Tanith Lee Has left this world (1947-2015)

I first read Tanith Lee in the mid-1980s, with this collection of short stories. I've been reading her ever since, and occasionally I gloam all her work for details such as this:

"The shuttered house too was gaunt in the moonlight. Was it not somewhat like a tall thin skull, eye-socket, nostrils, cave of mouth with its teeth knocked out. And what about that phalanx of round attic windows above? Of course, the scars of bullets which had gone through the brain and killed it long ago."-- Stained with Crimson, Book of Paradys. 

Emotionally invested description was her gift. She painted her stories like an artist. She paid attention to color. And I reread her all the time just to see the words, all those beautiful and yes, sometimes, very dark words.

Tanith Lee has died, and I am so sad to hear it. If you look on Goodreads, you'll see that she was in my top five favorite writers, always has been and always will be. Others come and go, but she remains. She was very prolific and I have heard she wrote some 300 short stories and 90 novels. I can't even imagine that. But I want to read them all. I think I had to write this today, I had to post it, because it's difficult to believe there will be no more stories and that she was ill and well, we distant readers, do not ever hear of such things. And now she has died and left this world. 

Another hole in the soul that cannot be filled.

Read as Much as Possible (Fiction)

I don't mind saying, that when people come to my house, they are always looking at my books. I have books all over the house, in every room, even the kitchen and dining area has its books. Every room has books. The first question people ask me about my library is if I have read all of them. Truthfully, there are always a few dozen that I have not read, but the rest of them, well,  I may have read most of them at least five times. I've always loved books, but more than that, I've always loved reading. All kinds of books, poetry, biography, histories, fairy tales, mythology, Bibles, (the Book of Job is my favorite from the Old Testament), Dante (right now I am rereading Dante), and of course, fiction. I adore fiction. Reading good fiction is akin to a big adventure. 

I've developed some great friendships while reading the same fiction. It's a terrible thing to admit, but I'm prejudiced in that I do judge people by their reading! Laughing. Oh, that was mean, but to a degree it's true. I do have some good friendships that are not based on reading, but my deeper friendships have grown out of love of good fiction. A lot of my life is about books and stories and the best relationships that I have are with people who share this passion. It's a good thing Fred and the boys love and read books. And they do, and I am so lucky, and I am going to teach both my grandchildren to read good books.

If you are a writer, it is essential to read as much fiction as you can, all across genres. This is how you will grow as a writer, how you will learn, and how you will understand how fiction changes over time. You can't make good fiction without knowing what it is. It just doesn't happen.

But I guess what I am saying here is, a life is much richer and fuller with books and stories from a variety of styles. The world becomes very big by reading all kinds of stories. So read. I think it was Stephen King who said if you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot.

Well, I'm out of here. I moved over five-hundred books today. 

Later...

Green Things

When I was little, I was always fascinated by plants, especially flowers. I noticed them right off when visiting relatives or friends. I'd always remember a person by what they had planted in their yard. "The person with the yellow roses." "That lady with the bushes with orange berries." "The man who swept his lawn with a broom and had neat boxwoods." And on it went for years and years until I became more sophisticated in naming plants. I still remember places and events by carrying an image of the landscape in my mind. It's odd. I remember one particular time when I was having a meeting with a doctor in his office, and the older man was talking to me and all I could do was focus on the roses he had on a table. I finally had to ask him if they came from his garden. They did, but I knew that, because I knew exactly what kind of rose they were, an old china rose called Old Blush. They make terrible cut flowers and the petals and leaves had fallen all over the table, but they were a favorite of mine, and from then on, I kept wondering what kind of man would put them in his office at work. It was totally fascinating, and that man went on to help me with three difficult pregnancies. 

I suppose I am writing this because this morning I am going to work in my garden and because I am thinking about how I look at developing character in my current book. I am thinking about how personal writing can be even when we are writing genre fiction. It's all so telling.

I don't know the name of this painting. It may be a detail from a painting.  I found it on Pinterest. But I love it. It's green and white for one thing and GREEN is the color of my mind. In some ways, it's very telling of me.

Out to the garden for the day.

Day Trips More Fearful Than A Ghost Story

On Sundays we would go out for day trips, right after dinner, or before, depending on how far we were traveling. The weather was never a cause for delay. Sometimes the roads turned to dirt, and dust flew through the inside of the car and I would lie down on the seat, holding my breath. Sometimes it rained so hard Mother would pull over to the side of the road and we all smothered under the weight of water and lightning and thunder. If our destination was not a relative, it was some road Mother wanted to follow, some old house or cemetery or bridge she wanted to see. She told tales like a color commentator on a sports show, with varied voices, tales of people and places and things she knew or had been told.  The tales always grew taller and taller but that didn't matter. "I remember, I remember." Mother said that often. We were time travelers, ghost hunters, bone collectors, bridge walkers. Our pockets were always full of stones and twigs, our knees scraped. We ate gnats while trying to breathe. That is how it was when Mother was restless and she was always restless on a Sunday, following Mass and dinner. That is how it was when days were slow, so slow I thought they would last forever. I saw many things, snakes and raccoons, possums and armadillos, bird nests, and bee hives, turtles bathing and sunning all without a zoo sign. I attended funerals and looked in wooden coffins, kissed the cold cheeks of old dead aunts of aunts of aunts, took home some of their dresses and old bowls, along with the turtles and a fear I did not understand.

I remember, I remember this old bridge. 

One of my favorite quotes

“A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my 

walls.” ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

In the art room this week

Nothing moves me more than a beautiful painting. For many people, music motivates writers. For me, art is a key ingredient in the creative process. Of course, my favorite paintings are narrative, and I honestly believe the greatest art is narrative art, and that the greatest books are written the way an artist paints, in layers, with myth and metaphor, with scenes and symbols. This painting is a guilty pleasure. I have an obsession with paintings that are a bit whimsical like this one. It's called "A fair beauty." The artist is Herbert Gustave Schmalz who was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites. I've previously posted this painting on Facebook but found it on Flickr this past week while I was searching for some paintings of flowers and insects that might help me with a composition I am doing. If I am on the Internet, nine times out of ten, I am looking at paintings. What a wonderful gift that time has been for me, the ability to see all this fabulous art work that normally I'd never get to see. I'll be checking in, but this week, I am in the art room working. Be back next Sunday.

Saturday work update

Cinderella and her stepsisters by Ruth Ives

A Ghost Story

This is part of Locust Grove Cemetery near St. Francisville, Louisiana. In college I wrote a small ghost story based on an experience I had there as a young girl of fifteen. I looked for it this week, but have not found it, but one of these days, the story is bound to turn up. I never throw anything away. I wanted to end October talking about how we should all write to truth. That is not easy to define, and in November as I write my words for NaNoWriMo, I will attempt to explain why writing to truth is so important.

When I was a young girl, we often visited St. Francisville, Louisiana, which was like my second home. It is a place I have the fondest memories of and also some of the most sentimental. I am lucky to have seen St. Francisville  when it was still a small town and had not really been touched by tourism and capitalism. For example, my mother was a friend of the owner of The Myrtles at one time, long before it was a tourist attraction and one of the most haunted houses in the USA. Then, it was just an old house with a tragic history, no electricity on the second floor, and used mostly for storage. I used to play in it when Mother went for her visits. I used a flashlight. I never saw a ghost, but my sister said she did and she was only a toddler at that time. Who knows?

I grew up on ghost stories. Mother told the most wonderful ghost stories and I believed every single word she said (at the time). I suppose places can be haunted, by history, by sad events, by the longing of people to escape into the past or to just ignore time. Maybe ghosts are like fingerprints? They linger on and on, a lasting image of some event no one can forget.

If I had to choose a place haunted in St. Francisville though, I would choose Locust Grove Cemetery, which is north of town on a what used to be a narrow winding road. It was the family cemetery of the Smith family who once had a plantation there. The house is long gone, gone before I was even born. In this cemetery is buried Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of President Zachary Taylor and the first bride of Jefferson Davis, who went on to be the one and only President of the Confederacy of America. Davis and Taylor eloped without the approval of the bride's family and on their honeymoon, she contacted malaria and died and that is how she came to be buried in this lonely little cemetery.  Mother loved this story and we went there many times over the years, walking around, talking, recounting the tragic tale of how poor Sarah sang a song while dying and how poor Jeff Davis became a recluse for ten years following her death. All that is true. And very sad and makes for great drama.

But the facts are not always known, and I have come to suspect that this story is much more tragic than history recounts.  

One afternoon, it was already late, (when I was that girl of fifteen) Mother, my younger sister, who was about ten years of age, and I went out to Locust Grove. (It wasn't as  neat and polished as it is now, no white picket fence, no signs, etc). Against the back of the cemetery is a sharp slope where other graves can be found, what everyone calls outsiders! The picture above is one such grave. (But there were many others at that time. Most of them have sunk into the ground today.) Mother was determined to walk as far down the slope as possible and we two girls tagged alone. I kept thinking that it was getting dark and I worried over snakes, but I don't think Mother ever thought of such things. She was always eager to do what she wanted to do and if she wanted to see a certain grave, well she did.

I think I became very anxious. I had already noted the consequences of being stuck out at Locust Grove in the dark, in the middle of what was really a nasty sort of woods. I won't recount now, the details of the grave we found and how it looked. Not now, because I want to confess that I abandoned my mother and sister and headed back up the hill toward the car. It was almost dark and I began hollering for them to follow me.

At the top of the hill, when I arrived, exhausted, bug-eaten, scratched up, and fearful, I saw a young woman standing near a tree. I never thought about her being a ghost. I just ran to the car, and turned the keys and began honking the horn. It was twilight and I was scared out of my wits! I didn't want to be stuck out there in the dark, especially with other people coming into the cemetery which is exactly what I thought in the car. I was always scared of strangers in isolated places. Finally Mother and my sister showed up, got in the car and I drove us out of that place.

Later that summer, while visiting a historic home in Woodville, MS. I saw a collection of small paintings, most the size of cameos. I love art and I looked at them a long time with the kind of earnest devotion I still give to such things. One of the paintings reminded me of the young woman I saw in Locust Grove. When I asked if anyone knew who the woman in the painting was, they said, Sarah Knox Taylor Davis, and from that moment on, I was haunted by the thought of her and her history. I even thought, at the time, that I had seen a ghost. Maybe this is how ghost stories begin? Maybe this is how we create them? In wonder and fear and that earnest devotion to story and art and love.

And even now, decades later, old and wise as I have become, when I  think of Locust Grove, I still see that young woman standing by the tree, and I remember with detail, the lonely sad cemetery and all the souls that rest there. 

So I guess you could say, I am haunted and I've seen a ghost. Happy Halloween!

Edited to add link.
Check out this link for Sarah's story.
http://www.la-cemeteries.com/Notables/Others/Davis,SarahKnox/Davis,SarahKnox.shtml

My first collection of Poe's work

As you can see, I checked this out of the school library, and I don't believe I ever returned it. Of course, I had to buy it before I received my final report card. This volume has been read countless times over the years and because it was printed during the 1950s, it's still a beautiful, highly readable book. The paper is as clear as the day I first read it. 

I love this quote in the Introduction by T. O. Mabbot.

“Properly read, Poe achieves magic in a way rarely attained even by Coleridge, to whom indeed Poe owes something, though perhaps less than to Thomas Chatterton. Within his own range, it is hard to imagine a more individual mastery than Poe's.”

Poe would have approved of Haint Blue

Haint blue painted on a house keeps the evil spirits away. Next year, I am personally painting the ceiling of my porch Haint Blue to keep away all the ghosts that haunt me! I am so haunted....

Edgar Allan Poe by Vincent Buranelli

Edgar Allan Poe by Vincent Buranelli, a book I used in high school when working on a paper on Poe. Naturally I kept it all these years. It's not a biography but a collections of essays that make up a fair literary criticism. Very good, too. 

Poe Riverside edition 1897

My oldest edition of Poe's work, which includes 8 poems and 4 tales, including The Fall of the House of Usher. At some time, I'll type in the introduction to compare how Poe was viewed in 1897 to present day.

Original Resting Place of Edgar Allan Poe and Wife

Hawthorne's grave (Just because I had to!)

Although I love Poe, I wrote my college paper on Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and of course, the gorgeous Rappaccini's Daughter (not to mention dozens and dozens of other wonderful tales). I might be southern, but I am totally "Hawthorne" at heart. No other American writer has influenced me as much as Hawthorne. My novels and short stories are filled with literary allusions to his life and work.

My First Book on Poe (c) 1970

Quote

“When people die they leave behind tiny deposits, like dust or ash, littering the lives of those who have to carry on. Impossible to wipe a house clean. Memories dwelled in cobweb places behind wardrobes and between cupboards; they hide behind radiators; they urged on shelves; like slivers of shattered glass, they waited for their moment to lodge deep in any vulnerable expanse of passing skin.”

                                                  from Requiem

                                                    by Graham Joyce

                                                    (1954-2014)

Influences

Augoustos Sordinas, Bronze Age, caves, geoarchaeology, Ionian islands, Kephalonia, Mesolithic period, Neolithic period, Northwest Greece,Palaeolithic period, prehistoric research, Sidari, Stone Age, stone tools,Thesprotia

He drove a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. He was old by the time I met him, but still driven to teach. He was distinguished and kind and invited me to go on one of his personal field trips. He told me that I wrote the most interesting essays. (Laughing and maybe one day I'll post the one he liked the most.) Today I was reading all my papers from his classes and I knew I would find him online somewhere. He died many years ago, but his work is still used through-out the Anthropology community. He knew everyone and traveled everywhere.  He was not only my teacher but my advisor. And a huge influence. I was always interested in caves, mainly because I feared them.  As a young girl I had been in several, some very primitive and wet and dark and haunting and I told him about them. In turn, he showed our class a great many personal slides of caves that he had visited all over the world. Caves fascinated me in a way that they fascinated him, the idea of people living in them or using them for magical purposes. I was very interested in how prehistoric people thought about magic, primitive religions, personal possessions, the idea of sympathetic magic and if primitive cultures thought about that in the same way that modern people did. We used to talk about that a lot and I still think about those conversations, I still know that if I had gone that way in life, I would have focused on sympathetic magic, that would have been my thing, because I had seen it in so many of his slides and I felt a deep connection to it.

Beautiful Monsters

Penny Dreadful is a beautiful, Gothic masterpiece. Until it appeared, I forgot how much I loved good vampire fiction, so I am reading as much of it as I can this year, or books with faeries rooted in the original folklore. After all, fairies, vampires, angels, they are all pretty much the same thing. Monsters. The Uncanny. And yes, The Dead. It's no secret that I prefer Monsters to the serial killer folks out there. Serial killers and related murderers are not really evil in the sense of Monster evil, they are part of human psychopathology, which is grounded in mental disease. Monsters, on the other hand, are not human. They reflect the shadow world of our fears. It's a whole new ball game.

On Penny Dreadful, there was a character named Fenton, a Renfield-like character, serving his Master, the powerful Vampire/Dark God. I found Fenton absolutely gorgeous, and the casting of Olly Alexander worked perfectly. Isn't he a beautiful Monster? Of course, he is.  I was so disappointed when he died. I believe he could have had a much longer character arc.

There is something appealing to me about the Fentons of dark fiction, the young, vulnerable, partly human Monsters who are caught between worlds. You ache for them, understand them, in a way you cannot let yourself care for the others. You know they are doomed, too, which makes it worse. I am sure there is a whole Jungian element to loving these beautiful, young, carefree Monsters whose fates are sealed the moment they are chosen. Maybe it's the fact that most of these Monsters are chosen and do not really choose. Maybe it is their youth and vulnerability. I don't know. Must think about it.

Mother's Daylily

Mother's Day Lily

Pink Rose Mallow

Pink Rose Mallow, old fashioned plant