Happy Birthday, Tanith Lee.

Tanith Lee cast such a wide influence on my art in the early days. Her work is really indescribable, and I kind of love that, though I would not call it weird fiction, ever.  At first, it was her language and use of color that attracted me. I'd never read an author (past or even present now) that used color like Tanith Lee did. It was amazing. And I love color used in a book in uncanny and delightful ways to enhance imagery, and imagery was Tanith Lee's special gift.  Oh, her imagery!

Next it was her themes, which often moved around girls, women, and sexuality. Around power dynamics. Around feminism. She wrote of despair, too. Despair so palpable one could almost reach out and touch it as a substance laying separately on the written page. It was all rather dark and beautiful at the same time. You know, like that statement you often hear or read: "beautiful is not always pretty."

In that way, it was pure literary Romanticism. It was never really postmodernism. It was never really fashionable. It never evoked current politics or gave clear lessons. 

Even after writing some 90 novels and who knows how many shorter pieces, she fell out of fashion several (if not more) years before she died in 2015 at the age of sixty-eight. I think many people found her idiosyncratic in ways that are exasperating, almost annoying. She was her own person, she possessed great agency, and she was a little eccentric. All these qualities went into her work, which was just wonderous. 

WONDEROUS.

I don't think she ever really wrote for the crowd first, it was always for herself, though that could be debatable. Laughing. She was an original and I really do lament that there will be no new words from her.

I always think of Tanith Lee on her birthday. And yes, on the day she died.  

She said in an interview: "I must admit, I never thought, after all the years of working as a professional writer in and out of the genres, I would end up at sixty-one, back where I was at twenty: unknown, unpaid, unincluded, uncertain."

I'll never forget that interview either, those singular last words, and I live by them.