Theodora Goss

I’ve decided that every Friday, I’m going to write part of the Shadowlands serial. If you want to read parts that I’ve already written, go to Serial. There, you can read all about Thea Graves, Matilda Tillinghast, Emma Gaunt, and Mouse, from the beginning.

Tillinghast House was one of those brownstones near Newbury Street that look so expensive – and are. You could just tell that it had been standing a hundred years ago, when there had been carriages rolling up and down the Boston streets, and that it would have taken a whole team of servants to keep it up.

We were dressed warmly, because although it was September, there was already a chill in the air. But not in our school uniforms, of course. We had put on the darkest pants and shirts and jackets we could find. We stood across the street from Tillinghast House, trying to look inconspicuous under the street lamp.

“The kitchen door is around back,” said Matilda. “We have to get over the wall into the garden, and then it will be easy.”

“Oh, after we get over the wall!” said Emma. “You didn’t say anything about getting over a wall. What if it’s covered with glass?”

“What if it’s not? Anyway, I don’t have another plan. Do you?”

Emma did not look happy. She’s not the sort of girl that goes over walls, generally. I mean, she’s a Gaunt.

“Come on,” I said. “You can climb on my back. And there won’t be any glass.” At least, I hoped there wouldn’t be.

We were lucky. No glass, although Emma did scrape her knee going over, and Mouse almost fell into a rose bush that still had some roses on it.

“Here it is,” said Matilda when we had reached the kitchen door. She took out the key.

“Do we really want to do this?” asked Emma. “I mean, we are breaking and entering. What if we get caught?”

“Just entering,” said Matilda. “We can’t be breaking if we have a key. Anyway, Aunt Matilda said I could come visit her anytime. So maybe I want to visit on a Friday night.”

“Wait,” said Mouse. “I brought something.” We turned to look at her. She was wearing a black cap over her head. White hair shines pretty brightly, even in lamplight. “I took an invisibility potion from Miss Gray’s classroom before we left. They were making it in Magical Chemistry. I thought it might come in handy.”

The invisibility potion was in a plastic juice bottle, and it tasted a little like orange mango. We all drank some.

“I can still see you,” said Emma.

“We can all see each other because we’re all invisible,” said Mouse. “Can we just get inside already? I forgot to bring gloves, and I’m getting cold.”

“You should always bring gloves,” I said. “Because of fingerprints.”

“We’re not thieves,” said Matilda. “Invited to visit, remember? I think the stairs are over here somewhere.”

The kitchen was just under street level, and there were stairs leading up to the first floor. We went up them, as quietly as we could. Old stairs are creaky! Matilda, who was in front, opened the door at the top, and then almost shut it again.

“Someone’s up there!” she said. She opened it again, just a crack. We could see light coming from a room down the hall.

“Go on!” I said. “It’s all the way down there. We can sneak down the hall and listen. We’ll hear if anyone’s in the room. Anyway, we’re invisible, remember?”

Following Matilda, we all sneaked down the hall, staying as close to the wall as possible. The floor creaked too! As we got closer, we could hear voices.

“How’s the old lady doing?” asked a man’s voice.

“She’s well enough,” a woman’s voice replied. “Has all she needs, although not all she wants. She still won’t tell us where she’s hidden the key.”

“Well, keep her in the portrait until she tells. She can die in there for all I care!” We heard the clink of class, and then a gurgling sound, as though something were being poured.

“You wouldn’t actually kill her, Samuel!” The woman’s voice sounded shocked, alarmed.

“What do you care? After what she and her friends did to you.”

Suddenly, I felt Mouse move past me. She was sneaking closer to the door, past Matilda, who tried to hold her back. The door was partly open, and light came through the crack. She stood right next to it, so she could see into the room as much as possible. Matilda tried to reach for her again, but Mouse brushed her hand away.

“Well, we did go to school together. That counts for something, you know. When you get older, you remember things like that. School days.”

“You’re getting sentimental in your old age. Stuff it, girl. I’m not going to let my chance at that key get away. Ever since you told me about it, I’ve been thinking about how to get it for myself, and Matilda Tillinghast is going to tell me or I’ll wring her neck as though she were a chicken.”

“Samuel, how horrible! I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

Mouse stepped back. She motioned to Matilda, waving at her to come forward, to look at – what? I moved forward too and caught a glimpse of it. At the far end of the room was a mirror, and reflected in it were two people – a woman in a gray dress and a man in a butler’s uniform. She was sitting in one of the armchairs, he was pacing around the room with a glass in one hand and a decanter in the other. He stopped and drank from the glass, pouring whatever it was down his throat with a quick gesture. Suddenly, he stood still and said, “Did you hear something?”

“Not a thing, and you really should stop drinking, Samuel. You’ve had quite enough.”

“I’ll drink until I’ve drunk all the whiskey in her cellar!” he said. “But I’m sure I heard something.”

“It must be mice,” she said. “They kept me awake half the night, last night.”

Matilda put her hand on Mouse’s arm to pull her back and gestured for all of us to move back as well. We sneaked back down the hall, toward the kitchen. We did not stop until we had gone down the stairs, through the door, and over the wall.

When we were standing in the street again, Matilda said, “Well, I was right. That wasn’t Aunt Matilda.”

“Who was it, then?” asked Emma. “And was that really her butler? It didn’t sound like any butler I’ve ever known.”

“No, it wasn’t her butler,” said Mouse. “I don’t think Matilda’s aunt would hire him!” We all looked at her in surprise. Mouse never sounded angry. But she sounded angry now.

“Who is he?” I asked.

For a moment, she did not answer. Then she said, “He’s my Dad.”

“Your Dad?” said Matilda. It was the last thing any of us had expected to hear.

“Yes,” said Mouse. “Everyone calls me Mouse, but name is Sophia Sitgreaves.”

Matilda gave her a blank stare. But Emma gasped and I stepped back without thinking.

“What?” said Matilda. “What am I missing?”

“The Sitgreaves Murders,” said Emma.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back to the school. We can talk about it there.”

We walked back through the dark streets, Matilda and I walking together, Emma walking with Mouse. You can’t say the Gaunts don’t have good manners. She wanted Mouse to know that we didn’t think of her any differently, despite what her father had done.

Earlier this month, Nathan Ballingrud wrote a blog post called “Writing Around the Heart.” This was the last line:

“I appear calm on the outside, but inside it’s all wind and high seas.”

I think that’s a beautiful line, but I’m copying it here because I thought it was true about me as well. (Perhaps it’s true of many writers.)

I seem like a calm person generally. And competent. (The thing about having a law degree from Harvard is that people assume you can do all sorts of things you probably, actually, have no qualifications for. Like organize a new writing program. They assume you have a kind of general competence. But it’s me, too. I sort of seem that way.) But underneath the surface, there are all sorts of things roiling. Most often, creative ideas, but really all sorts of things.

Last week, I was at a faculty party, and I was talking to two of the other teachers. Both wonderful teachers, both people I like very much. And one of them asked me what I had done over the winter break. So I mentioned working on my dissertation, and writing my column, and another project I’m working on that I can’t mention yet. And blogging every day. She told me it was amazing that I was doing so much, and then the two of them talked about the movies they had seen. They had seen four or five. And honestly? I kind of envied them. I had seen exactly one movie, and I had blogged about it. It seemed wonderful to be able to actually rest.

But the truth is, I’m not the sort of person who can rest for long. When I have time to myself, I usually start a new project. I think it’s just that there’s so much I want to do, and I always have more ideas than time to do them in. For example, if I had time now, what would I do?

1. I would start my first novel series. I have it all planned out.

2. I would start on one of the short story ideas I have. I have a lot of short story ideas, all plotted out. They just need to be written.

3. I would add more poems to Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre. It’s still such a bare site, and there are so many poems I want to add.

4. I would e-publish some of my short stories, probably through Smashwords. Maybe even my entire first short story collection.

5. I would publish a poetry collection. There are several ways that could happen.

And that’s to start with.

I think the thing is, I live at a certain level of intensity. Wind and high seas. Some of that intensity is emotional, some of it intellectual. And it finds expression in creativity, in making things. If I’m not making things, I feel lost somehow. I feel as though I’m failing – well, let me explain.

There are two things I’ve believed since I was a child. Perhaps they’re strange things to believe, I don’t know. The first of them is that I’m here for a reason. I have something to do, and the times I’ve been most sad in my life, even despairing, have been the times when I’ve felt as though I wasn’t accomplishing whatever I was supposed to. It’s as though Mother Night had given me a mission, and I was here to carry it out. So I always felt as though my life had a purpose, and I was here to fulfill that purpose. But I could fail, and I didn’t want to fail.

The second thing I’ve always believed was that I got help. Somehow or other, things happened that taught me what I needed to know, to fulfill that purpose. I look back at my life and I wonder, about various things, whether they were a waste of time. Was going to law school a waste of time? But law school, and being a lawyer, taught me to write in a particular way. What about graduate school? That, too, taught me to write in a particular way, taught me so much about literature I could not have learned elsewhere. And I look at ostensible failures and realize that from another perspective, they’re successes. Taking so long to finish my PhD – but if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have begun my writing career.

So I get help, but I still have to fulfill my purpose, do whatever it is I was put here to do. And by this point I know, because I’ve known since I was a child and because by this point it’s become obvious, that it’s about writing. Writing is what I’m meant to do, not as an end in itself, but for an end I’m probably not going to be aware of, not going to understand myself until I stand in Mother Night’s house and she explains it to me. And shows me which part of the pattern I am.

I suppose that’s the surface calm: it’s a kind of faith. And underneath, it’s wind and high seas, and I’m living so intensely that every moment has its joys and despairs, its epiphanies. And the words come out, like a river.

I read an interesting blog post recently: Rachelle Gardner on “The Dilemma of the Prolific Writer.”

Rachelle writes about writers who are prolific – who write fast and well – and what they should do after the first novel sale. Because, and this is something I hadn’t really thought about, the publisher will want to see the sales figures for the first novel before purchasing the second one. And so there’s going to be a lag time after that first novel comes out, when the writer will probably have books written but won’t be selling anything. (The same issue comes up with a two-novel sale, because the publisher will still want to see sales figures for the first novel before purchasing the third one. And a prolific writer will probably already have the third and fourth ones ready to go.)

During that lag time, Rachelle tells the writer to do the following:

“1) Keep writing. We should be able to sell those books eventually.

2) Since there’s no hurry to write more books, spend more time on carefully building her brand and platform, including planning and writing her blog.

3) She can find other ways to make money from writing during this time. She can consider writing articles, or ghostwriting.”

What particularly interested me in her list was the second suggestion, that the writer build her brand. I’ve noticed that writers don’t particularly like to be referred to that way, as brands. And yet they are. We are.

Readers buy our writing based on our names, on whether they trust those names, what they expect those names to provide for them. Rather in the same way they buy Kleenex. And yet (you can quote me on this):

Writers are not Kleenex.

Our brands are who we are, not just as writers but as individuals. They are made up of our tastes, our aspirations, our beliefs about the world and other human beings. They are extensions of who we authentically are. So in a sense, we are brands that can’t think of ourselves as brands, because as soon as we start to write how we think we ought to write, that authenticity is lost. We become Pepsi One.

I can’t think, who do I want Theodora Goss to be? I have to think, who am I? What do I actually like? What do I want? Who do I want to become?

This issue came up for me recently in two ways. First, it came up because I was redesigning my website. (You know, this one.) It took me a while to get it looking exactly this way, in part because it took me a while to decide what I actually liked. But now, it feels so perfect. The William Morris wallpaper in my favorite color, the painting by Waterhouse up above echoing that color. The theme of the painting: what looks like a catastrophe is actually the start of something new and wonderful. Even the fact that Miranda, in the painting, looks like me from that angle. And I thought, yeah, that’s a Theodora Goss website. I mean, it’s me. It’s all the things I love.

Second, it came up because I was asked to write a story for a themed anthology. And I just couldn’t, and couldn’t, think of a story that actually interested me. And then I sort of distanced me from myself, and thought about myself objectively. (Or tried to.) And I thought, what sort of story do I usually write? Well, I usually write stories about characters who don’t have a chance to speak, who are silenced in some way. I give them a voice. And that’s when the story came to me.

Oh, I’m not saying don’t experiment. But if you’re going to be a brand (and you’re going to be), figure out who you are, what you stand for. That process can actually be fun and informative. You can discover so much about yourself. And for that, I highly recommend a blog. Writing this blog has been such a process of self-discovery. You may think that when I blog, I’m telling you things – but really what I’m doing is discovering them for myself. I’m figuring out who I am, what my brand actually is. Because like it or not, I am one, so it may as well represent who I am, what I care about. That will help guide my choices as a writer, because we all make mistakes, but if we hold to ourselves, we will make fewer of them. And our writing will be better, truer. Which is, after all, what it’s all about, right?

I don’t mean editing in the sense of editing my own stories. I mean professional editing, the kind of editing that results in books.

I learned to edit from two people. One was Delia Sherman, who taught me how to edit living writers. You know what I mean – writers send you their stories, and then you read through them, choose the ones you want to include in the anthology, contact the writers about problems, get those problems resolved. Then you decide on the order of the stories, write an introduction, that sort of thing. It’s a lot of work, but so worthwhile, because finally you have an anthology that you conceived, writers you wanted to promote, whose stories you loved.

The other person I learned from was John Paul Riquelme, a scholar specializing in the work of modernists such as James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. I was his research assistant when he edited the Bedford Books edition of Dracula. He taught me how to edit the work of dead writers. For example, he taught me that the text you want to use is the last one approved by the author. That’s why publishers usually reprint the final version of Frankenstein, the way Mary Shelley altered it, rather than the 1818 version. I think it was during my time as his research assistant that I learned how to locate the texts I wanted: what to look for, what was available to me.

From both types of editing, I learned a habit of precision. I think that’s carried over into my writing. I think I have a way of writing in which every word counts – am I right about that? I think so . . . And every punctuation mark, of course.

So how does all that translate into my own editing? Well, several nights ago I decided to add a section on William Allingham to Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre. I had been looking at a website with art and poetry on it, and some of the poetry was by Allingham, and I remembered that he was more interesting than I had originally thought when I read “Fairies.” That’s the poem he’s known for. You know, “Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen . . .” I like it well enough, but he’s not exactly W.B. Yeats, is he? He doesn’t evoke the magic of fairies in the same way.

I thought it would be easy, because there was already quite a lot of Allingham online, and when a poem is already online, all I have to do is copy it and then edit. I don’t always copy a poem, but it does save me the trouble of typing, and I can focus on the important task, which is the editing. Because every single poem I have ever copied, rather than typing myself, has had mistakes – either in wording or punctuation. How do I edit? I compare the poem to at least one copy that was published during or close to the author’s lifetime. In this case, I looked at a book called Songs, Ballads, and Stories by Allingham, published in 1877. And I made sure that the poems on my site conformed to those. Honestly, where are other people getting their poems? Why do they have so many mistakes in them? And the mistakes are identical over various sites that include Allingham, so I think they’re all copying each other – but without editing.

One advantage to looking at original texts is that I always find poems that aren’t already online. In this case, I found a poem I’ve seen before, somewhere or other. I rather like it. Here it is:

The Witch-Bride

A fair witch crept to a young man’s side,
And he kiss’d her and took her for his bride.

But a Shape came in at the dead of night,
And fill’d the room with snowy light.

And he saw how in his arms there lay
A thing more frightful than mouth may say.

And he rose in haste, and follow’d the Shape
Till morning crown’d an eastern cape.

And he girded himself, and follow’d still,
When sunset sainted the western hill.

But, mocking and thwarting, clung to his side,
Weary day! – the foul Witch-Bride.

That’s macabre enough, right? And including it gives a very different picture of Allingham than you might get from just reading “Fairies.”

This post is called “The Art of Editing,” which if you think about it is simply the art of researching, reproducing, and being precise about it all. But I suppose a more important question is why edit at all? Why am I spending my time putting Allingham’s poetry online when I could instead be writing my own poetry?

Well, one answer is that I wouldn’t be spending that time writing my own poetry. Writing takes a different part of the brain than editing. When I’m too tired to write, I can still edit. Editing is something I do for fun, to relax. Although it can be frustrating as well. Another answer is that I need to take care of Allingham, and Dora Sigerson Shorter, and Alfred Noyes. If I don’t make sure their poetry is available, who will? Perhaps someday, someone will preserve my writing in the same way.

If you look on the internet now, you will find the art of the pre-Raphaelites everywhere. So many people love it and pay attention to it. But I’m sure you remember when it was difficult to find, when museums hid it away in back rooms. I think we’re going through a period like that with poetry. We’ve formed a poetic canon, and poetry outside that canon tends not to be available – except in obscure places online. But I think it’s time to reevaluate a particular kind of poetry, as we’ve reevaluated the art of the pre-Raphaelites – poetry that is lyrical and fantastical, much of it written right around the period when the pre-Raphaelites were painting. I think that process is underway. Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre is part of it, and I’m proud of that.

You see, when I decided to have a writing career, I decided to have a writing career. Not just to write books, but to be part of the ongoing dialog about literature. To let people know where I was drawing my influences, what I thought was worthwhile. In a sense, writers are always remaking the literary past. We say, “Joyce was important,” and our saying that, and writing out of it, makes Joyce important. Same with Wilde. The pre-Raphaelites are important, in retrospect, in part because they are influencing contemporary artists and writers. (I include illustrators in “artists.” I think the distinction between the two is artificial.) They certainly influence me.

And so, by editing dead writers, I’m remaking the literary past, saying Noyes is important, he is part of a tradition, that tradition has contemporary repercussions and implications.

To have a writing career is to be in dialog with both the past and the future. At least, that’s what I think.

(And I’m going to edit living writers too, you’ll see. As soon as I have time . . .)

Writing Exercise: Choose an image by a surrealist painter and write a story about it.

I chose two images.

The Sacred Wood by Arnold Böcklin:

In the grove by the temple, we knelt before the living flame. It spoke to us, of course, and told us what we had to do.

We were so out of time, out of our own time I mean. Me and Emma and Matilda. What was it, something something B.C.? In a civilization that history had forgotten. The priestesses stood behind us, waiting. They were used to this, they always talked to fire. And water, and tree, and stone. It was we, in our own age, who had forgotten how. Or perhaps our fires and waters and trees and stones had forgotten how to speak.

It’s funny, if you think about it. Stuck in something something B.C. among the Ilurians, kneeling before a living flame who tells you to “Find the gray woman, the spinner of webs, the sayer of spells.”

“That’s Miss Gray,” said Matilda.

“Do you think she’s here?” asked Emma.

“She’s everywhere,” I said. “If there’s a moment in history when she doesn’t exist, it’s way before this one.”

It told us to look on the mountaintop, hissing as flames do. Well, that was where we would look, then.

And assuming we found Miss Gray, what then? Would she know how we were going to find Sitgreaves? Because you see, and I haven’t told you this – somehow or other Sitgreaves had taken Mouse. And Miss Gray, our own Miss Gray, had said, “He’s taken her somewhere in time, girls. You’ll have to go back or forward, following his trail.”

“How can we go forward in time?” Emma had asked. And Miss Gray had frowned, because she had explained about traveling in time the week before in Elementary Time Travel, and she never explained anything twice.

She had sent us back, the way she did everything: shifting space and time with the help of metaphor. Meaning, in this case, an hourglass. “You understand, of course, that the hourglass does nothing,” she told us, always the teacher. “It’s the mind that shifts time. The metaphor merely gives it something to focus on.”

And there we were, greeting the Ilurians and explaining to them that we were from Miss Lavender’s School, and had they seen a girl with white hair?

The high priestess told us that, although she had not seen Mouse, any friend of Mrs. Moth’s was a friend of hers, although she called Mrs. Moth by another name. And she invited us to meet the oracle. The living flame.

And now, that living flame was telling us to find Miss Gray, the gray woman.

“All right,” said Matilda. “On to the mountain. I’m glad we at least got lunch.”

The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin:

He had died again. He had died nine times, at least I think the number was nine. Honestly, I had lost count.

Emma and I rowed him to the Isle of the Dead. Well, I did most of the rowing. Emma stood up in the boat, looking all dramatic and solemn.

“He’s going to come back again,” I told her. “He always does. He just appears from another point in history.”

“I know,” she said. “But isn’t it romantic? I’ve never been to a funeral before.”

There we were, in something something B.C., and she wanted to stand in a boat and look romantic. Whatever.

I thought about the events of the last few weeks. Finding Miss Gray, or the gray woman as she was known by the Ilurians and random talking flames. She had looked almost exactly like she did in our own time, except that she had been wearing a linen tunic and her hair had been coiled and draped in a series of braids. The first thing she said was, “Emma, stand up straight. Matilda, you have a stain on your school uniform. And Thea, what in the world are you girls doing here anyway?”

We had told her about Sitgreaves taking Mouse. And she had told us where to find them. When we got there, Sitgreaves was already gone, and Mouse had been under a spell. She had been asleep. And Sitgreaves had gotten what he wanted, the key she wore around her neck.

It took a while to wake her, and that was when Merlin showed up. He wasn’t concerned about Mouse, of course not. He just wanted the key.

“What’s so special about it?” I asked him.

“It opens a door to the Other Country,” he said.

“What door?” asked Matilda.

“Any door,” he said. “You put the key in the lock, and it becomes a door to the Other Country.”

Sitgreaves had been banned from the Other Country. But that key would let him in again.

“Can’t Mother Night stop him?” asked Emma.

“She made the key. She gave it the properties that allow it to open any door to the Other Country. She won’t work against her own magic.”

“Whatever,” I said. “It’s probably some stupid working out of the pattern.”

“Thea!” said Emma.

“I need to find that key,” said Merlin. And he vanished in a plume of smoke. Typical.

We woke Mouse, and I won’t go into the details of our adventures. Just as we thought they were finally over, we found Merlin’s body. He had fought Sitgreaves and lost, which meant that Sitgreaves still had the key.

“I’m sending you back,” said Miss Gray, the gray woman, the spinner of webs, the sayer of spells. “By now, he’s gone wherever he’s going to go. The next battle will be fought in the Other Country itself. Tell Mrs. Moth and Miss Lavender what happened here. And tell them to get ready.”

“What about Merlin?” asked Emma. She was always the romantic, the tender one. “Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, hold a funeral for him or something?”

So we rowed him to the Isle of the Dead and left him there, with the shadows that live behind trees and beneath rocks. But we knew we would see him again, when we least expected it. We always do.

This is one of those evenings on which I’m very, very tired.

My back hurts from typing, and I don’t seem to have any ideas left. Certainly nothing left to write about. And on top of everything, I look back at my blog posts from yesterday and I’m not happy with them. It’s because I’m a perfectionist and I want my posts to have a certain shape, and those particular posts don’t. They’re not particularly well-wrought. And that bothers me, you know?

On the other hand, every time I look at this blog, it makes me happy. I like the painting at the top, like the way in which the link colors actually sort of match the colors in the painting. (Didn’t I tell you I’m a perfectionist?)

So instead of trying to say anything profound, I’m going to quote from Terri Windling, who has been saying profound things as usual. This is from one of her recent blog posts, called “Dare to be Foolish.”

“The simple truth is that being a creative artist takes courage; it’s not a job for the faint of heart. It takes courage each and every time you put a book or poem or painting before the public, because it is, in fact, enormously revealing. (Delia Sherman once likened the publishing of a novel to walking down the street buck naked.) Worse yet, what our work often reveals is not the beautifully-lit, carefully-presented surface of our creativity, but the darker shadow-play at its interior. That can’t be helped. But the good news is: that’s precisely where the best art comes from.

“While our intellect chases its bright and lofty visions, our most original, powerful ideas tend to rise from muddy, murky depths below: from the clouded waters of the subconscious; from the baffling landscape of nightmare and dream; from the odd obsessions, weird fixations, and uncanny flashes of intuition that rise up from those strange parts of ourselves that we know and approve of least; from those places most likely to make us feel ridiculous, and exposed. The muse, if we follow her far enough, and honestly enough, demands that we bare it all: our angel wings and our asses’ ears. It doesn’t matter if we’re writing genre fiction and not memoir; it doesn’t matter if we’re painting fairy tales and not self-portraits. ‘All art is autobiographical,’ said Federico Fellini; ‘the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.'”

I think that’s essentially right, that being a creative artist takes courage. For all sorts of reasons, one of which is as Terri points out that art reveals an awful lot about its creator. And so as artists we are revealing ourselves all the time.

I like the image she ends with, the pearl as the oyster’s autobiography. Because the pearl is something perfected, something round and shining and precious. And yet what is it, really? Sand and saliva. Out of sand and saliva, we make our pearls. And they genuinely are pearls, at least if we make them right. What we dredge out of the depths of ourselves becomes complete, luminous. That is the transformation we are allowed, as creative artists. But the price is our courage, our willingness to live lives in which creativity is possible (which are difficult lives to live), our willingness to go into those depths on a regular basis.

I would offer a corollary to her injunction, “dare to be foolish”: “dare to be serious.” Dare to take yourself seriously as an artist, to make the necessary space in your life for the sort of foolishness Terri describes. To practice, to study, to learn. So that you can be foolish freely, like a clown whose movements are so trained that they are also entirely natural.

I think sometimes about how foolish it is that I’m spending all this time: writing, even doing scholarship. What’s it all for? But I think it’s for the pearl, so that eventually the product of my life will be a shining whole. That makes the fact that I’m tired, and I have a headache, and my back hurts, all worthwhile.

Terri concludes with this statement:

“Don’t be afraid to be weird, don’t be afraid to be different, don’t worry too much about what other people think. Whatever it is that’s original in you and your work might sometimes make you feel uncomfortable. That probably means you’re on the right track, so just keep going.”

Whichever track you’re on, just keep going. It doesn’t really make sense to do anything else, does it? Even what seems like the wrong track can become the right one, can result in the work that will someday make you say, “Yes. That.”

Did you notice that I changed the picture above? It used to be a drawing Kendrick made of me, with a green background. Now it’s John William Waterhouse’s painting of Miranda from The Tempest. I have to admit, I chose it because I thought Miranda looked a little like me, with the red hair and her profile at that angle. I sort of have that nose.

But I also liked the picture of the ship that is so obviously breaking up in the distance. You see, it looks like a disaster. It looks as though the ship is going down, and everyone on it is going to perish. But we know that’s not what’s going to happen. This isn’t the end of the story but the beginning. Miranda is looking at the brave new world she’s going to discover, a world with narrative in it. A world in which she will be able to act, after a period of statis.

I liked that. And so I chose the painting as my icon of sorts. I thought it went well with the green background, which is a William Morris design from the same era. What do you think? Is it too busy for my website? Or is it an improvement? I keep looking at it, trying to decide.

Here’s the entire painting, in case you wanted to know what it looks like:

I mentioned the other website I created this weekend, Poems of the Fantastic and Macabre. For that website, I chose a different Waterhouse painting, one of the sirens singing to Odysseus. That makes sense thematically too, right? Because singing has always been used as a metaphor for poetry, which started in song, and the sirens are also frightening – as poetry sometimes is, because it has such power to allure and alter us. So the sirens are both fantastical and macabre. Here is that painting, in case you wanted to see the whole thing:

Aren’t they beautiful? I get so much out of art from this particular period. I’m not sure why, but it makes me feel – more alive, more imaginative, more creative. Sort of Paterian, actually!