Katherine Keenum

Before settling in to work on my fantasy novella this morning, I made the mistake of skimming the news. After that, I needed a better picture in my mind's eye, for sure, so I visited Terry Windling's Dartmoor Mythic Arts page, which, in turn, took me to Virginia Lee's home page and this mysterious landscape. I allowed myself to poke around at her website and found her illustrated edition of The Frog Bride by Antonia Barber, one of my favorite children's book authors. At Better World Books, I found a copy and ordered it. If you don't know that venue, its profits go to literacy programs, and it provides a carbon offset feature for shipping (at the grand cost of $0.04 in this case!). It's much more worth supporting than the behemoth Amazon. Sales of used books do not profit authors (don't I know!), but they do help circulate work on the budgets that so many of us book lovers can afford.

Serendipity in my blog crawling! The History Blog's Rare Brazilian feathered cloak restored, exhibited concerns a gorgeous orange-red cloak made of feathers while Honoring the Wild at Myth and Moor contains an image of a mysteriously evocative sculpture by Hib Sabin of a raven wearing just such a cloak. The detail of rarity hanging in a collection is from a 1666 catalogue of the Setalla Gallery of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. A spirit cloak, contemporary mythic sculpture, a 17thC cabinet of curiosities—so many hints and suggestions for metaphors and story lines. What would be your take?

When I read Philip Pullman’s new novel, La Belle Sauvage last fall, I noted with a little puzzlement that he has the hero, Malcolm, explain the name of his canoe by saying that an uncle owns a pub called La Belle Sauvage downriver.  Read More 

In a fantasy story I’m working on, I sometimes put the narrator’s comments into parentheses. Neil Gaiman has said that, as a child, he fell in love with C. S. Lewis’s use of parentheses for chatty asides, which made him aware that  Read More 

The conceptual artist Catherine Chaloux tickles my fancy. Although fantasy fiction is a part of my reading and writing life, I have not reacted to her witty, luscious work as a source of stories so much as illustrations of my imaginary self. This picture combines  Read More 

Some of my favorite novels are fantasies. For a holiday treat, I read Patricia McKillip’s Od Magic. It is a lovely, lively story and I was specially interested in how McKillip interwove four plot lines. It allowed her to jump over the  Read More 

Images inspire writing. Among my desktop folders, I have one for Pictures Demanding Stories—or, in Greer Gilman’s more potent term, Story-seeds. This image by Rovina Cai instantly called to mind Gilman’s work. I’m tickled pink that she agrees. Here’s hoping that one day she’ll tell us the story! (As for me, it's back to ANONYMITY and, well, to some other fiction that insists on being written.)

Thanks to Line and Colors for the post on Cai.

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Blog tip: Writer, artist, and editor Terry Windling posts today on Stories that matter. She quotes other writers who share her philosophy (and mine) that real writing is what you must do because you can't not do it. The post is illustrated with fantasy images by Nadeshda Illarionova, whose pictures could easily inspire a fairy tale of your own. Check'em out! Read More 

Blog tip: Any of you who read fantasy fiction know Terri Windling as a writer or editor. I have just stumbled across her blog Myth and Moor while researching Glasgow women artists (I think Amy Richardson may wind up in Glasgow). A visit to her page is a two-fer, Windling herself and Jessie M. King. Read More