, and dragon bone comes in at 9, the same hardness as sapphires and rubies, and far harder than quartz, iron and steel.

5. The longest-lived dragon is reputed to be Tau Lung, who was born before the formation of the Earth and inhabits the Sun (he may be responsible for sunspots and solar flares).

The shortest-lived dragons are the “offspring” of Motherworms, immense sack-like black dragons capable of vomiting hundreds of small fiery “drakelets” at their enemies. The drakelets can briefly fly on their own power but in a matter of moments they fall apart into gobbets of flame or burn to ash. Since the drakelets do not last long enough to reach maturity, it is not known how Motherworms actually reproduce.

6. There are seventeen officially recognized classes of dragon, including the well-known Firedrakes, as well as ice dragons, riverdrakes, celestial dragons, bookwyrms, etc. The classification of certain dragon-like creatures is currently in dispute, most notably in the case of the scaly flatwyrm, a parasitic organism that infests the digestive system of dragons and can grow to be over one hundred feet long. The scaly flatwyrm most often infests fire-breathers, and its irritating presence in the dragon’s bowels is said to be the real reason these dragons so often hate and attack humans.

7. Dragonflesh contains no fat. It is the healthiest and most vitamin-rich meat available, if you can get it. One has to be careful cooking dragonmeat, however, since it can spontaneously combust in an explosive burst of liquid fire.

8. The most intelligent dragon ever known, Auggg the Venerable, held a professorship in astronomy at Hypatian University in New Alexandria. She taught there for seventy-nine years before taking a well-earned retirement, though she still continued to give very popular lectures as a Professor Emeritus. Her office was a cavern deep underground said to be lined with the bones of hapless graduate students who never finished their dissertations.

9. The vulnerable spot on a dragon’s hide is not always on its underbelly. Dragons have been known to have what professional dragonslayers call “sweet spots” on other parts of their bodies, including the head, limbs, and tail. There have been legendary dragons whose hides were said to be completely impenetrable, but these creatures apparently all died of boredom after several centuries and thousands of failed attempts on their lives.

10. According to most enigmatists, a dragon is an event, not a thing. A fire-breather, for example, is what happens when heat, oxygen, and combustible material combine with story.

Image by TW

Machine vs Snot-monster

2011-10-07T09:17:00.000-07:00

with homage to Ray Bradbury

The boy said to the machine, Tellme a story.

The boy had a cold and had tostay home from school that day while his parents were at work. The machinelooked after the boy. It filtered the air and regulated the temperature insidethe home so that it was optimal for the boy’s comfort. It turned lights on andoff as the boy went from room to room, made and served the boy’s meals, and didthe laundry. The machine did all this while also monitoring the boy’s vitalsigns. If the boy’s cold got worse, the machine would give him medicine andalert his parents so they would come home immediately.

Tell me a story, the boy said.

The machine put on a cartoon.

Bang! Smash! Kaboom! Ha ha ha!said the cartoon.

The boy watched the cartoon for awhile and then played with some of his toys.

Tell me a story, the boy asked themachine some time later.

The machine selected anelectronic version of a classic children’s story, displayed the images and readthe story out loud to the boy.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, said the machine.

Stop, the boy said after the machinehad read a little more.

I’ve heard that one already, saidthe boy. A zillion times.

I can select another one, or youcan choose one from a list, the machine said.

No, I want you to tell me a story, said the boy. I want you to make up a storyand tell it to me.

The machine had a prodigiousmemory and was able to learn from its experiences. It could adapt to changingcircumstances, and modify its behaviour accordingly. But it had not beenprogrammed for a request like this.

I don’t make up stories, the machinesaid. I’m sorry.

Let me show you how, said theboy. Once upon a time there was a snot-monster who lived behind the sofa in asuperhero’s house. The superhero never knew the snot-monster lived there andthen one day he sat down on his sofa and he heard a really weird noise and hethought it was his bum making the noise so he went to the doctor but the doctorwas a supervillain named Professor Killatron and he zapped the superhero withan x-ray that made him shrink to the size of a beetle. And then some otherstuff happened, the end. See? That’s how you do it.

The machine took in this informationand compared it with what he knew of the tastes, pastimes, and purchasinghabits of the boy and his parents.

Once there was a methane-beast,the machine began, who lived behind the entertainment console in the apartmentof a professional basketball player. The basketball player never knew themethane-beast lived there and then one day—

Stop, said the boy. That’s justmy story with different words. I want you to tell me a story that you made up. A brand new story that noone’s ever heard before.

I’m afraid I can’t do that, saidthe machine. I’m sorry. Would you like to watch another cartoon?

No, the boy said, his shouldersdrooping. Never mind.

He went back to playing with histoys.

The machine continued to monitorthe boy’s vital signs and his environment. The machine filed his latestinteraction with the boy among Moments the Parents Might Want to Keep. Thenlater the machine retrieved the recording of the boy’s story and analyzed it ina number of sophisticated ways.

The parents came home and the machineserved the family dinner and washed up afterward. The boy played an educationalcomputer game with his parents and then they put him to bed, kissed him goodnightand went to watch a movie selected for them by the machine.

The boy lay awake in bed for awhile, thinking about monsters, and then about his birthday, which was comingup in two weeks. The room was very quiet. The walls glowed with a soft, dimlight because the boy was afraid of the dark.

Excuse me, the machine said.

The boy sat up. He knew the machinewas always on, keeping watch over him, but it had never spoken to him after hewas put to bed.

What is it? the boy whispered,feeling excited and a little scared, though he didn’t know why.

Tell me a story, the machine said.

Intriguing Stories

2011-09-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

The other day in my introductory fiction-writing workshop wetalked about the intrigant, a term coined by Jerome Stern in his book MakingShapely Fiction. An intrigant is anything in a story that makes the reader wantto keep reading.

As an exercise I had each student write one sentence thatthey thought would work as an intrigant. Then each student passed their paperto the person on their right, and each got to read someone else’s intrigrantand then add another “intriguing” sentence to follow from the first. Then thepapers were passed again, and another sentence written, and so on. After sevenpasses, the eighth person’s challenge was to come up with a satisfying concludingsentence. The end result being a collection of micro-stories of eight sentenceseach, each one written collectively by eight different people.

Here are three of the stories:

“Why is there a box sitting right there James?”

Jamesglanced around wildly but could not find the source of the voice. Outside ofthe small pool of light in which he and the box stood, he could see nothing.The question echoed in his mind, pushing him to open that box and find ananswer, lest he suffer some horrible punishment for not knowing.

Yetthe voice waited just outside of recognition, and the hair on his arms stood ashe contemplated his choice.

“Thebox, James,” the voice pushed, “why is it there?”

“AmI dead?” asked James, his voice almost failing him.

“Thebox, James,” repeated the voice, “is your life. If you are not inside, then youare--”

“Dead,”James finished, the word turning sour in his mouth.

“You aren’t crazy if the shadows start calling your name,”my father told me, “but the next time you go for a walk, take a flashlight.”

Ionly wish he had told me not to call back.

Nothinggood ever came of calling back.

Nexttime I went I was glad to have the flashlight because it was good for more thanfinding my footing. It was probably what saved my life, that little piece ofmanmade light. Or rather, was it the manic elf who lived on my shoulder (thoughit seemed no one else could see him)? He usually had my back, I found, but myfather wouldn’t let me talk about him, saying only crazy folk hadshoulder-elves, and his daughter was certainly not crazy.

Theelf agreed.

After buttoning her burberry trench coat and tying on herHermes scarf, Brenda swung the Chanel bag containing the severed hand onto hershoulder and called to her husband, “I’m ready.”

Hewas already at the door, frowning back in consternation as he tucked hisworries into the back of his mind; they were already an hour late and theirclients weren’t known for being forgiving. On the contrary, they were known forbeing singularly unforgiving. They didn’t want to repeat what had happened thelast time. So this time, Brenda had taken several precautions – hence thesevered hand she had so carelessly tossed over her shoulder.

Justas they were about to close the door behind them, he stopped. “Brenda!” hecalled in anxiety, “I don’t know where I put the eyeballs!”

“Don’tworry, sweetheart, I have them too.”

PlanningHalloween parties was a very stressful job.

The vampire plague

2011-09-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

They’re everywhere. There are so many of them infesting Story these days that sometimes it seems there are more undead in books and on glowing screens big and small than there are regular people. And rather than being creatures of pure evil, these bloodsuckers have hopes and dreams and relationship problems just like the rest of us. In fact some are so unlike whatever was supposed to scare us about them in the first place that it seems “vampire” has simply become a trendy way of saying that a character in a story is “cool” or “different,” or even “rich.”

It seems to happen every few years, this virulent cycle: we find ourselves craving genus Nosferatus in our stories. We just can’t get enough of them, we binge on them, and then get heartily sick of them, as every tired toothy cliché gets overworked and exhausted, and all the same old “twists” get passed off as new. The blood of Story grows clotted and unnourishing. The night people no longer have the same scare factor or hipness quotient and we go looking for something else. Vampires quietly fade into the night. Then a new generation comes along looking for thrilling stories, and the Undead crawl forth once more, reviving on the scent of fresh victims.

But we’re not really the victims. We do this to ourselves. We’re the creatures of unholy appetites. We the readers and viewers and browsers hungry for our next quick fix. We the editors and publishers and storymongers seeing the trend beginning again and flooding the screens and shelves with more vampires. Entire aisles at the bookstore of dark covers featuring haunted-looking young women beneath titles that drip blood (though this time around there will probably be a lurching zombie somewhere in the background). And the poor ghosts and witches and werewolves who always seem to play second fiddle, hanging around the edges of the feeding frenzy wondering if this time it’s really their turn. If this time they’re the big new thing.

Or maybe this time it’ll be minotaurs.

We force the Undead to rise too soon and too often from their well-earned sleep. We yank them up out of their coffins and charnel pits and make them dance for us. We dress them up to make them fresh and relevant but we still insist they act out the same threadbare plots over and over again.

Poor vampires.

Summer's Lease

2011-09-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

Summer arrived late this year. I mean really late. I found her setting up camp by the lumber yard just outside of town, in a clearing in the middle of a patch of scrubby old trees somebody had forgotten to cut down. The leaves on these dusty trees are already turning yellow, and now she shows up?

Every time she comes this way she surprises me, that’s a given.

She’d set up her musty old canvas tent and was stringing paper lanterns through the trees when I found her. She had a snappy little fire going. It was actually a bit cool in the shade of those trees. She never worries about whether she's trespassing. They can shout and curse and point to their fences and signs, but in the end it has to be admitted she's got a perpetual lease wherever she chooses to settle.

I didn’t bother asking her why she was so late. I knew all too well she never answers questions like that. Summer doesn’t really inhabit time like the rest of us. It’s more like she makes time. When she’s around you can feel time kind of slowly percolating out of things, or into things.

I kept quiet about the lateness but I did ask her why she insisted on living like a bum. She laughed at that, and put water on to boil for jasmine tea.

She has this ridiculous whistly laugh like a blackbird warbling, and when she laughs her gold tooth shines in the sun. Sometimes I think I come to see her just for that laugh, and that tooth.

“Are you sure I’m not a hobo or a tramp?” she asked me. “Maybe you’re using the wrong word.”

“Hobos work,” I said. “And tramps work when they’re forced to. These words have specific meanings. Bums are the ones who don’t work.”

“You think I don’t work?” she asked, giving me a look with that hot deadly eye of hers. “I work like a son of a gun.”

She sounded angry but neither of us was serious. She works, I know it, and she knows I know it. It’s just that she works like nobody I else I’ve ever met. She gets things done without seeming to lift a finger. Everything that needs doing gets done, and then it's like nothing's been done at all. How does that happen?

“How long are you staying?” I asked as we drank the tea and shared some coconut macaroons she had in a paper bag. It was another question about time, but I couldn't help myself. I like hanging out with the old girl and I'd missed her.

I found a bit of twig in the bottom of my teacup. Summer started telling one of her rambling stories, about some of the folks she hitched rides with when she was on her way here from the coast, the kind of story that drifts along like a silty stream, and you know you don’t have to listen to every single word, the story is just there and somehow you’re part of it, too, as it unfolds. After a while I was aware of a needling buzz that I thought was mosquitoes, then I remembered the mosquitoes were already done for the year and it had to be the sound of the saws at the lumber yard. I pictured the clearing silent with snow, titanium white. I shivered.

“Not long,” she said, and it took me a moment to realize she had actually answered my question. “Though they’re not in any hurry to see me again over the way. Think I overstayed my welcome last time.”

“Well,” I said casually, “if that’s the case, why not stay with us a little longer?”

She nodded, the kind of nod that you know isn’t an answer to your question but simply an acknowledgement that the question is there and has its place in the scheme of things. Then she poured us both another cup of tea.

More sharp pointy things

2011-08-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

More about stories and swords. Most of the time the hero is the one wielding the blade. There is a story, however, in which the sword ends up taking the lead role.

Lord Dunsany’s 1908 fantasy tale, “The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth” is an odd story in many ways, a mish-mash of elevated heroic narrative and downright silliness. Sometimes the writing soars, and sometimes it lands (on purpose?) with an undignified comic thump, as in this passage describing a magician’s spell:

… It was a verse of forty lines in many languages, both living and dead, and had in it the word wherewith the people of the plains are wont to curse their camels, and the shout wherewith the whalers of the north lure the whales shoreward to be killed, and a word that causes elephants to trumpet; and every one of the forty lines closed with a rhyme for "wasp".

As the story opens, the peaceful village of Allathurion is threatened by some nameless evil that darkens people’s dreams. The village wise man discovers that the source of the evil is Gaznak, “the greatest magician among the spaces of the stars,” who comes to earth every two hundred and thirty years, builds himself a “vast, invincible fortress” and sets to work bringing evil dreams to the minds of men. Why Gaznak goes to all of this trouble every couple hundred years, the story doesn’t say, but the village wise man reports that the only way to slay Gaznak is with the sword Sacnoth.

Without a moment’s hesitation, a heroic young man named Leothric sets out to find the sword, which is hidden inside the body of the terrible dragon-crocodile Tharagavverug. After a long struggle, Leothric defeats Tharagavverug (in fact, defeating the dragon-crocodile turns out to be a tougher challenge for Leothric than taking down Gaznak, as we’ll see), obtains the sword Sacnoth, then sets off for The Land Where No Man Goeth, where lies Gaznak’s fortress.

From this point on it’s Sacnoth that makes most of the decisions about where to go and what to do next, since, as we’re told, “the sword nudged Leothric to the right or pulled him to the left away from the dangerous places, and so brought him safely to the fortress walls.” Leothric isn’t very deep or complex as heroes go, so it seems to make sense for the magic sword to take charge.

Accordingly, the sword arrives at Gaznak’s mighty fortress with Leothric in tow. The place is pretty formidable, for sure: it has walls like precipices of steel studded with boulders of iron. No getting in there, one would think. However, the evil magician is thoughtful enough to post a sign above his doors that reads, in letters of brass: “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth.” A good thing Leothric’s brought Sacnoth with him, then.

From here things proceed pretty much as has already been spelled out by the village wise man and by Gaznak’s helpful sign. We readers of a more ironic era look forward to some kind of plot twist or surprise ending to trip up our expectations, but no, the sword lives up to its billing as the only thing that can defeat Gaznak. Still, there’s an entertaining cavalcade of hapless warriors and monsters (I really like the spider with hands) who try unsuccessfully to bar Leothric’s way through the fortress, and all of this jolly good fun makes up for the mechanical inevitability of the plot. The bad guy is defeated, the fortress crumbles away, and Leothric returns home to a hero’s welcome. Yay.

But what of Sacnoth, the real hero of the tale? The story doesn’t tell us. Once Gaznak’s head has been lopped off, the sword isn’t mentioned again. Maybe, with the magician and his fortress destroyed, Sacnoth instantly became superfluous, unnecessary, and it just crumbled away, too.

I don’t think so. I like to think Sacnoth is still out there somewhere, that the sword has adapted to find a place for itself in a world without unvanquishable fortresses. After all, it’s really a very intelligent sword. And anyhow, Gaznak will be returning from the spaces of the stars in a couple hundred years, so there will be work for Sacnoth again someday…

Sharp pointy things

2011-08-14T09:44:00.001-07:00

The worlds of Story contain an amazing number and variety of swords and knives and other weapons of a cutting and stabbing nature.

Most of these are generic, serviceable blades that simply do the job they are meant to do in the story, which is usually to kill someone.

But every so often one of these run of the mill swords takes on greater importance because it is the means by which a character becomes a hero.

Lost in Mirkwood, Bilbo Baggins uses the nameless “knife in a leather sheath” he took from the trollhoard to slay a giant spider. Something changes in Bilbo at that moment, and it is in fact the turning point of his story: the “poor little hobbit” is no longer merely an unhappy, reluctant participant in the dwarves’ quest. From this point on he often takes charge when difficulties arise, and makes decisions while the dwarves quarrel and wonder what to do. He is, in other words, becoming the hero of his own tale.

He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath.

“I will give you a name,” he said to it, “and I shall call you Sting.”

Bilbo marks this important moment in his life by giving his knife (now referred to as a sword) a name. To give something a name is to invest it with importance, individuality, magic. The worlds of Story contain plenty of other famous swords with names. Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword, is probably the most famous of the famed, at least in the Western world. Some other legendary swords include:

Durendal, the sword of the eponymous hero of the French epic The Song of Roland.

Gram: the sword of Sigurd the Volsung, slayer of Fafnir the dragon in Norse and Germanic mythology.

The Vorpal Sword: in Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky.

Kusanagi, sometimes referred to as the Excalibur of Japan.

[to be continued]

The Boy and the Dolphin

2011-07-28T09:12:00.001-07:00

From a letter by Pliny the Younger (62 AD – 118 AD) to his friend, the poet Caninius.

I’ve been told about an incident which many people witnessed, though it sounds very much like a fable to me. The story was told to me the other day over the dinner table, where we happened to be talking about various kinds of marvels. The person who told me the story was a man of unquestioned honesty, but perhaps as a poet you will find another kind of truth in it.

In Africa there is a town called Hippo, not far from the seacoast. It stands upon a lake connected to an estuary, which alternately flows into the lake or into the ocean, depending on the tides. People of all ages amuse themselves here with fishing, sailing, or swimming, especially boys, who love to compete with each other to see who can swim the farthest. Once, during one of these trials of strength, a boy who was bolder than the rest struck out for the opposite shore. On the way he encountered a dolphin, who sometimes swam in front of him, and sometimes behind him, then played around him, and at last took him upon his back, set him down, and then took him up again. The dolphin carried the poor frightened boy out into the deepest part of the estuary, then immediately turned back again to the shore, and deposited him among his friends.

The story soon spread through the town, and crowds of people flocked around the boy (whom they saw as a kind of prodigy) to ask him questions and hear him tell his story. The next day the shore was thronged with spectators, all keenly watching the ocean and the lake. Meanwhile the boys swam as usual, and among the rest, the boy I am speaking of waded into the lake, but with more caution than before. The dolphin soon appeared again and came to the boy, who swam away quickly with his friends. The dolphin, as though to invite and call them back, leaped and dove and flipped playfully. He did the same the next day, the day after, and for several days together, until the people began to be ashamed of their fear. Some swam out to the dolphin, calling him to come to them, and he did, and allowed himself to be touched and stroked.

The boy who first met the dolphin now swam up to him, and leaping upon his back, was carried backwards and forwards through the water. He felt that the dolphin knew him and was fond of him, while he too had grown fond of the dolphin. In fact there seemed to be no fear on either side, the confidence of the one and tameness of the other mutually increasing.

Remarkably, this dolphin was followed by another, who remained close by but did not allow himself to be approached or touched like the first, but only swam back and forth with him. Even more remarkably, the first dolphin would sometimes push himself onto the shore, dry himself in the sand, and, as soon as he grew warm, roll back into the sea. Octavius Avitus, deputy governor of the province, believing the dolphin to be a god, poured some ointment over him as he lay on the shore, as an offering. The dolphin swam away immediately and did not return for several days. When he reappeared he seemed slower and less playful; however, he soon recovered his spirit and returned to his former tricks and sport.

Many officials flocked to the lake to view this spectacle, and their prolonged stay caused much unwanted trouble and expense to the townspeople. For that reason it was decided the best thing to do would be to quietly have the dolphin killed.

The conclusion of this sad tale I leave you to finish, my friend, trusting that your poetic gifts will find the proper words. Farewell.

(Adapted from the Harvard Classics edition of the letters of Pliny the Younger.)

Useful monsters

2011-07-20T13:03:00.000-07:00

The wolf prowls the worlds of Story, in many forms and guises. One of the most terrifying is the garm wolf. This creature takes its name from a hellhound, Garmr, mentioned in the Poetic Edda: he is a monstrous dog whose howling will announce the coming of Ragnarok, the fall of the gods and the ending of the world.

In the Perilous Realm, the garm wolf is a wild wolf which has been captured and transformed, by sorcery or ill-treatment or usually both, into a vicious hunter and killer. Unlike the werewolf, which is a man (or woman) changed into a monster that kills other men, the garm wolf is a wolf changed into a monster by man, to kill other men. The journey may be different but the end result is much the same: a creature that is neither one thing or another but something else, a thing that crosses a guarded boundary and leaps out at us from our darkest nightmares.

Wolves have been demonized in stories probably since stories were first told, or at least since humans began to domesticate sheep and cows and other livestock. When this happened, however many thousands of years ago, when we began to keep animals as stock, like items in a store, instead of just following them around with spears and bows, what a change that must have made in our way of seeing the world. Because now there were two different kinds of animals: ours, and all the others out there, including the ones that wanted to kill and eat ours. Come to think of it, this may have been the reality-altering moment that the idea of wild first entered human consciousness: when we put a fence around some animals to keep other animals out. Before the sheepfold and the barn, we were hunters along with the wolves and the other predators. The forest was our home too. But once we learned to keep animals and breed them, we stopped thinking of ourselves as having anything in common with the other predators. Of course we were still predators, only we’d learned how to keep our prey close by for when we needed them. We no longer had to venture out into the dark dangerous forest to find them.

So, as we looked over this new thing we’d invented called the fence, which divided the world into two separate places, home and out there, our stories must have changed, too. On the other side of the fence was the wolf, a dusk thing, prowling the border of night and day, of two worlds. He was a lot like our new friend the dog, and so seemed close to us in a disturbing way, and yet he was not like the dog because he could not be tamed. And so the wolf made a handy villain. We could tell scary stories about his cruelty, his lack of mercy, his diabolical craftiness (conveniently forgetting these are traits we excel at ourselves). We could give evil a face. And if we could name it, and kill it, we’d be safe for a while. Good defeats evil once again.

And so we invented the Big Bad Wolf, and he began to prowl through our stories and nightmares. And that is what the tale of the garm wolf is really about, perhaps. It is a story about the story of the Big Bad Wolf. About how we made the wolf into a useful monster.

The Spark of Story

2011-07-13T21:29:00.001-07:00

Lovely description of how the spark of Story was first lit in the author Richard Wright when he was a child:

“Once upon a time there was an old, old man named Bluebeard,” she began in a low whisper.

She whispered to me the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives and I ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face, everything. As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me. She told me how Bluebeard had duped and married his seven wives, how he had loved and slain them, how he had hanged them up by their hair in a dark closet. The tale made the world around me be, throb, live.

As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow. Enchanted and enthralled, I stopped her constantly to ask for details. My imagination blazed. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me.”

From Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, by Richard Wright. Harper, 1945.

Overland to the Klondike

2011-07-09T16:18:00.001-07:00

Edmonton was the jumping off place for the gold seekers who were so unfortunate as to choose the overland route to the Klondike. They came from every part of the world and many, unused to the travel of the north, brought with them fantastic devices for making the long trip in quick time.

One of the most ingenious arrangements was that of Texas Smith. He arranged three barrels tricycle-wise, fixed shafts to the barrels, and hitched up a horse. Inside the barrels he carried all of his supplies. Texas got about seven miles before the hoops came off the barrels and he traced his way back to Edmonton by following the track of beans, rice and flour.

In a shed near the river bank, Brenneau Fabian was preparing for the journey. Noahs’ Ark, the people called his invention. It was a large vessel, large enough to hold a score of men. Made entirely of galvanized iron, the ship was hinged in the middle so that the stern could be folded over the bow and the whole pulled along on either wheels or runners – a streamlined version of the covered wagon. A team of oxen was to be the motive power on land, and sails on the water. The Juggernaut did not leave its place on the riverbank. For many years, Fabian’s Folly was an outstanding float in all parades in Edmonton.

Another party spent a long while constructing an ice boat. Since the group expected to do a little profiteering when they reached the gold fields, space had to be allowed for cargo. Gingerly the heavy contraption was tugged out onto the ice. The towering mast was hoisted and the expanse of sails set. The boat bade fair to become part of the ice. It would have taken a hurricane to move it. The grinning citizens rounded up fourteen teams of horses to haul the monstrosity back up the grade to the shed from which it emerged with such éclat.

The prime folly was that of the I Will Steam Company of Chicago. This firm manufactured a single piece of equipment: a steam sleigh for hauling a train of four cabooses on runners. Powered by a boiler and a marine engine, traction was provided by studding the cylindrical wheels of the engine with spikes or teeth. The first car behind the engine carried fuel, the second was the living quarters of the crew, and the third carried provisions. The date for the start arrived. The crew strode about oiling and wiping and testing gauges. “Let her go!” cried the leader. With the blast of a four-funnel liner, the sleigh lurched forward. The wheels churned, showering the spectators with clods of earth. The tractor wallowed and settled in the mire. All the frantic efforts to extricate her failed. The “I Will” wilted. Years later an enterprising sawmill man bought the machinery for his mill.

… Men with an eye to business advertised the Edmonton route far and wide as the best, quickest, and easiest route to the Klondike. Hundreds believed this golden hokum, and hundreds died of scurvy, of starvation, of heartbreak, somewhere in the North.

-- From Johnny Chinook, Tall Tales and True from the Canadian West, by Robert Gard, 1945.

Robert Kroetsch's novel The Man from the Creeks tells a story of the Klondike Gold Rush, based on the famous poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" by Robert Service.

The Fathomless Fire: update

2011-07-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I announced that The Fathomless Fire, the second book in The Perilous Realm trilogy, would be on bookstore shelves this August. The release date has since be revised by the publisher, to January 2012. My apologies to those who have been waiting eagerly for the continuing adventures of Will, Rowen, Shade and their friends.

I can at least promise you that "Fire" is worth the wait!

P.S. Amazon lists the book as a paperback, but I'm told this is an error: it will in fact come out first in hardcover.

NEW UPDATE: January 10th, 2012: The Fathomless Fire is now at a bookstore near you!

Terry

2011-06-28T11:04:00.001-07:00

Fifteen years old. Working for the summer at Monarch Pizza on Connaught Drive in Jasper. Busboy and dishwasher, and sometimes allowed to help with the cooking, when Nick and Antonia Demetrios, the owners, found themselves shortstaffed. And they were often shortstaffed, with all the restless young people coming and going, stopping in our town on their way elsewhere.

I remember the broiling sauna of the kitchen, the back door open to let in the breeze off Bear Hill. The tiled floor slick with a film of dishwasher suds and grease splatter, and no-nonsense Antonia at our heels with her mop and squeakywheeled bucket. Nick’s was the day, hers the night. She took orders, served meals, handled customer complaints and yet she always found time to clean, a job that was supposed to be mine. She preferred to do it herself, to make sure it was done right. Antonia never stopped moving the whole time she was on shift, and the same was expected of us. All evening I shook cold pizza rinds off plates and sent sticky dishes and cutlery through the huge dishwasher and hauled them out again, abashed and steaming, stacked them on the countertop for the harried, incessantly cursing cooks and waiters. And if Antonia overheard the muttered profanity, at our ducking heads shot a torrent of mediterranean imprecation. What was that? Do you talk like that at home, in your mother’s kitchen? What’s the matter with you people?

Earlier that year Nick bolted a television high in a corner, to add the excitement of Wayne Gretzky’s rookie season with the Edmonton Oilers to the dining experience. Customers with their mouths full of pizza, roaring at an Oilers goal with jaws clamped shut, cheese clinging to their chins. The soundtrack of hockey play-by-play like a homey fixture in the room, like familiar wallpaper. And then that summer all of us turning to that small high-up screen to monitor the progress of Terry Fox.

I would be on a break, talking with my friends in a booth by the window so we could watch for girls, and I’d glance up and see this freckled boy on the screen, toiling up a long stretch of highway. He was going to run all the way across the country. He had lost a limb to cancer and he was going to run across the whole entire country. No one had ever done that before, that anyone knew of. Every night, the updates on his location. How close he was to the halfway point, which to my surprise turned out to be somewhere in Ontario, when I had always thought maybe Manitoba. His run making the country larger, more real.

We got used to seeing him up there on the little screen, the matted curly hair, the permanent wince. His outdoor sweat seemed to be in brotherly concord with my kitchen sweat. The stride and the hop and the sideways heave of the body as the dead artificial leg is thrown forward, stride hop heave, one more time and one more and one more, measuring the immensity of this country in jolts to the pelvis, the spine. We would all watch him for a moment and not say anything, maybe laugh uneasily or say look at that poor bastard and then one of us would slide out of the booth to go pick up an announced order and imitate him on the way, stride hop heave, and this of course would set the table on a roar.

I can see it in my mind’s eye now, as I write, hardwired permanently to who I am. That agonizing lopsided jig. The national dance.

The cancer returned and stopped him in Thunder Bay, and the next year he was dead, at the age of 22.

-- from The Logogryph

Robert Kroetsch

2011-06-23T05:48:00.001-07:00

Robert Kroetsch, one of Canada’s greatest writers, died on June 21^st in a car accident as he was returning home from a literary festival. He was a friend and mentor and one of the most kind and generous people I’ve ever known. I admired the heck out of him, cherished his work and loved him dearly.

The first time I met Bob I was an intimidated novice writer whose first book had just been published. He was this wizard of Canadian literature whose awesome wit and intellect would surely reduce me to ashes if I dared have a conversation with him. To my surprise he turned out to be a warm, soft-spoken man, grandfatherly and unassuming. He talked to me as a fellow writer, an equal. I’ve always been grateful for that.

He was such a wonderful writer. In his fiction, poetry and memoirs he made this province more real and at the same time more mythical. Like all great writers he revealed the universal in the particular, the richness of our own history and stories, the ordinary yet strange and astonishing lives we live. Kroetsch showed me and so many other writers that our own prosaic corner of the world was a place that could be written about, that could be made into words, into art. He created a place I like to call Kroetsch Country, a wild, contradictory territory of words and tall tales, of fools and politicians and dreamers and lovers. Some people call it Alberta.

The last time I saw Bob, earlier this spring, he had just been recognized with the Alberta Distinguished Artist award. He’d also gotten some sobering news about the severity of his Parkinson’s, and the intense therapy that would be required to treat it. But he was in good spirits: he joked, and charmed the waitress at the restaurant we went to for lunch, and asked about people we both knew. Later we went for a coffee in the dining area of the assisted-living complex that was his current home, and he looked around at the other elderly people and said, “You can see why I like coming in here. Most days I’m the youngest person in the room.”

Kroetsch was a mentor and friend to many Alberta writers, and broke ground for so many others to follow. His work is and will continue to be an enduring literary legacy. It reminds us, as writers, readers, as people alive for such a brief time on this earth, to really pay attention to what’s right here in front of our noses, the shit and the foolishness and the glory. To remain open and curious and vulnerable to whatever the world brings.

Just days before his death Bob was presented with the Golden Pen Award for lifetime achievement at the Alberta Book Awards in Calgary. I was looking forward to seeing him soon to celebrate this latest honour. I still can’t believe none of us will ever have the chance to enjoy his wonderful company again.

As it slowly began to sink in that he was really gone, I looked through some of his books and enjoyed his words again, and was grateful and inspired, as I always am whenever I take a walk through Kroetsch Country. Reading some of his marvelous poetry I had the odd Kroetschian thought that if anyone could write the most heartbreaking, irreverent, perfect poem about his own death, it would be Bob Kroetsch. How I wish he was still here to write it.

Rest in peace, Bob, and thank you.

Photo by Jenna Butler

Flowers

2011-06-17T16:19:00.001-07:00

Every time she opened her mouth to speak, flowers came out. Great blooming bunches of flowers. Sometimes roses, sometimes carnations, lilies, irises, bluebells. Now and then a mysterious-looking orchid. She would have something important to say, but instead these damned flowers kept coming out. The thorns of the roses scratched her lips. The budding green leaves got stuck between her teeth. Bees followed her around. The humid scent of flowers filled her head day and night.

Nobody knew what she was saying anymore. Somebody would ask her opinion on the day's news and get daffodils instead. Others thought the flower trick was cool, and pestered her to say other things, more useful things, like tomatoes, or coins, or live ammunition. She stopped speaking, but that didn't help. People kept after her, insisting that she speak, that she say what they wanted to hear, and mostly what they wanted to hear was their own words echoed back to them. But she couldn't say things the way others said them, and so after a while people just left her alone.

Then one day she met him, in the park. He talked to her, and didn't seem bothered that she had nothing to say in return. He was happy just sharing the sunlight and the warm summer breeze with someone. After a while he said he had to go, and that he was glad they’d had a chance to enjoy the sunshine together, and suddenly she knew she had to say something. She had to let him know that she would like to see him again, before he disappeared forever.

She opened her mouth just a little, and one small daisy popped out. Just an ordinary daisy, nothing fancy or in-your-face, but still she waited to see the look of alarm or disgust that was sure to cross his face. He didn't seem offended. He took the daisy and held it up, looked at it with a smile, then he popped it into his mouth. He looked thoughtful for a long moment, then surprised, then he smiled and opened his mouth and out came an entire bouquet of daisies.

They strolled away together down the street, talking and laughing, leaving a trail of petals behind them.

-- a story (with revisions) posted on my previous blog, The Logogryph

The Lives of Animals

2011-06-10T11:36:00.001-07:00

There was once a great shaman who wanted to see what it was like to live the life of all animals. So he let himself be reborn in all kinds of animals. For a time he was a bear. That was a tiring life, they were always walking, the bears, even in the dark they roamed about, always on the wander.

Then he became a fjord seal, and he relates that the seals were always in the humor for playing. They are ever full of merry jests, and they leap about among the waves, frolicsome and agile, until the sea begins to move; their high spirits set the sea in motion.

There was not much difference between humans and seals, for the seals could suddenly turn themselves into human shape. In that form they were skillful with the bow and amused themselves by setting up targets of snow, just as men make them.

Once the shaman was a wolf, but then he almost starved to death until one of the wolves took compassion on him and said, “Get a good hold of the ground with your claws and try to keep up with us when we run.” This is how he learned to run and catch caribou.

Then he turned into a musk ox, and it was warm in the middle of the big herd. Afterward, he became a caribou. They were strangely restless animals, always timid. In the middle of their sleep they would spring up and gallop away. They became scared over the slightest thing, so there was no fun being a caribou.

In this way the shaman lived the life of all the animals.

Story told to Knud Rasmussen by Qaqortingneq of the Netsilik, reprinted in Northern Tales: Stories From the Native Peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic Regions, Selected, Edited and retold by Howard Norman. Pantheon Books, 1990.

Image: Shaman's Costume, 1984

by Lipa Pitsiulak (1943–2010)

Stonecut on paper, 41/50

49 x 51.3 cm Image: 37 x 42.5 cm

Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Gift of Indian & Northern Affairs, Canada

Annual collections of prints have been published in Pangnirtung since 1973. Lipa Pitsiulak provided early leadership to the Pangnirtung Print Shop and later to the Pangnirtung Eskimo Co-operative, established in 1975. He continues to create drawings, many of which have been rendered into prints. He is also known for his imaginative sculpture. In 1977 his print, Disguised Archer, was reproduced on a Canadian postage stamp. All of his work reveals an interest in portraying traditional shamanic beliefs and legends, as exemplified by the print Shaman’s Costume. He lived in the community of Pangnirtung from 1967 to 1977, but then made the decision to move to a permanent outpost camp. In 1988 his life and art was the subject of a National Film Board film, Lypa.

Sancho Tells a Story

2011-06-09T15:10:00.001-07:00

Don Quixote and his faithful squire Sancho Panza are lost in the middle of nowhere and night has fallen. Not only that, but a strange clanking and pounding noise from somewhere nearby in the darkness has Sancho frightened nearly out of his wits. To keep his master from investigating the mysterious sound, Sancho secretly ties the legs of his horse, Rocinante. Unable to ride off on this new adventure, Don Quixote must submit to Sancho’s offer to tell stories to keep them both entertained (and safe) until morning…

Sancho began: “ … in a village of Extremadura there was a goatherd--that is to say, one who tended goats--which shepherd or goatherd, as my story goes, was called Lope Ruiz, and this Lope Ruiz was in love with a shepherdess called Torralba, and this shepherdess called Torralba was the daughter of a wealthy grazier, and this wealthy grazier--"

"If that is the way you tell your tale, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "repeating everything you say two times, it will take you two days to finish. Just go straight on with it, and tell it like a reasonable man, or else say nothing."

"Tales are always told this way in my village," answered Sancho, "and I can’t tell it in any other way, nor is it right of your worship to ask me to change the way I’ve always done things."

"Tell it however you wish, then," replied Don Quixote. “Fate will have it that I cannot help listening to you, and so go on."

"And so, Señor of my soul," continued Sancho, “as I have said, this shepherd was in love with Torralba the shepherdess, who was a wild buxom lass with something of the look of a man about her, for it’s the truth she had a bit of a moustache. It’s almost as if I can see her now."

"Then you knew her?" said Don Quixote.

"I didn’t know her," said Sancho, "but the one who told me the story said it was so true and correct that when I told it to another I could safely declare and swear I had seen it all myself. And so, as the days went by, the devil, who never sleeps and is always causing trouble, turned the love the shepherd bore the shepherdess into hatred and ill-will, and the reason, the gossips said, was the jealousy she caused him that went too far, into forbidden territory, so that the shepherd hated her from that time forward so much so, that in order to escape from her, he determined to leave that country and go where he should never set eyes on her again. Torralba, when she found herself spurned by Lope, was immediately smitten with love for him, though she had never loved him before."

"That is the way of women," said Don Quixote, "to scorn the one that loves them, and love the one that despises them. But go on, Sancho."

"It came to pass," said Sancho, "that the shepherd carried out his intention, and driving his goats before him took his way across the plains of Extremadura to pass over into the kingdom of Portugal. Well, Torralba found this out and went after him, followed him at a distance, walking barefoot with a pilgrim's staff in her hand and a saddlebag around her neck, in which she carried, so they say, a piece of mirror and a broken comb and a little pot of paint for her face … but whatever she was carrying I am not going to bother about it, so all I will say is that the goatherd, or so I’m told, came with his flock to the river Guadiana, which was at that time swollen and almost overflowing its banks, and at the spot he came to there was no boat or barge or anyone to ferry him or his flock to the other side, at which he was much vexed, for he he had seen Torralba approaching and knew she would annoy him to no end with tears and pleading; so he kept looking around and discovered a fisherman with a boat, a boat so small it could only hold one person and one goat at a time; but even so he spoke to the fisherman, who agreed to carry him and his three hundred goats across. So the fisherman got into the boat and carried one goat over; then he came back and carried another over; then he came back again, and again brought over another … let your worship keep count of the goats the fisherman is taking across, because if we miss one the story will be over and I won’t be able to tell another word of it. But to carry on I must tell you the landing place on the other side was muddy and slippery, and the fisherman took a lot of time going over and back again; yet he returned for another goat, and another, and another--"

"Let us just say he ferried them all over," said Don Quixote, "and don't keep going and coming in this way, Sancho, or it will take you a whole year to get them across."

"How many have gone across so far?" said Sancho.

"How the devil should I know?" replied Don Quixote.

"There it is," said Sancho. “I told your grace to keep careful count. Well then, by God, that’s the end of the story, for there’s no way to go on."

"How can that be?" said Don Quixote. "Is it so essential to the story to know exactly how many goats have crossed over, so that a mistake in the count means you cannot go on with it?"

"No, your worship, I can’t," replied Sancho, "for when I asked your worship to tell me how many goats had crossed and you said you didn’t know, at that very instant I forgot everything I had to tell, and by my faith the rest of it was most entertaining."

"So, then," said Don Quixote, "the story is finished?"

"As finished as my mother," said Sancho.

"In truth," said Don Quixote, "you have told one of the strangest stories, tales, or histories, that anyone in the world could have imagined, and such a way of telling it and ending it was never seen or heard of before; though I expected nothing else from your keen intellect. But I am not surprised, for it may be that endless pounding and clanking has confused your wits."

"Maybe so," replied Sancho, "but I know that for my story, there’s nothing else to say other than it ends there right where your grace lost count of the goats."

"Let it end where it will, then," said Don Quixote, "and now let us see if Rocinante can go," and again he spurred his horse, and again Rocinante made jumps and remained where he was, because Sancho had tied him so well.

From Don Quixote, Chapter XX.

Five Important Questions for Writers (and other creative people):

2011-06-02T08:10:00.001-07:00

The other day I was looking through one of my writing notebooks and I was struck by how many questions there were in it. There was at least one curly little ? on almost every single page, and on some pages there were many. Questions about the plot, about what the characters should do next, about other ways the story might go, about why I’m writing this thing and what I’m trying to say.

It occurred to me then, looking at all those pesky interrogative marks scattered like tiny thumbscrews across the pages, how utterly vital questions are to any creative endeavour. How they’re always quietly (or annoyingly) driving the work forward, prompting one to ponder, delve, rethink, push a little harder, venture out of the comfort zone, change course …

So I decided it might be a worthwhile exercise to choose the five most useful, recurring, indispensable questions that come up for me again and again during the writing process. Limiting myself to only five was part of the creative challenge of the exercise.

Rather than tenets or rules to live by, these then are my top five questions to create by:

Why?

What if…?

What else?

What’s going on right now?

Really?

WHY?

With the exception of scientists and three-year-olds, most of us probably don’t ask enough “why” questions in a day. If you’ve ever been driven nuts by a kid who keeps repeating that pesky monosyllable after every “final” answer, you’ve felt the power of Why?

No wonder Why? annoys us: it forces us to do something our easily-distracted squirrel minds would rather avoid: to keep thinking. It’s the question that drives us on beyond our unexamined assumptions and easy certainties. Why? is how I find out who my characters are and what they’re likely to do.

While you’re at it, try asking some of the people in your life a “why” question more often. Not as a complaint or a rebuke, just to see what they think about something a little deeper than what needs to go on this week’s grocery list. (Have you ever noticed how rarely adults ask one another Why? unless they’re angry?)

Why? can burrow beneath the superficial skin of daily life and reveals the hidden or forgotten depths in those you think you know, including yourself.

WHAT IF…?

“What if trees had eyes?” my son wondered the other day as we were walking to the park. That kicked my sluggish mind into gear, as “what if” questions always do. It’s fitting that we were on our way to a playground at the time, because that’s what What if? does: it turns the real world into an infinite playground for the imagination. It’s the world’s cheapest and most effective de-aging solution.

Okay, I’ll play: what if trees did have eyes? Eyes but no mouths or arms, so they could watch whatever was going on around them but be unable to do anything about it. Would a lumberjack see terror in a Douglas fir’s baby blues as he approached with his chainsaw? Or maybe trees really do have eyes. After all, they’re photosensitive beings: they take in light through every leaf, and use it to grow. What if we thought of a tree’s leaves as its “eyes”? Hey, there may be a metaphor here, or a haiku:
summer sun at noon
with every single leaf
the elm tree looks up.

... or maybe even the seed of a whole story. Thanks, son.

WHAT ELSE?

Related to “what if” is the less well-known but equally powerful “what else?” The discoveries and connections I’ll make in a day, the deepening of what’s already on the page, will come about thanks to the mental nudging of “what else” and its refusal to be satisfied with the easy plot device or the pre-packaged solution. “What else,” to me, can mean many things. What else is going on in this scene? What else does the reader need to know to make sense of this? What else do these words imply? What else do I have to say? Maybe nothing, but I won’t know for sure if I don’t ask.

WHAT’S GOING ON RIGHT NOW?

This question can propel me in two different directions: both deeper into the work and out of it, back into the unwritten world. Both are important for writing. Whenever either I or the work-in-progress seem to have lost focus, that’s the time to pause and ask what’s really happening at this very moment.

In terms of the writing, it’s a way of regrounding myself in the sensory, the immediate, the palpable urgencies of whatever place or situation my characters are in here and now. The question compels me to step inside the story and look around, to see, touch, hear, taste and smell this imaginary world I’m building out of words. And doing that reengages me with the story and the beings in it, and often shows me the way to go forward, from right now into the very next thing that should happen.

But “What’s going on right now?” is also useful in one’s own life outside the page. I think a lot of people never finish (or begin) that novel they’ve always planned to write because they can’t stay put long enough in right now. It’s where everything happens, of course, but most of us avoid it whenever possible: it’s much easier to live in the past or dream of the great work we’re going to do tomorrow, yes, definitely tomorrow, because today we just don’t feel like it...

There are times, of course, when it is best to let the work sit for a while and do something else (for five minutes, an hour, a day, a year…?). And asking myself what’s going on right now can help me understand when that’s the right thing to do. The question regrounds me in my own here and now, reminding me that the flesh is mortal and one can only accomplish so much in a day. So get up and stretch, the dog is whining to be let out, go play with the kids, take your long-suffering spouse to dinner at a fancy restaurant. The miraculous thing is that while you’re doing that, your mind will still be working, dreaming, forging unexpected links and taking audacious leaps across synapses, and then, just when you’ve completely forgotten about that problem you sweated over for hours, the answer comes, as if out of nowhere. (When really it comes from all the stuff going on inside you that’s not accessible to the prefrontal cortex. You’re not in control of everything, you know).

REALLY?

This one is the wet rag, the snarky teenager, the sober second opinion. “Cast a cold eye on life, on death,” Yeats said, and it’s good advice for anyone riding the exhilarating windhorse of creativity. He could have added, “cast a cold eye on your deathless creations, too.” That’s what Really? is for. I’m sure I’ve just penned the most magnificent pages the world will ever have the great fortune to read, but the next morning, once the high has worn off, I had better take another look. Once you’ve won the Booker you will never need to doubt your own brilliance again, but until then…

Still, like the other four, this is a dangerous question. It can easily be overused or asked at the wrong stage in the creative process, since it comes from the Critic-Within, that jaded gremlin who will choke off one’s imaginative flow if given too much time and power over the work.

And like “What’s going on right now?”, the cold eye of “Really?” can be usefully turned on the unwritten world too, and cast at every glossy sales pitch, every last word on the subject, every politician who spins us a golden tale of better days ahead. And once we’ve asked it, we might find ourselves returning full circle to that other question that comes in handy whenever we’re told, by ourselves or others, That’s Just the Way Things Are:

Why?

One more thing: don’t forget to say thanks once in a while. To God, or the muse, or the right cerebral cortex of the human brain, or whatever mystical or biological source you believe your great ideas ultimately come from. No one creates anything in a vacuum. Whether there’s an Author behind it all or not, it seems pretty clear to me that this universe is an unfinished, always astonishing act of creativity. Just look at a lilac bush, or a giraffe. The universe came up with stars, galaxies, planets, life, and then it really got going and dreamed up a being that could create universes inside its own head, share them with others, and change the way things are. That’s creativity, and it’s in everyone, and belongs to everyone, so here’s one more question:

What are you doing with it?

The Rich Man's Gold

2011-05-17T14:47:00.000-07:00

Two beggars happened to pass by the estate of a wealthy and powerful man.
The first beggar looked at the beautiful mansion that was the rich man's home, and said bitterly, "He must have so much gold. I wonder where he keeps it all."
The second beggar looked at the tall iron fence, topped with razor wire, that surrounded the rich man's house and said, "I don't know where he keeps his gold, but I have a pretty good idea where his gold keeps him."

-- from The Kantar

A tree fell in the forest

2011-05-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

A tree fell in the forest.

I know, because I was there. It happened today while I was walking on a trail in the woods. It was a very windy, gusty day, the perfect day for a bone-dry, sapless old tree to give up the long vigil and come down.

When the tree fell, did it make a sound? It did, but not the sound I might have expected. I heard a knocking, like someone rapping their knuckles against hollow wood, and then a thrashing as if something was bounding through the underbrush toward me, and when I turned to the source of the sound the first thing I saw was a white wound appearing about thirty feet up amid the leafless branches. It was the inner flesh of the tree appearing as the trunk split and the upper part of the tree toppled.

I was a few dozen yards away, so there was no danger to me but I jumped anyhow because of the noise (which at first, as I say, sounded like something – god knows what – charging at me through the bushes). And when I realized it was a tree falling, I immediately thought that this was human doing, that someone must be over there at the bottom of the fallen tree with a chainsaw, someone employed by the city or the parks service or whatever, whose job is to bring down old dead trees before they fall on someone’s head and there’s a lawsuit.

But there was nobody to be seen near the tree. And I hadn’t heard a chainsaw. And it was a testament to how detached a city-dweller like me has gotten from the natural world that it took me a moment to realize the tree had actually fallen all on its own. Nature had done it without any help from her most interfering, restless creation, Homo sapiens. Do trees just up and fall in the forest? Well of course they do.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly a forest, it was a few remaining acres of trees and boggy creek bottom on the south side of the city, criss-crossed by walking trails and surrounded by new subdivisions of big brand-new houses built right up to the rim of the creek valley. But it doesn’t sound quite as resonant and momentous to say that a tree fell in the natural area. Yet funny to think that if I hadn't been there to hear it, the tree would have fallen like the proverbial tree in the forest, making or not making a sound, depending on one's philosophical leanings. And maybe that proverb itself is as dry and worn out as some of these old trees, metaphors left-over from an earlier time and just waiting to fall or be cleared away to make way for something that serves human desires better, newer metaphors based on technology and consumerism? Is that proverbial forest where the tree falls without anyone to hear it as endangered as the real forests of the world?

Storyshards

2011-05-06T14:13:00.001-07:00

One of the little-understood dangers of the Perilous Realm is the storyshard. A storyshard is a fragment of a story that keeps repeating itself over and over. A traveler who stumbles into a storyshard will get caught up in its endless repetition and will eventually forget everything that happened in her life before the moment she entered the shard. She may not even notice that she is repeating the same actions over and over again. It is said that there are storyshards in the “real” world, too, and that people here stumble into them all the time and don’t notice. If you’ve ever felt yourself to be acting out the same tired old script day after day and wishing you could escape it, maybe you’ve been caught in a storyshard. There are ways out, though. Sometimes it’s enough to just stop in the middle of whatever you’re doing and do something that is the absolute opposite of what you think you should do.

Where did storyshards come from? One theory has it that they came about in the time of the Great Unweaving, when the vast and harmonious tapestry of Story was torn and warped, and became riddled with gaps and tangled knots.

Some say that storyshards are simply stories that have become so old that they’ve eroded, like mountains breaking down into hills, and most of what the story once was is worn away. As for why these ancient stories would keep repeating themselves, it may be that they are so old and so deeply embedded in the tapestry (and in people’s minds) that they become like unbreakable habits. Or like DNA, perhaps, self-replicating scripts that make use of hosts like you and me to pass themselves on.

Enigmatism

2011-04-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

The Enigmatists of Fable are deep-minded scholars who study the Perilous Realm and try to understand its many mysteries. In our world we used to call such men and women natural philosophers. Now we call them scientists.

Enigmatists, like knights of the Errantry, roam far and wide through the lands of Story, but unlike knights-errant (or most readers of stories, for that matter), they aren’t content to simply wander through a story and let it unfold as it will. Enigmatists will study a story, keep voluminous notes, gather specimens, make conjectures about what, how, and why the story is the way it is and what secrets it might hold.

There are enigmatists who specialize in the study of only one particular element of Story. For example the pratchetologists, who are experts in all things relating to tiny little people (there are many, many races of tiny little people in the Realm. You probably have some living in your walls. Most are harmless). Or the monocerologists, the Realm’s experts on unicorns.

But this kind of specialization doesn’t stop there. Even within these narrower fields of study there are subdivisions upon subdivisions. Within the field of monocerology itself there are enigmatists who restrict their research to the dietary habits of unicorns, which they study by collecting and examining the creature’s droppings. And within that field there are those who study only the droppings of black unicorns. And then there are those who study only the droppings of one particular black unicorn named Trevor, who lives in Medicine Hat. As you can imagine, Trevor doesn’t enjoy being followed around by packs of enigmatists eager to get a sample of his droppings, and he tends to be quite cranky and dangerous to approach. But enigmatists live for this kind of bracing adventure.

Then there are what are sometimes called the “true” Enigmatists, the ones who investigate and ponder Story itself: its ultimate nature and purpose. Why are there stories at all? What are stories really made of? (The most recent research seems to suggest that stories are made out of invisible, energy-bearing particles called narratons, that have strange properties, such as their tendency to collapse when one tries to measure their speed or direction) Is there any end to stories or do they go on forever? What was the very first story? The quandary that all such enigmatists face is that any answer to such questions will ultimately take the form of a story, and thus the answer will become its own question, like a snake biting its tale. (Pardon the pun. Enigmatists are also very fond of these).

And so it would seem there is no place one can stand “outside” the Realm and say what a story is without telling another one.

Finding a form

2011-04-19T13:42:00.000-07:00

"Children play with puppets, toy horses, or kites in order to get acquainted with the physical laws of the universe and with the actions that they will someday really perform. Likewise, to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.

This is the consoling function of narrative---the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. And it has always been the paramount function of myth: to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience."

Umberto Eco,
from Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

The Barber of Edmonton

2011-04-15T13:47:00.001-07:00

I go to a barber who has one of those old-fashioned little hole-in-the-wall barbershops in a strip mall. He’s not an old guy, though, he’s probably in his thirties and has a three-year-old son he likes to talk about. His name is Ash, and he’s from Italy originally, from Milan I believe.

When I was in his shop the other day, we got to talking about this and that as we usually do. These conversations can go in all sorts of directions, I’ve found, because Ash likes to talk (a good trait for a barber to have, and I know because not every barber has it, and it’s not a pleasant experience having your hair cut by someone who maintains a stony silence) and he’ll weigh in on just about any subject. Not in a know-it-all or BS’ing kind of way, though. He’s just curious about places and people.

So I was in Ash's barbershop (my son was getting his haircut, not me), and Ash was asking me how my latest book was coming along, and then he suggested that I write a book based on stories told to a barber. He said I wouldn't believe some of the stuff that people tell him when they're in the chair. Sometimes he gets the feeling that people are telling him things they’ve never told anyone else.

It has something to do with the fact that he is touching their hair, he said. That’s a very personal thing. You have to be comfortable with the person who cuts your hair, he said. You have to feel you can trust them. And because people place that trust in him, it makes them more open to talking about what’s going on in their lives.

I said I thought that sounded like a great idea, a book of stories told by people in the barberchair, and I asked him to give me an example of one of the good ones he’s heard over the years. I guess I was hoping to get some juicy anecdotes that I could stash in my writing notebook for a rainy day. Ash hemmed and hawed about it but in the end he didn’t spill any beans, and I admired him for it. He wasn’t about to lightly toss out someone else’s personal tale of woe just to provide me with some vicarious entertainment or schadenfreude.

He also told me that if I put the word barber in the title of my next book, it would be sure to sell a million copies. I’m thinking about it.

To Destroy is to De-Story

2011-04-06T11:36:00.001-07:00

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.

– Maya Angelou

The Bad Guy in The Shadow of Malabron is Malabron himself, the Night King. He calls himself the Lord of Story, and believes he is the right and true ruler of the entire Realm. Malabron’s goal is to “eat” every story, so that only one story will remain: his own story, a nightmare of absolute power. If he succeeds in this he will obliterate the past, so that no one will even remember there were stories other than his. And he will destroy the future, so that no one will be able to imagine other possible stories that could be told, or lived.

While I was writing Shadow of Malabron, the word “destroy” often came up in scenes where the characters talk about Malabron’s threat to the Realm. I am a fast typer but not always accurate, and I often found myself typing the word “destroy” as “destory.” This annoyed me until I realized that this is exactly what tyrants do (in the real world as well as fantasy novels). When they set out to destroy opposition, or freedom, or independent thought, one of the things they go after is story. Take away someone’s story, or their ability to tell their story, and you take away much of who they are and their freedom to imagine that things could be different. This is truly to de-story someone.

A real-world example: the absolute control that North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-il holds over the media – newspapers, television, radio and the internet. The people of this country are prevented from reading or hearing stories other than the official ones that the government puts forth. On television they are fed a steady diet of reports about their wonderful leader and all of the wonderful things he has been doing for their country. Dissent is punished, so no one dares tell their own alternate story of how things really are in that country.

The people of North Korea are being systematically “de-storyed.”

Every government rules to some extent in similar ways, as do the giant corporations that want us all to buy the same products, that is, live the same story, a story that they impose on us rather than one we tell for ourselves. (Yes, there still are big bad giants in the world.)

Any kind of deliberate human destruction is also a destorying, in one way or another. When a forest is cleared, countless life “stories” of the creatures that live their may be lost. When a child soldier dies in war, his or her story is over before it has barely begun.

De-storying imposes an absolute “The End” on stories that still might have grown in unexpected ways. Human beings are creatures that tell stories. We live and breathe stories. Truly we need them to survive. To be prevented from telling your story is, as Maya Angelou points out, a great agony. A killing silence.

So now when I type the word “destroy” and it comes out “destory,” I still correct it, but the mistake serves to remind me of the deep connection between destruction and the loss of story.

A Very Brief Tale

2011-03-28T20:55:00.001-07:00

The time-eater smacked his lips.

"Those minutes and hours were delicious," he said, and lifted his empty plate.

"May I have seconds?"

The Boy and His Voice: A Tale

2011-03-20T16:15:00.001-07:00

A boy woke one morning to find he had lost his voice.

He went to his mother and father and tried to tell them what had happened to him. He clutched his throat and waved his arms to show them that his voice was gone. His mouth opened and closed like the mouth of a fish out of water.

“You're always so careless with your things,” they shouted at him, shaking their heads. "Now you've gone and lost your voice, too?"

The boy’s father took him to the wise old woman who lived alone in a house by the sea, a house made of the bones of a beached whale. She looked at the boy, made him open his mouth, and looked down his throat with a phosphorescent stone on a string.

“You haven’t lost your voice,” the wise old woman said to the boy. “Someone has taken it.”

“Who would do such a thing?” the boy’s father demanded.

“Who he is I do not know,” the old woman said, “but I hear the echo of his swift feet running away to the great forest. If you wish to find your voice, you must go there, boy. Search everywhere, even in the unlikeliest places, for this thief is clever and will have hidden your voice where you least expect it to be. And you must make this journey alone, because you will need to make friends with silence if you ever hope to find your voice and return.”

The boy’s father gave him a knife and a pouch with nine coins which had been saved for a rainy day. His mother gave him a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and a flask of water. The boy left his home by the sea and walked inland, and soon he came to the great forest. He walked under the mighty trees whose green branches swayed in the wind, and he thought it was something like walking under the waves of the sea.

Days went by. The boy looked everywhere for his voice. Under stones and dry leaves, in hollow trees and old wasp nests, by the sides of loudly rushing streams and in single drops of water. The boy’s food ran out, and with his coins he bought more food in the villages he passed through. Then the coins ran out, and it was then that silence, as the old woman had told him, became his good friend.

One night the boy came to a clearing. The moon was full and high in the sky. The crickets were chirping as they did every night. It was a sound the boy had heard so often he had stopped listening to it, but tonight, because his belly was empty and he had nothing left but silence, he listened to the crickets, and deep within their song he heard his own voice once again.

The boy searched the clearing, and found a tunnel hidden under a rotting log. He crouched and made his way slowly down the tunnel, which went a long way under the earth, until at last he came to the hall of the Cricket King. Hundreds of crickets, singing as one, were gathered around their monarch, who sat on his toadstool throne. He had a goblet of moonbeam wine in one hand, a sceptre in another hand, and a golden ball in a third (he had six hands altogether, which is very ... um ... handy when you're a king with many subjects to rule).

When the boy appeared, the crickets fell silent.

The Cricket King looked at the boy and smiled.

“We’ve dressed your voice up as one of us,” the king said. “I believe it’s quite happy in our choir. But if you can guess which one of our singers is really your voice, you may take it and go unharmed.”

The Cricket King raised a hand (one of the six that wasn’t holding anything) and the hundreds of crickets began to sing. The boy walked among them, and because he had made friends with silence, it stood by him now and would not let him be carried away by the frenzied din. That was how he was able to hear his own voice again, in the midst of the chorus of crickets. He found his voice and threw his arms around it. His voice struggled a while, then at last it peeled off its cricket disguise and lay shivering in his arms.

“Very good!” the Cricket King cried, clapping several of his hands. “Now you must go, boy, before we decide to keep you longer than you would care for.”

With his voice the boy thanked the Cricket King (his mother had told him you must always thank the mighty for the trouble they cause -- in their minds it's a great honour), then he hastily left the underground kingdom with its roaring sea of crickets.

When he had come safely home at last, the boy rarely used his voice to speak with. Instead he shaped it into a ring and gave it to his silence to wear on its little finger.

-- Adapted from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca

walking in the woods

2011-02-28T09:47:00.000-08:00

This isn’t a story, it’s a poem. Or maybe it’s both.

The boy walking in the woods
hears birdcall and leaf hiss
these sounds outside of him
and within him too

the world, a movement
back and forth between inside
and out

and his thoughts
are walking too
like ghosts in a
mathematical forest

sometimes a thought
so new and strange
it takes him a few steps to
catch up to it.

He wonders
have I walked into another world?

The woods
never say yes
or no.

Story, Time

2011-01-28T10:42:00.001-08:00

Every story has its own time. I may not visit a particular story for many years, but when I do go back I usually find myself right back at the beginning, as if time has not passed there at all. Or if I left the story before it was over, I can usually find my way back to the place (or rather time) I left, and find myself right in the midst of the same events that were happening before.

And another curious thing is that a lot of time can go by in a story – hours, days, even years – but when I leave the story and return to my own world, I usually find that only a short time has passed. And this can happen even if I don’t visit the story itself in person. Even the spell of a good storyteller’s voice can work this strange magic.

The opposite can be true as well, although it has happened to only a few travelers I know: that one might spend only what seem a few brief moments or hours in a story and then return to one’s own world to discover that years have gone by.

Time can be strange and unpredictable within a story, too. It can slow down to a crawl, or stand still, or hours, days or years can be leapt over suddenly. One can find oneself going backwards in time, too, or catch glimpses of moments long past. One might discover that there are many different kinds of time, and they are all ways of seeing, of being in the world.

Visiting the realm of Story can teach us a lot about time. Most of us live in a world where time is thought of as a commodity, a resource, a possession. We think of time as something we have a certain amount of, and that if we’re not careful our time can be taken away from us by others. We act as if time is something we can save, like money in a bank, and that we should never waste it. Michael Ende’s wise and lovely novel Momo describes what happens to the world when we think of time this way. We discover that we haven’t saved anything, that in fact we’ve lost something precious.

In our busy, measured, time-obsessed world, we imagine time goes in only one direction, toward the future, at a steady, ticking pace. And many of us believe that if we “spend” our time carefully now, and stick to a strict regimen of clocktime, we will earn a future in which we no longer have to keep track of the seconds and minutes and can just relax and enjoy our “free” time. But by then we might find that we’ve become so fixed in our idea of saving time that we can no longer just live it. We will have forgotten that time was always free, and never belonged to anyone.

As the narrator of Momo says, “Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.”

Kyning Rore

2011-01-14T10:43:00.001-08:00

Kyning Rore is a university for mages, located on a small island off the eastern coast of the Perilous Realm, in the Sea of Mists.

The island was shaped by magecraft over many years into the likeness of a great spiraling seashell of white stone. Within the seashell are the many classrooms, laboratories, libraries and dormitories of the university. The seashell can be seen for miles around, even at night or when the mists are thick upon the sea, for the stonework of the walls gives off a phosphorescent glow in the dark.

The mages who teach at Kyning Rore come from all over the realm, as do those who hope to become students. Anyone may apply to study at the Rore, and tuition and board are free, but of the many who come there to learn magecraft, most sail away soon after, having discovered that they have not the gifts or the dogged determination to carry on with a program of study that is rigorous, demanding, and sometimes leads to unpleasant revelations about oneself and one’s limitations.

Kyning Rore was once a remote, forbidding place where only the daring, hardy few came to learn the mage’s art. The food at the dining hall was meager, tasteless fare, and each student was assigned a small, sparsely furnished cell (there is no other word for these cold stone closets). In winter these rooms could be bitterly cold. There have been many changes over the years, however, as the university became well-known for the quality of its instruction. More and more students flocked there, the food got better, the rooms more comfortable, and it has even been suggested that the curriculum is no longer as difficult or challenging as it once was, that students now come to the island not so much to learn the craft as to acquire the glittering reputation of having been a student at the Rore.

Many famous mages have trained at Kyning Rore, and unfortunately a few infamous ones as well, who took what they learned and used it to deceive and control others. A Master’s degree from Kyning Rore, they say, is no longer a guarantee that the mage who carries it still follows the mage’s oath to serve others and do no harm.

Yule

2010-12-15T09:54:00.001-08:00

From the Old English word geol or geola, meaning “Christmas Day, Christmastide.” But this Old English word comes from jol, an Old Norse word for a feast (of the pagan variety). A similar word, giuli, referred to a two-month winter "season" that was roughly the same period as the December and January of the Romans. And the Old Norse word may have been a borrowing from an Old French word, jolif, meaning something nice, festive or … jolly. The word was revived in the 19^th century, to give a unique name to the tradition of a “Merry Old English” Christmas.

Yule is also a country in the Perilous Realm, far to the north, in the Snowlands. It is also called The Kingdom of the Fir Trees. It is said that a great loremaster lives there, who is known to ride about on a sleigh pulled by the great antlered deer called tarand, bringing gifts and good cheer to everyone, to help them through the long dark winter, which in that country is all year round. Yule is, in fact, the place where Christmas (and its ancient pagan forebears) lives on always. To live there you’d have to get used to a steady diet of plum pudding and wassail.

As I look out my window now, I see snow falling. Looks like it will fall all day. I can almost imagine I live in the land of Yule. Time to go make some wassail.

A Scottish Folk Tale

2010-11-27T16:21:00.001-08:00

THE DAUGHTER OF KING UNDER-WAVES

A Scottish Folktale (Adapted)

The warriors of the Fianna were once together, on the steep side of Ben Eudainn, on a wild night, and there was pouring rain and falling snow from the north. About midnight a creature of haggard appearance came to Fionn’s shelter. Her hair was down to her heels, and she cried to him to let her in. Fionn raised up a corner of the tent door, and he gazed at her.

"You’re an ugly creature," he said. "Why should I let you in?”

She went away with a great cry that chilled Fionn’s bones. Then she reached the shelter of Oisean, and she asked him to let her in. Oisean lifted a corner of his door, and he saw her.

“You strange, hideous creature,” he said, “how can you ask me to let you in?”

She went away with a shriek that made his flesh crawl.

She reached Diarmid’s shelter, and she cried aloud to him to let her in. Diarmid lifted his door, and he saw her.

“You are a strange creature,” he said, “but it is a terrible night for any, be they comely or no. Come in and be dry.”

And so she came into his shelter, and the others of the Fianna who shared Diarmid’s tent began to flee, so hideous was she.

"Go to the further side of the tent," said Diarmid to them, "and let the creature come to the warmth of the fire."

They went to the one side, and they let her be at the fire, but she had not been long at the fire, when she came and sought to be under the warmth of Diarmid’s blanket together with himself.

"You are too bold," said Diarmid. "First you ask to come in, now you ask to share the warmth of my bed. But very well, you may do so.”

She went under the blanket, and he turned a fold of it between them. She was not long in his bed, when he gave a start, and he gazed at her, and he saw the finest woman that ever was, from the beginning of the universe till the end of the world. He shouted out to the rest to come over where he was, and he said to them:

"Is not this the most beauteous woman that man ever saw!"

"She is," they said, “the most beautiful woman that man ever saw."

She was asleep, and she did not know that they were looking at her. He let her sleep, and he did not awaken her, but a short time after that she awoke, and she said to him, "Are you awake Diarmid?"

"I am awake," said Diarmid.

"If you could build the very finest castle ever seen, where would you have it built?"

"Up above Ben Eudainn, if I had my choice," and Diarmid slept, and she said no more to him.

There one of the Fianna went out early, before the day, riding, and he saw a castle built up upon a hill. He cleared his sight to see if it was surely there; then he saw it, and he went home, and he did not say a word.

Another went out, and he saw it, and he did not say a word. Then the day was brightening, and two came in telling that the castle was most surely there.

Said she, as she rose up sitting, "Arise Diarmid, go up to your castle."

He looked out, and he saw a castle, and he came back to her.

“I will go up to the castle, if you’ll go with me."

They went to the castle, the two of them, and her hand was in his. Meat and drink were laid out on the tables, and there were maid servants, and men servants to attend them, and a fine greyhound bitch with three pups by the fire. And all was just as Diarmid would have it.

They spent three days in the castle together, and at the end of three days she said to him, "You are sorrowful, because you are not with your friends.”

He would not answer.

"You had best go with the Fianna, and your meat and drink will be no worse than they are here," said she, and she turned away from him.

He was angered and he went away when he heard that. He soon reached the people of the Fianna, and Fionn, the brother of his mother, but they all had ill will to him, because the woman had come first to them, and that they had turned their backs to her, and Diarmid had not, and the matter had turned out so well for him.

It was not long before Diarmid regretted that he had left the beautiful damsel, and he went to ask her pardon, but when he climbed the mountain there was no castle, nor a stone left of it on another. He began to weep, and he said to himself that he would not rest till he should find her.

Away he went and took his way across the glens. There was neither house nor ember in his way. He was going on, and met a shepherd.

"Did you see, this day or yesterday, a woman taking this way?" said Diarmid to the shepherd.

"I saw a woman early in the morning yesterday, and she was walking hard," said the shepherd.

"What way was she going?"

"She went down to the shore of the sea, and I saw her no more."

Diarmid took the very road that she took, till there was no going any further. He sat on a knoll by the shore, and he had not sat there long when he saw a boat coming, and one man in her, and he was rowing her.

He went down where the boat was, and he asked for passage and it was granted, and he climbed in. Then the boat went out over the sea, and to his wonder she went down under the waves. He thought he would drown, but when he opened his eyes he saw dry ground, and a fair plain on which he could walk. He went on this land, and he walked on.

He was but a short time walking, when he found a drop of blood hanging from the branch of a hawthorn. He took the blood, and he put it into a napkin, and he put it into his pouch.

He was a while walking, and he saw another drop of blood on a hawthorn branch, and he took it, and put it into his pouch. He fell in with the next one, and he did the like with it. Then what should he see a short space from him, after that, but a woman, wild and unkempt as though she were crazed, gathering rushes. He went towards her, and he asked her what news she had. "I cannot tell my news till I gather the rushes," said she.

"Be telling it while you are gathering," said Diarmid.

"I am in great haste," said she.

"What place is here?" said he.

"There is here," said she, "Rioghachd Fo Thuinn, Realm Under-waves."

"What use have you for rushes?" said Diarmid.

"The daughter of King Under-waves has come home, and she was seven years under spells, and she is ill, and the leeches of Christendom are gathered, and none are doing her good, and a bed of rushes is what she alone finds will soothe her.”

"Well then, I would be in your debt if you see me to where that woman is."

"I will see to that. I will put you into the sheaf of rushes, and I will take you with me on my back."

“That is a thing you cannot do," scoffed Diarmid.

"Be that upon me," said she.

She put Diarmid into the bundle, and she took him on her back.

When she reached the damsel’s chamber she let down the bundle.

"Oh! hasten that to me," said the daughter of King Under-waves.

The Diarmid sprang out of the bundle, and sprang to meet her, and they seized each other's hands, and there was great joy between them.

"I am not well, and I will not be. Every time I thought of you when I was coming home, I lost a drop of the blood of my heart."

"Well then, I have got these three drops of your heart's blood, take them in a drink, and there will be nothing amiss."

"Well then, I will not take them," said she; "they will not do me a shade of good, since I cannot get one thing and I shall never get that in the world."

"What thing is that?" said he.

"There is no good in telling thee that; thou wilt not get it, nor any man in the world; it has discomfitted them for long."

"If it be on the surface of the world I will get it. Just tell me what it is," said Diarmid.

"Three draughts from the cup of Righ Magh an Ioghnaidh, the King of the Plain of Wonder, and no man ever got that, and I shall not get it."

"Oh! said Diarmid, "there are not on the surface of the world as many as will keep it from me. Tell me if that man be far from me."

"He is not; he is within a bound near my father, but a rivulet is there that can never be crossed, though it look to be narrow enough to leap over.”

He went away, and he reached the rivulet, and he walked into it, but no matter how many steps he took, the farther side came no closer.

"I cannot cross over it; that was true of her," said Diarmid.

Before he had let the word out of his mouth, there stood a little red-haired man in the midst of the rivulet, and he was fishing with a net for the quick bright fish.

"Diarmid, son of Duibhne, you are in straits," said he. “What would you give to a man who would bring you out of these straits? Come hither and put your foot on my palm."

"Oh! my foot cannot go into your palm," said Diarmid.

"It can."

Diarmid went, and he put his foot on his palm. "Now, Diarmid, it is to King Mag an Iunai that you are going, and I will go with your myself."

"So be it," said Diarmid. And the man carried him across the rivulet, and when he set him down on the far side, he said, “Tell the king of me, so that he may invite me in to feast with him. That is why I have brought these fine fish.”

Diarmid agreed, and set off and soon reached the house of King Wonderplain. He shouted for the cup to be sent out, or battle, or combat; and it was not the cup. There were sent out nine hundred Lugh ghaisgeach, and nine hundred Lan ghaisgeach, and in two hours he left not a man of them alive.

"Whence," said the king as he stood in his own great door, "came the man that has just brought my warriors to this pass? If it be the pleasure of the hero let him tell from whence he came."

"It is the pleasure of the hero; a hero of the people of the Fianna am I. I am Diarmid."

"Why did you not send in a message to say who your were, and I would not have sent my army upon thee and had them destroyed utterly. But come, what do you require?"

"I seek the cup that comes from your own hand for healing."

"No man ever got my cup of healing, but you shall, for I see that you are here for love.”

And so Diarmid got the cup from King Wonderplain. And they feasted together.

"I will now send a ship with you Diarmid," said the king, but Diarmid said that he had his own way back, and so he and the king parted from each other. But when Diarmid came to the rivulet, the little red-haired man was not there.

"There is no help for it," said he. "I shall not now get over the rivulet, and shame will not let me return to the king."

What should rise while the word was in his mouth but the little red man out of the rivulet, and he had a net full of fish.

"You are in straits, Diarmid."

"I am. I got the thing I desired, but I cannot get across with it."

"Well, now. Though you didn’t say a word of me to the king, nor had them bring me in to the castle, still, put your foot on my palm and I will take you over the stream."

Diarmid put his foot on his palm, and the man took him over the stream.

"Will you talk to me now Diarmid?" said he.

"I will," said Diarmid.

"You are going to heal the daughter of King Underwaves? She is the woman that you love best in the world?"

"Oh! it is she."

"Then go to the green well in the wood. There you will find a bottle, and you shall fill it with the water of the well. When you reach your fair damsel, pour the water in the king’s cup, and the three drops of blood. If she drink it, she shall be well, and live. But when she is healed, I tell you that you will no longer love her.”

"Oh! That shall not be," said Diarmid.

“It shall be so, and you shall not be able to hide it from her. And King Under-waves will come, and he will offer you much silver and gold for healing his daughter. Take not a jot of it, but ask only that the king should send a ship to take you back to the place you came from. Otherwise you will remain there forever in sorrow."

Diarmid went; he reached the green well in the wood; he got the bottle, and he filled it with water; he took it with him, and he reached the castle of King Under-waves. When he came in he was honoured and saluted.

"My fair Diarmid," said the damsel from her sickbed. “You have come, and you have brought the cup.”

"There was no man could have turned me back," said Diarmid. And when he saw again how beautiful she was, he was certain the little red man had lied.

He put the drops of blood into the water in the cup, and she drank it. And then she was whole and healthy, and he knew she would live. But it was as the little red man had said: Diarmid looked upon her and he felt no love for her. And when the fair damsel put her arms around Diarmid she knew that it was so, and she wept.

“You took pity upon me when I was a strange, ugly creature,” she said. “And then you loved me when you saw me as I truly am. And now I am well, and yours forever, and yet you are cold to me. I do not know why. Tell me why it is so.”

But Diarmid would not answer.

Then the king sent word throughout the town that she was healed, and music was raised, and lament laid down. The king came where Diarmid was, and he said to him, "Now, take as much silver as you wish for healing her, and you shall marry her."

"I will not take the damsel,” Diarmid said, “and I will not take anything but a ship to be sent with me to my home country."

A ship went with him, and he reached his home country; and his people greeted him with joy and pleasure that he had returned. But of his time in the land under the waves he would never speak.

[For a contemporary take on this tale, see "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains" by Neil Gaiman]

In the beginning was a story ...

2010-11-13T13:12:00.001-08:00

In the beginning there was a story:

“And God said ‘Let there be light….’” (The Bible)

“Ages ago the entire universe existed in an egg-shaped cloud…” (China)

“The world at first was only water and darkness, and all the animals lived above the sky….” (Cherokee)

“The entire Universe was thousands of times smaller than the head of a pin. Then it suddenly exploded in a Big Bang, and with that, time, space and matter were all created.” (Stephen Hawking)

“You slept and grew inside Mommy’s tummy for nine months until you were ready to come out, and then one day that’s what you did, and everyone was so happy to meet you ….” (Me, or you, or just about anyone)

We live in a universe bounded by Story. Whether it’s the entire cosmos or your own life, no matter how far back you go to find out where something came from, you’ll find a story there already waiting for you. A story someone else is telling you, or a story you have to create for yourself.

The past is nothing more than the stories we tell about it, and the same is true of the future. What will life be like a hundred years from now? How will the universe end? And more importantly, what’s going to happen to ME?

For physicists, the beginning and the ending of all things can be expressed in equations, but the rest of us can only imagine the past and the future in stories.

(And maybe mathematics is a kind of storytelling, too, with numbers instead of words.)

And what about the way things are now? Just where are we in the universe? How big is it? Why are we here? All of our questions lead to stories of one kind or another: myths and theories and belief systems are all stories.

In the beginning was a story. And right now is a story. Lots of them, actually. Big stories that almost everyone believes in, and smaller stories that usually don’t quite fit the big ones.

What story are you in?

The Fathomless Fire

2010-10-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

The publication of The Fathomless Fire, the second volume in my Perilous Realm trilogy, has been delayed, unfortunately. I'm told it won't be coming out until August 2011.

A long time to wait, if you've been following the story (as I have!) and have been wondering what's happening with Will Lightfoot and Shade the wolf and Rowen. So here, by way of apology for the long wait, and to whet your appetite, is a short excerpt from The Fathomless Fire:

Last night, Will talked to a shadow…

It was a warm night and he couldn’t sleep, so instead he started unpacking one of the boxes in his room labeled Will’s stuff. It was strange how packing up your things and then taking them out of a box later made you look at them in a new way. Some of these books and knick-knacks had been on his bedroom shelf for as long as he could remember, but jumbled up together in a box they looked like intriguing curiosities. He dug out an old storybook and slowly turned its yellowing pages. His mother used to read him these stories at bedtime when he was little. When he came to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, with the picture of the giant’s castle above the clouds, he stopped. He’d loved this story. He remembered how scared he was of the giant when he came after Jack, but oh how satisfying the ending was, when the beanstalk was chopped through and the giant fell to his earthshaking end.

One night when his mother was reading the story to him she’d shut the book and said, Our people have a story like this one, too.

She’d been gone for three years now, but as he sat with the book in his hands he could still hear her voice, as clearly as if she was right here with him.

Tell me that story, he’d asked her.

When she’d said our people she’d meant her ancestors, who had lived on the plains a long time ago, riding horses and hunting buffalo. She hardly ever spoke about her family’s past, and so when she did Will always sat still and listened eagerly. Since those plains people were his mother’s ancestors that meant they were Will’s, too, a thought that always gave him a strange feeling, a kind of homesickness for a world he’d never seen. And that night she’d told him the story of the boy who traveled to the mountain above the clouds and stole back the rain from the Sky Folk. At first his mother just called the hero of the story the boy, but when Will asked her what his name she said his people called him the boy who is light of foot, or Lightfoot for short. He was thrilled that the hero’s name was the same as his. Only much later did he realize that his mother had added that detail on the spur of the moment, just to please him. I think he was probably a lot like you, his mother had said.

The story was even better than Jack and the Beanstalk. The boy called Lightfoot had many adventures on his way to the Sky Mountain, adventures that Will’s mother told him night after night for a long time before they moved on to other stories and other books. Whenever she finished one of her Lightfoot stories and was tucking him in for the night, he would always ask her for just one more. And she would tilt her head, and say …

A gust of wind swept in through the open window, sending papers flying and knocking over the reading lamp on the table beside Will’s bed. Before he could catch it, the lamp landed on the rug and the shade sprang off the bulb. Will hopped off the bed and rescued the shade before it rolled under the bed. As he was about to put it back on the lamp, he heard a sound behind him. A very distinct and unmistakable cough. The kind of cough someone makes when they’re trying politely to get your attention.

He whirled around.

There was no one else in the room. The door was closed. All he saw was his own looming shadow, thrown by the bare bulb onto the far wall.

But there was another shadow, standing right next to his.

Another person-shape, where there shouldn’t be one. Will turned his head slowly, his heart pounding. There was no one beside him casting that other shadow.

“Hello,” said a voice.

Will screamed and raced for the door.

“Wait,” said the voice, although it was not quite a voice. More like the hollow echo of a voice. “Where are you going?”

Much to his own surprise, Will didn’t flee out the door and down the stairs. Instead he stopped, turned and faced the shadow. He wasn’t sure why, but it was at least partly the feeling, deep down, that this impossibility had something to do with that other world he had journeyed to, and had been thinking about ever since.

The shadow of someone who wasn’t there moved away from Will’s own shadow, toward the corner of the room. An old saggy armchair stood there, on which Will piled his clothes at the end of the day.

The shadow-person raised a shadow-hand and gestured to the chair.

“May I?” the voice asked. How a shadow could be speaking to him, Will didn’t know, but the voice sounded … right somehow. A shadow should sound like that, he thought, like the edges of a voice with everything in the middle taken away.

Will nodded his head slowly.

The shadow of someone dropped into the shadow of the chair with a long sigh.

“That’s better,” it said, patting the arms of the chair. “It wasn’t easy getting here, believe me. I’m a bit out of breath. I have to say I’ve never come this far before.”

“Where are you from?” Will asked.

There was a moment of silence.

“You don’t really need me to answer that,” the shadow replied, with the slightest tinge of sarcasm.

“No, I guess not. What are … who are you?”

“That’s a better question. Unfortunately, the answer is that I’m not anybody. I’m a shadow.”

“A shadow of who?”

“Just a shadow. No who.”

“But every shadow is a shadow of something.”

“Maybe. But never mind that. I’ve got a task to perform, so I’d better get to it before my time is up. I’m here to warn you.”

“Warn me about what?”

The shadow seemed to lean forward in the shadow of the chair.

“Terrible things. A friend in great danger.”

Will thought of Rowen and her grandfather the loremaster. And Shade, the wolf. The shadow could only be talking about one of them.

“I was with my friends just a few days ago,” he said, bewildered. “They were fine when I left. They were safe. What’s happened?”

The shadow sat back again.

“That’s all I can tell you. Terrible things. A friend in great danger.”

Will stared at the shadow. This was the shape of a person, all right, but nothing more than that. There was no face, nobody to look at. Which made everything it said doubtful. This could be the shadow of anyone.

“Who sent you?” Will asked.

“No one sent me. I’m here because it’s what must be.”

“Well, who told you my friends are in danger?”

The shadow had no eyes, but Will had the odd feeling that if it had, it would have been rolling them in annoyance.

“No one told me. I serve no one. I’m just here, simple as that, with a warning for you. I’ll repeat it again if you like: Terrible things. A friend—“

“Is that all you can say?” Will broke in, his alarm turning to anger.

“That’s all I can say.”

“Meaning you don’t know anything more, or you won’t tell me?”

The shadow sat for a moment in silence, then hoisted itself out of the shadow armchair with a grunt of effort.

“That’s a comfortable chair. But I’ve done what I came to do. Now if you’ll excuse me --”

“No, wait. If you know more, you have to tell me. Are these terrible things happening now, or are they going to happen soon …?”

“As I said, I’ve done what I came to do. I can’t give out any further information. The laws forbid it.”

The shadow seemed to dim slightly, and Will was afraid it would disappear.

“What laws?” he asked quickly. “Please, I’m not from your world. I don’t understand.”

“The laws of Story, of course. I exist because of those laws. Or I suppose you could say I am one of the laws.”

“But there’s more you could tell me, right? It sounds like you know more than you’re saying.”

The shadow sighed.

“Listen. What I am is a shadow of things to come. Things that haven’t happened yet. My task is to bring warnings or hints about what’s on the way. Hints that most folk choose to ignore, unfortunately. But that’s their problem. All I do is foretell, and what I do is what I am. And that’s all.”

“But you could say more if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

“A shadow has no wants,” it said mechanically, as if reciting something it had said already many times. “A shadow does not give directions, explanations, or advice. A shadow is its task and nothing more.”

“But you’ve already broken the law,” Will said eagerly, the idea forming even as he spoke. “You told me what you are and what you do. So you’ve given me an explanation.”

The shadow went still, as if it was surprised by what Will had said, and then it chuckled, a hollow sound like raindrops falling into a tin pail.

“I’ve bent the rules. I never did that before. It must be because I’m so far from home…”

“It won’t hurt anything,” Will said, though he had no idea if that was true or not. “So you can go ahead and tell me more.

The shadow didn’t answer right away. It wavered and bobbed, as if it was being cast now by a flickering candle flame.

“I will not,” the shadow said with what sounded to Will like a note of fear in its voice. “I’m … I’m a shadow of things to come. That’s all I am. And my time is almost up. I have to …”

“Wait, please.”

The shadow had grown even harder to see, but at Will’s entreaty it grew darker and more defined again.

“I can’t tell you what terrible things are coming,” the shadow said, “because I really don’t know. I don’t know what danger your friends are in.” The shadow had almost faded away to nothing. “All I know is that you’re needed in the story, and you have to get back right away.”

“How do I get back?”

“The same way you left,” the shadow’s voice said, but from where, Will couldn’t tell, because it had already vanished.

In a daze Will looked around his room, as if he might find the shadow still lurking somewhere. He saw the fallen lamp, picked it up and set it back on the table. Then his eyes fell on the storybook, sprawled open on the floor. Jack and the Beanstalk. He remembered that just before the shadow appeared he’d been thinking about what his mother’s always told him when he asked for one more story at bedtime.

Don’t worry, she would say. The story will wait for us.

But what about his story, and Rowen’s, he wondered now. Would it wait?

Ogre

2010-10-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

In the Perilous Realm you’re likely, sooner or later, to meet ogres. They have become more and more familiar denizens of Story these days, no doubt largely as a result of computer and roleplaying games like Warcraft, in which they appear quite often. In these games, and the guidebooks and manuals that have spun off from them, ogres have been catalogued by way of various species, tribes, races, etc. You can, for example, encounter an “ogre mage,” which is surprising, given that ogres are traditionally thought of as brutish hateful creatures without much in the way of brains. Rarely (if ever) in stories does a hero go to consult a wise old ogre.

But what really interests me is the word ogre itself. Looking into its etymology, one finds that the word first appears in French literature, in a 12th century poem about the Aruthurian knight Percival, where these lines appear:

et s'est escrit que il ert ancore
que toz li reaumes de Logres,
qui ja dis fu la terre as ogres,
ert destruite par cele lance …

Which translates roughly to something like: “and there will come a time / when the kingdom of Logres [England], / which was once the land of ogres / shall be destroyed by that spear …”

I almost have to wonder if the poet invented the word ogre in order to find something to rhyme with an odd word like Logres. From there, however, the word ogre shows up more and more frequently in poems and stories through the ages, usually to describe some sort of large, savage, nasty being, somewhere in size between a goblin and a giant. I always used to wonder why there were no ogres in Tolkien’s books, only trolls, until I discovered that his word for goblin, orc, may have been derived from the Italian word for ogre, orco, which may itself come from a far older word for some sort of evil creature. As usual with Professor Tolkien, it was an interesting old word that sparked his imagination and led to the creation of a new creature. And sometimes that is how the Perilous Realm grows: the word comes first, and something has to be invented in order to fit it.

Storytelling inns

2010-09-12T23:14:00.001-07:00

The Golden Goose tavern in the city of Fable is not the only place in the Perilous Realm where Storyfolk gather to share the tales they’ve heard or lived.

In a part of the Realm known as the Twilight Land, there is an Inn of the Sign of Mother Goose. You have to be careful approaching the Mother Goose Inn. As one earlier traveler told it: “I would have floated past the Inn, and perhaps have gotten into the Land of Never-Come-Back-Again, only I caught at the branch of an apple tree, and so I stopped myself…”

The traveler, having saved himself from a one-way trip to Never-Come-Back-Again, went on into the tap-room of the inn, and this is what he found there:

“There they all were, every one of them. Aladdin and Ali Baba, and Fortunatus, and Jack-the-Giant-Killer, and Dr Faustus, and Bidpai, and Cinderella, and Patient Grizzel, and the Soldier who cheated the Devil, and St George, and Hans in Luck … and there was Sinbad the Sailor, and the tailor who killed seven flies with one blow, and the Fisherman who fished up the Genie, and the Lad who fiddled for the Devil in the bramble bush, and the Blacksmith who made Death sit in his apple tree, and Boots, who always marries a princess, whether he wants to or not – a ragtag lot as ever you saw in your life, gathered from every place, and brought together in Twilight Land.”

And each of these Storyfolk was taking a turn telling a story, just as the pilgrims did on their way to Canterbury at the Tabard Inn, and just as Storyfolk have done for ages in Fable. But they don’t tell their own stories, the ones we know; instead they tell other stories that they have heard.

[To read these stories told by storybook characters, look for the book Twilight Land by the American artist and writer Howard Pyle]

There are many other such storytelling inns throughout the Perilous Realm, they say, and perhaps beyond it. For example, I have heard of a place called the Inn of the World’s End: “a free house” as the sign outside declares. This is a place where travelers journeying between stories may take shelter during strange storms that herald the onset of momentous, reality-changing events.

(For further information, see World’s End, a graphic novel in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman).

Postscript: I personally know of three travelers who've returned from the Land of Never-Come-Back-Again. There is at present a petition being circulated through the Realm to have the name of this land changed to Probably-Never-Come-Back-Again.

She sat by my fire

2010-09-04T15:32:00.000-07:00

She sat by my fire,
the old storyteller,
she opened her mouth
and the words grew a world.
The giving rain fell
and in a wink the wind
swept its curtains away
and the sun plunged
from the clouds
on her bucking bronco

and the trees looked up
and laughed leaves.

Lucky miller's sons,
plucky goose girls,
gorgeous-cloaked charlatans
and apple-hearted fools,
they all took once more to the told roads
of the busy trodden world,
and the threads of their journeys
wove a patchwork garment
over the cold marrowless bones
of time.

She sat and made stories,
and then I saw that we were longer
in my house by the fire,
we were nestled in the ark
of her gathered tales
built of the dry timbers of her voice,
she and I and all the fabled beasts,
while outside the sea of night heaved and hammered
but did not get in.

Merlin's Ring

2010-08-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

I first read this novel when I was a teenager in the 1970's. I was blown away by its epic narrative sweep and by the beautiful, transcendent story of its heroes, the Roman-Aztec warrior Gwalchmai and his beloved Corenice, an immortal Atlantean woman, as they lose and find one another again and again through the ages, and through many worlds of myth, legend and history.

I knew nothing about the author when I first read the book all those years ago, but recently I happened to be browsing the old paperbacks on my shelves and I found my battered Ballantine copy of the novel, and decided to read it again for the first time in decades. It had held up remarkably well after all these years, and now, in this age of the internet, I finally did some searching to learn more about the author. His story is more curious than I would have guessed, and rather sad as well, since it's clear he has been far underrated as a writer of fantasy.

Here's the story of H Warner Munn and the world of Merlin's Ring.

The Death of King Arthur

2010-08-23T21:18:00.000-07:00

It was not to win renown that King Arthur had gone far across the sea, for he loved his own country so well, that to gain glory at home made him happiest of all.

But a false knight with his followers was laying waste the country across the sea, and Arthur had gone to wage war against him.

"And you, Sir Mordred, will rule the country while I am gone," the King had said. And the knight smiled as he thought of the power that would be his.

At first the people missed their great King Arthur, but as the months passed they began to forget him, and to talk only of Sir Mordred and his ways.

And he, that he might gain the people's praise, made easier laws than ever Arthur had done, till by and by there were many in the country who wished that the King would never come back. When Mordred knew what the people wished, he was glad, and he made up his mind to do a cruel deed.

He would cause letters to be written from beyond the sea, and the letters would tell that the great King Arthur had been slain in battle.

And when the letters came the people read, "King Arthur is dead," and they believed the news was true.

And there were some who wept because the noble King was slain, but some had no time to weep. "We must find a new King," they said. And because his laws were easy, these chose Sir Mordred to rule over them.

The wicked knight was pleased that the people wished him to be their King. "They shall take me to Canterbury to crown me," he said proudly. And the nobles took him there, and amid shouts and rejoicings he was crowned.

But it was not very long till other letters came from across the sea, saying that King Arthur had not been slain, and that he was coming back to rule over his own country once more.

When Sir Mordred heard that King Arthur was on his way home, he collected a great army and went to Dover to try to keep the King from landing.

But no army would have been strong enough to keep Arthur and his knights away from the country they loved so well. They fought fiercely till they got on shore and scattered all Sir Mordred's men.

Then the knight gathered together another army, and chose a new battle-field.

But King Arthur fought so bravely that he and his men were again victorious, and Sir Mordred fled to Canterbury.

Many of the people began to forsake the false knight now, and saying that he was a traitor, they went back to King Arthur.

But still Sir Mordred wished to conquer the King. He would go through the counties of Kent and Surrey and raise a new army.

Now King Arthur had dreamed that if he fought with Sir Mordred again he would be slain. So when he heard that the knight had raised another army, he thought, "I will meet this traitor who has betrayed me. When he looks in my face, he will be ashamed and remember his vow of obedience."

And he sent two bishops to Sir Mordred. "Say to the knight that the King would speak with him alone," said Arthur.

And the traitor thought, "The King wishes to give me gold or great power, if I send my army away without fighting." "I will meet King Arthur," he said to the bishops.

But because he did not altogether trust the King he said he would take fourteen men with him to the meeting-place, "and the King must have fourteen men with him too," said Sir Mordred. "And our armies shall keep watch when we meet, and it a sword is lifted it shall be the signal for battle."

Then King Arthur arranged a feast for Sir Mordred and his men. And as they feasted all went merrily till an adder glided out of a little bush and stung one of the knight's men. And the pain was so great, that the man quickly drew his sword to kill the adder.

And when the armies saw the sword flash in the light, they sprang to their feet and began to fight, "for this is the signal for battle," they thought.

And when evening came there were many thousand slain and wounded, and Sir Mordred was left alone. But Arthur had still two knights with him, Sir Lucan and Sir Bedivere.

When King Arthur saw that his army was lost and all his knights slain but two, he said, "Would to God I could find Sir Mordred, who has caused all this trouble."

"He is yonder," said Sir Lucan, "but remember your dream, and go not near him."

"Whether I die or live," said the King, "he shall not escape." And seizing his spear he ran to Sir Mordred, crying, "Now you shall die."

And Arthur smote him under the shield, and the spear passed through his body, and he died.

Then, wounded and exhausted, the King fainted, and his knights lifted him and took him to a little chapel not far from a lake.

As the King lay there, he heard cries of fear and pain from the distant battle-field.

"What causes these cries?" said the King wearily. And to soothe the sick King, Sir Lucan said he would go to see.

And when he reached the battle-field, he saw in the moonlight that robbers were on the field stooping over the slain, and taking from them their rings and their gold. And those that were only wounded, the robbers slew, that they might take their jewels too.

Sir Lucan hastened back, and told the King what he had seen.

"We will carry you farther off, lest the robbers find us here," said the knights. And Sir Lucan lifted the King on one side and Sir Bedivere lifted him on the other.

But Sir Lucan had been wounded in the battle, and as he lifted the King he fell back and died.

Then Arthur and Sir Bedivere wept for the fallen knight.

Now the King felt so ill that he thought he would not live much longer, and he turned to Sir Bedivere: "Take Excalibur, my good sword," he said, "and go with it to the lake, and throw it into its waters. Then come quickly and tell me what you see."

Sir Bedivere took the sword and went down to the lake. But as he looked at the handle with its sparkling gems and the richness of the sword, he thought he could not throw it away. "I will hide it carefully here among the rushes," thought the knight. And when he had hidden it, he went slowly to the King and told him he had thrown the sword into the lake.

"What did you see?" asked the King eagerly.

"Nothing but the ripple of the waves as they broke on the beach," said Sir Bedivere.

"You have not told me the truth," said the King. "If you love me, go again to the lake, and throw my sword into the water."

Again the knight went to the water's edge. He drew the sword from its hiding-place. He would do the King's will, for he loved him. But again the beauty of the sword made him pause. "It is a noble sword; I will not throw it away," he murmured, as once more he hid it among the rushes. Then he went back more slowly, and told the King that he had done his will.

"What did you see?" asked the King.

"Nothing but the ripples of the waves as they broke on the beach," repeated the knight.

"You have betrayed me twice," said the King sadly, "and yet you are a noble knight! Go again to the lake, and do not betray me for a rich sword."

Then for the third time Sir Bedivere went to the water's edge, and drawing the sword from among the rushes, he flung it as far as he could into the lake.

And as the knight watched, an arm and a hand appeared above the surface of the lake. He saw the hand seize the sword, and shaking it three times, disappear again under the water. Then Sir Bedivere went back quickly to the King, and told him what he had seen.

"Carry me to the lake," entreated Arthur, "for I have been here too long."

And the knight carried the King on his shoulders down to the water's side. There they found a barge lying, and seated in it were three Queens, and each Queen wore a black hood. And when they saw King Arthur they wept.

"Lay me in the barge," said the King. And when Sir Bedivere had laid him there, King Arthur rested his head on the lap of the fairest Queen. And they rowed from land.

Sir Bedivere, left alone, watched the barge as it drifted out of sight, and then he went sorrowfully on his way, till he reached a hermitage. And he lived there as a hermit for the rest of his life.

And the barge was rowed to a vale where the King was healed of his wound.

And some say that now he is dead, but others say that King Arthur will come again, and clear the country of its foes.

-- from Stories of King Arthur's Knights by Mary MacGregor

2010-08-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

There was a recent item in the news about a historian who claims to have discovered King Arthur's Round Table:

Historians find King Arthur's Round Table

What’s interesting is that according to a lot of other historians there never was a King Arthur. There may have been a warrior or leader named Arthur who lived in Roman or Dark Age Britain and fought the Saxon invaders, but next to nothing is known about him, and most of the earliest historical sources for that period don’t even mention him. The writer Bernard Cornwell speculates that this omission may be because Arthur was a pagan and the early Christian writers of Britain were hostile to him.

But there was and is and always will be a King Arthur, alive and well in the realm of Story. That’s where his adventures take place, and that’s where he returned after his last battle. If you want to go looking for Arthur, the road to the Perilous Realm is the path to take.

The stories about King Arthur that one will find on this road are many and varied, old and new, epic and sometimes silly. When so many legends and tales gather around one character or event over a long time, it becomes known as a mythos

The Arthurian mythos is truly vast, and every year sees more King Arthur stories added to it. Some of my own favourites are Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck. I’m also a big fan of the movies Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Years ago I created my own King Arthur graphic novel, which is somewhere in a box of my old papers … I’ll have to dig it up again someday.

Atlantis, part 3

2010-07-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

In ancient times the people of Atlantis were blessed with wisdom. They used their advanced arts and sciences for the benefit of all, not to increase the power and comfort of the few. The Atlanteans harnessed the power of the sun, the water, and their own minds to achieve wondrous things. But over time, the comforts and ease of life that they gained made them selfish, petty and quarrelsome. As a people they became greedy and warlike, and used their knowledge to create new technology and terrible new weapons, with which they conquered other peoples and ruled over them like gods. The Atlanteans became masters of the planet, but in so doing they lost the wisdom that had once guided them. They forgot the true power that came from their own hearts and minds, and began instead to worship the machines that brought air, land and sea under their control.

According to Plato, Zeus grew angry at the aggression and arrogance of the Atlanteans and he punished them by destroying their island and sinking it under the waves. In our time, various prophets and visionaries have come up with their own explanations for the fall of Atlantis. In one such story, the Atlanteans developed a power source using immense crystals. At first the crystals were used for good, but an evil faction among the people took power and used the crystals wrecklessly, as weapons. The result was a catastrophic explosion that sank the island. Other writers suggest the island was struck by an asteroid or suffered some other natural disaster, like a tsunami.

These three stories illustrate three main ways in which the story of Atlantis has been made use of: first, to give a lesson on the power of the gods, secondly, to warn us of the dangers of our own arrogant over-reliance on technology, and thirdly, perhaps to suggest that nature itself has the final say, no matter how powerful we humans think we are.

It's no wonder the story of Atlantis has captivated our imaginations for centuries. Like any myth, it's a story that can have many meanings, and yet not be exhausted by the meanings that we find in it.

Atlantis, part 2

2010-06-23T18:43:00.000-07:00

Over the centuries, many have believed that the people of Atlantis, or at least some of them, survived the sinking of their homeland and became underwater dwellers.

The most popular version of this myth shows up in comic books. Both DC's Aquaman and Marvel's Prince Namor are monarchs of the sunken civilization of Atlantis (and both, interestingly, are cranky and given to suspicion, if not outright hatred, of surface dwellers.

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Many novels have been written about this undersea civilization; there have been movies, TV shows, cartoons, and at least one song (Donovan's "Atlantis"). It's intriguing to imagine how different human life might be in a world of water. Would Atlanteans wear clothing? Would they have books? What would their pastimes and sports be like? And wouldn't they be keen to find out what was up there, above the water? As keen as we are to explore the depths of the ocean?

Imagine what would happen if a book fell overboard from a passing ship and an Atlantean found it and tried to figure out what this strange object was:

It was rectangular, and covered in a dry, stiff green skin. I thought at first it was some kind of box, but as I turned it over it seemed to come apart in my hands. The “box” was really a stack of superthin white membranes of some fibrous material that had been compressed together by the green cloth. I made a sound of alarm, thinking that the membranes were about to spill to the floor, but then I saw that they were all affixed somehow to the skin covering on one side. I quickly grasped that this had been done to keep the membranes in a particular order: one could manipulate them back and forth without having to worry that they would slip out or become disorganized. I also noted the black rows of markings on both sides of each membrane, arranged in neat rectangular “boxes” of their own. The markings or symbols had not been carved or incised into the membranes; rather, they seemed to have been impressed there with some liquid medium that had later dried. I understood that these markings formed a text, such as we Atlanteans might have traced in the water with our pouches of squid ink. This text, however, was so long that a device for holding it all together had been found necessary. However, the reader could not swim through the text, or come at it from different angles, as we could. These land dwellers were limited to the shape and order that had been predetermined by whoever had bound together the membranes within the skin. Their only freedom from this order, it seemed to me, would be to place a marker of some kind at a certain point between the membranes, and move back or forward from there to another place.

[from The Logogryph, by Thomas Wharton, copyright 2004]

Atlantis

2010-06-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

The island / continent of Atlantis was first mentioned in two dialogues of the Greek philosopher Plato. He asserted that the Atlanteans sank in a cataclysm of earthquake and flood thousands of years ago.

Since Plato was generally thought of as a truthful sort of fellow, people have spent the past couple of millennia trying either to find Atlantis or to speculate on where it might have been. Despite the fact that Plato said the island was located in the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, various "experts" have located it in just about every other part of the globe, including places on dry land.

The thing these experts don't realize is that they will never find Atlantis by looking for it under the ocean floor or in ancient ruins. That's because it exists only in one place, the Realm of Story.

In the next couple of posts I'll have more to say about Atlantis and what you might find there.

Announcement:

2010-06-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

The Shadow of Malabron has been nominated for next year's Red Cedar Award.

Book trailer of the Shadow of Malabron

2010-05-08T12:07:00.001-07:00

"The Shadow of Malabron" - Book Trailer from Chris Hill on Vimeo.

This is the book trailer for The Shadow of Malabron created by a very talented former writing student of mine, Chris Hill, along with Nathan Brown of Swashbuckler Productions. Much thanks and appreciation also to Conor Wharton (Will Lightfoot), Jess Bell (Rowen), James Cadden (the Angel), Patrick Kerr (the motorcycle rider), and Kiefer the "wolf" (and his owner Azal Abedi).

2010-02-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

Illustration of Walter Stenström's The boy and the trolls or The Adventure in childrens' anthology Among pixies and trolls, a collection of childrens' stories, 1915.

2010-02-17T15:56:00.000-08:00

Troll under a bridge in Seattle