Katherine Keenum

Blog post alert: Material culture matters in historical and fantasy fiction. Rare survivals of decorative paper cutting by schoolgirls in the 17th century found under floorboards at Sutton House could prompt a telling detail in a story, but it would matter whether you were writing about a curator's discovery, life in the 17th C, or an imaginary world. Particularly for historical fiction, it would be important to know just who had access to such cut-outs in a world where paper was expensive.
 
For three more delightful examples, click here. And for context, click here.

I've just been introduced by our Western Massachusetts public library system to Astrid Sheckels and her Hector Fox books. I can't tell you how delighted I was to come across Ebenezer Moose, shown here, in Hector Fox and the Giant Quest! For many years, my husband and I vacationed at a lake in Maine, where we almost always saw at least one moose and especially loved spotting them in remote marshes. Sheckels' evocation of that landscape is evocative.

 Read More 

Hoo boy! How's this for a follow-up to yesterday's post? A transformation of every major element of Hollar's Pedlar into something lively, colorful, and strange. Lion-dog: otter. Skeleton: dragon. Peddler: traveller. Pannier: mystery box. It's Alan Lee's illustration for a story in Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson. I have just requested the book through interlibrary loan to find out what's going on. (As an author, I encourage people to buy books. As a library trustee and environmentalist, I urge you to remember what marvellous resources the country's public libraries provide.) As for this picture, I guess I'll wait to see what Dickinson was up to, but wouldn't it be fun to make up a story of one's own to go with it?

For my fantasy work-in-progress, I was looking for details of what a foot peddler might carry. Up came this etching by Wenceslaus Hollar after a picture in The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger. The wicker pannier resembles one in The Wayfarer by Hieronymous Bosch. Check. But what about the animal?

 Read More 

In the wake of last night's assassination attempt, I am staying clear of the news on the theory that there will be far too much chatter and misinformation afloat. Instead, I am working on maps for my current fantasy project and looking at pictures I love—like Charles Vess's illustration for Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, "High Marsh" in The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition. For those of you who are fascinated by the interplay of artist and author, check out Le Guin's post, A Work in Progress: Earthsea Sketches by Charles Vess. I'm also reading Le Guin's The Dispossessed in the Library of America edition. Let's all try to stay sane.

In order to force myself to work out a village layout for a story setting, I've been collecting drawings and photographs of medieval villages. One of the most useful is an archeological site at Gainsthorpe in Yorkshire. A different archeological discovery is a Labyrinthine structure found on hilltop in Crete. That History Blog post sent me to an earlier period, but the same sort of stimulation toward inventing place.

 Read More 

Well, the Supreme Court dropped a bombshell. Still love the red, white, and blue. BOOM!

Congratulations to Aaron Becker! His wordless picture book, The Tree and the River, is the 2024 double winner of England's prestigious Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration (awarded by an expert panel of librarians) and the Yoto Carnegie Shadowers Choice Medal for Illustration, which is decided by children and library users. It's one of those picture books in which the more you look, the more you see. In double-page spread after double-page spread, it depicts the colonization of a beautiful valley, its gradual transformation to village to town to city to ruin to—well, you'll have to get hold of the book to find out!

 Read More 

This delectable recorder-playing dragon appears in the margins surrounding of a large illumination in Boccaccio's Fates of Illustrious Men and Women. It would make a great jigsaw puzzle. Better yet, it could prompt a story. Is it part of a musical quartet (if so, who else plays?)? A runaway from dragon life (if so, why?)? Is it a dragon brought up in a human court after hatching from a captured egg? I think it's alive and not a toy, but I suppose it could be a clever marionette. Now, if it is a dragon buttoned into a onesie, what are three other things that must be true of its world?

During an interesting and very convincing recent lecture on the symbolic imagery of curtains in Byzantine liturgical practice, Professor Warren Woodfin discussed this image of Night, the prophet Isaiah, and the little boy Dawn. He connected Nyt's starry shawl in the Paris Psalter to iconographical traditions including the parochet that covered the Ark of the Covenant and altar veils of the Byzantine Christian church. I have to admit though that when he put up a detail of Nyt, my thoughts jumped immediately to Mara's cloak of pocket universes in The Dark Lord of Dernholm and then to all the lovely strands of Greer Gilman's imagery of weaving, scarves, and the Pleiades in Cloud and Ashes. I was trained as a medievalist, but you know what? I'm keeping my fingers crossed Nyt inspires me to something wonderfully fantastic.