Katherine Keenum

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?

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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.

Liz Williams' Fallow Sisters novels were my 2023 summer treat. When I learned that Bee Fallows is the main character in a short story in Williams' new collection, Back through the Flaming Door, my reaction? Gotta have it! I ordered it through Bookshop.org. The book arrived. Naturally, Bee's story, "Saint Cold," was the first I read. Now I've gone back to the beginning and am reading the rest in order, one every day or so. Besides introducing me to the range of Williams' imaginary worlds, they have made me think about a story technique.

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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.

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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!

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Four things struck me about this photograph of Pickard's Baulk in Derbyshire, England. First, all that greenness—not quite Middle-earth, but quintessentially English. Well, except, second: those stone walls instead of hedges. They locate the scene in the north and emphasize the rectilinearity of the fields. So, third, maybe a need for some rewilding? Let the trees in the middle spread? The central grove of trees is the fourth feature that delighted me, for it led me to the word baulk, one definition of which is "ground left unploughed as a boundary line between two ploughed portions" (OED). Splendid specificity!

Exhibition alert: A review in the Guardian of Mary Cassatt at Work, a new retrospective now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, sent me to the museum's holdings of her work, where I found The Banjo Player shown here. Cassatt was as innovative as her male contemporaries, and it's good to see her career presented in depth. For those of us who can't get to Philadelphia this summer or to San Francisco in the fall for the exhibition, there's always the catalogue. Nothing beats seeing actual works for their colors texture, brushstrokes, and so forth; but the leisure to read about works and methods has its own rewards, not only for viewers, but also for writers of historical fiction.

I've just finished rereading one of my all-time favorite bedtime comfort reads: Summer Half by Angela Thirkell. My copy has this cover; and as soon as I picked it up, I could identify all the characters, even the gent with the moustache, Colin Keith. I visualize him differently (authors know readers do that), but it pleases me that Claire Minter-Kemp has obviously read the novel, for she depicts him as he appears in Thirkell's description. Not much point to this post except to say here's hoping the second half of summer 2024 supplies us all with some light moments. Happy Summer Solstice!