and the others shout: Play on, play through.
As if it were life.
As perhaps it is.
Blown Away
I always try to write a short story for an anthology when asked. Usually the deadline is so far away, it seems a likelihood that I’ll finish in time. But sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Often I’ve forgotten I said yes, until the last minute when the editor asks plaintively if I’ve finished, and then I have to admit I got stuck. Usually that means I’m not in the book.
Not from want of wanting. Not from want of trying. Just because I find it hard to deliver magic on demand.
When I was asked about writing for Oz Reimagined, I remembered a poem I’d written and sold that had a line about wanting to read a story about a dog on wheels. That became the beginning of the story, but as with many of my stories (and poems) things veered left or south after that. Of all the possible stories I mention in the poem, “Blown Away” is the only one I’ve actually written. Maybe I should try more.
So “Blown Away” began with that image. And for the first half dozen or so revisions, the story was called “The Dog on Wheels.” Being in Oz, of course the dog had to be Toto. But what a strange ride this tale was. None of it planned and yet suddenly in the end all of it seemed of a piece. I’m not sure how that happened. Magic? Hard work? A brilliant muse? All of the above? Plus a visual cue: I found an old photograph in an antique store and thought, “That’s Dorothy before Oz.” A poem came from it . . . and it became how I envisioned the young Dorothy in my story.
The editor asked for the title change. Actually he came up with it. It makes better sense for the story as a whole. But I still think of the piece as “The Dog on Wheels.”
Dorothy Before Oz
There’s a flatness in her eyes and smile
from the prairie years, a shyness, too,
as if she prefers animals to people.
She knows twisters, they’re part of her life,
but fear doesn’t show in her eyes.
Neither does humor.
She’s been cleaned up for the photograph,
the dust of home, the grayness scrubbed,
but it’s still in her stare.
Oz is ahead, the colored lands,
talking animals, men of metal, scarecrows,
leading a troop against a witch.
I see her returning home changed,
becoming a missionary in Africa,
as odd in her mind as Oz, but reachable.
Bones in her ears, pet monkeys,
wearing dashikis. “Gone native,”
Aunt Em writes, a bit of Kansas
stuck between her teeth.
Dorothy sends but two words back.
“Finding home.”
A Knot of Toads
I live three to four months a year in Scotland, and so I write a lot of Scottish-based poetry. Various editors in Scotland ask me to submit stories and poems to anthologies and I try to comply whenever I can. Glasgow WorldCon was coming up, and I was Guest of Honor. It was a tough time, as my husband had cancer and was starting into chemo, so I ended up going for only two days. I’d been asked for a Scottish short story for a fantasy anthology that was going to be debuting at the convention—Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction compiled by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson. The book was among the finalists for the 2006 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology and my story got picked up by a Best of the Year anthology.
However, it almost didn’t get written. The opening was based on a fragment of a story written by Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) about a toad. James, who published under the name M. R. James, was an English author, medievalist scholar, and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and of Eton College. I was a big fan of his stories.
Though James’s work as a medievalist is still highly regarded, he is best remembered for his ghost tales. James redefined the ghost story, abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors.
So there I was with about a page’s worth of toad story going nowhere, sitting in my short story folder for a year or two. And only when I got the request from the Scottish publisher and remembered the fragment did I finally know what to do with that first couple of paragraphs. The story is set in the small Fife town of St. Monans about twenty minutes from my Scottish home, so research was pretty easy. I spent time at the church, a lovely building on the headlands. The church had some pamphlets that proved helpful. And I had a couple of books about Scottish witches that proved useful as well, for witches play a part in the story. In fact, this story went together so easily once I got started on it again—just as my life was falling apart—that I was thankful to have it to work on.
I Am the Apple
I am the apple
dappled by sun,
polished by rain,
garnished by galls,
cut by the witch,
stitched by her hand,
injected with poison,
suspected by none.
The Quiet Monk
The story of the hidden grave reported in a book by the Tudor Antiquary Bale had always fascinated me. Between two pyramids in Glastonbury Abbey was a buried casket of hollowed oak reputedly engraved (in Latin) The Once and Future King. When it was unearthed and opened, it was seen that the casket contained two bodies, one a woman’s bones crowned with golden hair that when exposed to the air, turned to dust.
Our modern take on the story of the two bodies in the hollowed oak is that they were not—as legend has it—Arthur and Guenivere. The monks simply made up a story to help fund the rebuilding of the abbey which had been mostly destroyed by a fire in 1184. It was a publicity trick to bring in more pilgrim visitors.
For years I had that stored in a file folder waiting to be used. After Merlin’s Booke came out—my fantasy short stories about Merlin—I wanted to do Guinevere’s Booke, and after that Arthur’s Booke. This was the second Guinevere story I’d written for it.
Alas, the publisher was not interested in a trilogy of linked Arthurian stories and poems. So I sent the story to Asimov’s magazine, where it was first published in 1988, and then had several reprintings thereafter.
The trilogy is still laying dormant, dead in its own oak tree, should anyone want to talk to me about writing it.
Oak Casket
It’s a Druid thing,
casking in an oak,
human bones being
finer than wine.
They lie together here,
man and woman
closer than when
they ruled a kingdom
and lies drove them apart.
The heart is a puzzle
not easily solved.
But pieced together
in the tomb
a part becomes two
partners one,
the druid’s work
done for eternity
or history, whichever
finds them first.
The Bird
Early morning December 20, 2016, about four days before I was to turn in the final pieces of this book, I wrote a new short story—two drafts early, and later in the day two drafts more.
I had been thinking about writing a new story ever since Tachyon bought the collection, even had several ideas that didn’t pan out. (The white whale in Moby Dick as an alien spaceship was one. Tam O’Shanter finding his own wife at the witches’ dance another. A Pre-Raphaelite–based tale using Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” poem a third.) They may get written a month or a year or a decade from now but not in time for this book.
I’ve long been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, though his personal life was messy even for a writer. Hard to live, but great stuff for a story. The idea for this story arrived pretty much whole cloth not because of Poe or his poem or his difficult love life, but because the bird reminded me of the damned budgie my son Jason owned when he was about seven. He let it fly free in his bedroom. I hated that bird because of the mess it
made when sitting on the bookcases or perching on picture frames. But being a good—no, a great—mom, when the bird died, I gave it mouth-to-beak resuscitation and it lived for another six months before I let it die the True Death. Also, the few weeks before I wrote this story, I’d been mired in bird research for a different book that was due right after this one was to be turned in. So I had corvid material already in hand.
Donna Plays Fiddle at Her Mother’s Wake
There is a note much higher than an angel’s wing,
and pure.
If I believed in anything, then this
would make me sure.
I see that holy moment, a monument
so clear,
as if God’s apron hem was solid, lucent,
and quite near.
There’s nothing that’s more sacred than this music
sounds to me,
except a tiny line or two of perfect
poetry.
When Donna plays her fiddle, I can hear the birds
all sing:
eternity like wind through feathers
on a raven’s wing.
Belle Bloody Merciless Dame
I was getting my master’s in Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, but was able to take a course in The Ballad at my old alma mater, Smith College. One of the poems we read—and I wrote a paper on—was “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” by John Keats, who wrote the poem in 1819 using the phrase he’d found in a courtly French ballad of 1424. My paper was a bit snarky about the Dame, seeing her as a kind of Bohemian free love girl based on someone from the sixties I’d known. And I looked back to that old friend, but forward to my house in Scotland, where I knew I could write about those pubs, those hillsides, those stupid young men.
Maiden v. Unicorn
Not much of a battle, the ending
known in advance, a glance
from that simpering girl, a lap
unfolding like a net, and the unicorn
caught in the amber of legend.
I would have watched from under a tree,
as he grazed on acorns, walnuts,
the exact crunch of them like a heartbeat.
I’d measure his beauty with my eyes,
not lead him, like a Vichy collaborator,
into the brownshirts’ trap.
But love, or its partner in crime, desire,
makes maidens foolish. Men
do not favor us for our cooperation
but hang our skins next to the golden horns,
on their trophy walls.
The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown
This began as part of a different short story called “The Barbarian and the Queen: Thirteen Views,” which was published in 2001 in Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Starlight 3 and of which Publishers Weekly said, “Jane Yolen’s series of set pieces, ‘The Barbarian and the Queen: Thirteen Views,’ offers surprising insights into the nature of, well, barbarians and queens (how about sword-toting exotic dancers and drag queens?).”
I liked the small premise in “The Barbarian and the Queen” of Disraeli and Queen Victoria’s conversation so much that I’d long wanted to write it in an entire story on its own. But I hadn’t gotten around to it. So when I was invited into Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, I got the push I needed. Along the way I learned some fascinating stuff about Disraeli’s life. A Jew (but Christian convert) who lived from 1804 to 1881, he served two times as prime minister, was first earl of Beaconsfield, and wrote ten published novels as well as some slim volumes of poetry. I learned as well about anti-Semitism in Victorian England, and cabbalistic magic. One of the true pleasures in being a writer is having the leisure to learn new stuff all the time.
Mission
Her mother sometimes brings home scraps
from the sewing she does for the queen.
One day she makes a hood the color
of a rich woman’s fingernails,
bright as sun going down
behind the mountain,
deep as trillium by the river,
warm as blood.
When the girl puts the hood on
to walk through the woods,
no one can touch her.
The hood is a sign.
The basket carries her heart.
The trees point sharp fingers.
But only the wolf knows the way.
The Gift of the Magicians
This satire is a response to the very famous short, powerful, and moralistic story by O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi.” O. Henry was the pen name for William Sydney Porter, and his story was allegedly written in Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place in New York City. O. Henry was famous for his twist endings. The story’s original publication was in the New York Sunday World on December 10, 1905, and has remained a sentimental Christmas favorite ever since. It has been adapted for movies, theater, pop songs, and television. Somewhere in America every holiday season it’s read over the air.
On my thirteenth birthday—as was our family’s observance—I woke early to find my birthday presents at the foot of my bed. By early, I mean I woke at midnight. I tore into the package that was clearly books and found two volumes: The Complete O. Henry Short Stories and The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I sat up the rest of the night reading the O. Henry stories (they were individually a lot shorter than the Holmes tales). Luckily it was a weekend, and so I got to read them all from start to finish in one sitting. The story that I remembered the most from the collection was “The Gift of the Magi.” Forty-one years later, casting around for an idea for a story for a Marty Greenberg Christmas anthology starring mythical animals, Christmas Bestiary, my mind went quickly to Beast of “Beauty and the Beast.” And from there bounced to my childhood favorite, the O. Henry piece.
The following poem was written to my husband on one of our later anniversaries. He died before our forty-fifth.
Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary
It is winter now,
and the roses are blooming again,
their petals bright against the snow.
My father died last April;
my sisters no longer write
except at the turnings of the year,
content with their fine houses
and their grandchildren.
Beast and I
putter in the gardens
and walk slowly on the forest paths.
He is graying
around the muzzle
and I have silver combs
to match my hair.
I have no regrets.
None.
Though sometimes I do wonder
what sounds children
might have made
running across the marble halls,
swinging from the birches
over the roses
in the snow.
Rabbit Hole
How prescient I was back in 1996–1997 when I wrote “Rabbit Hole.” It was for a friend of mine, Melissa Mia Hall (alas, now long gone), who was putting together a book of feminist fantasy short stories both new and reprinted.
I was only in my late fifties, but what I said then about old age (I am now seventy-eight) is spot on. And I tell you, I would definitely go down that rabbit hole if I had a chance. In fact, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass were both key books in my childhood. (As were the Oz books, which, alas, have not held up well as literature.) I was probably about five when I read them. My parents had given me a boxed edition of the two Alice books, which I still own.
I saw myself as Alice. I even had the bangs (or fringe, as the Brits call it), though the rest of my hair was in pigtails. What I wouldn’t have given then—and now—to meet up with a Gryphon or a Cheshire Cat or any of the wonders in Wonderland. Well, in a way I have—they are part of a vast array of invisible friends I still chat with on a regular basis. And aren’t I lucky! Not a crazy old lady, but a lucid and varied writer of tales.
; Dorothy and Alice Take Tea
Two Victorian girls,
long hair caught up
in bunches, in bows,
staring down into
the brown landscapes
of their tea
as if finding a road there
to get back home.
So ordinary.
So extraordinary.
Their little lives
boundaried
by the every day,
now blown away,
fallen down
into new lives, liberties.
Much to talk about.
Little to say.
It is a calculus
beyond their counting.
Witch, rabbit
shifting their priorities,
moving through wonder,
following the weird.
And the oddest of all?
They are safe home,
still longing for the wildness
where neither gender nor age
bound them, and friends came
in many shapes,
many colors,
many sexes,
many tribes.
Our Lady of the Greenwood
My first encounter with Robin Hood was as an eight-year-old reading The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. Nobody told me it was a “boy’s book.” So I was forsoothly hooked.
So after putting together an anthology of Arthurian stories by a diverse bunch of writers (Camelot), I proposed doing the same for Robin Hood stories—called Sherwood. I wrote my story last, thinking I would fill in for anything missing.
It turned out, the only thing missing was a story about Robin Hood’s birth. That rarely features in any of the Robin Hood canon, so it gave me a lot of room to simply go for it. And that’s the true story about why I wrote “Our Lady of the Greenwood.”