Katherine Keenum

There are authors whose new books you want to buy as soon as they are published. For me, Natasha Pulley is one, yet I waited on The Mars House. Hard science fiction is not really a genre I follow, and this one was billed as a queer romance set on Mars. Yes, but it has woolly mammoths! and a goofy dog! and a principal male ballet dancer for the central character! This past week, I finally read a library copy—and bought my own at a local bookstore. Definitely on the reread list.

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I'm rereading the four Fallow Sisters novels I discovered last summer. They're better with each rereading, and here's great news from Liz Williams in an article, How Running a Witchcraft Shop Helps Me Write Fantasy Book: "The Fallow sisters contain elements of me—they are not me, but they are also like people I know. The house in which they live, magical Mooncote, is not my house—but its orchard is my orchard, its beehives are my beehives. I'm definitely not done with it just yet." More to come? Yea!

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Exhibition alert: A show opening at Mass MoCa on August 25, 2024—Osman Khan: Road to Hybridabad— combines folklore from Southeast Asia and the Middle East with the immigrant experience and modern technology to explore how people form new identities these days. Flying carpets? Drones. Storytelling Scheherzade? AI. Djinn? A robot. The exhibition spreads out through several galleries so that viewers will experience a kind of narrative as they move through. I'm in the old-fashioned school of fantasy writers who rely on Northern European traditions for inspiration, but I'm eager to come at new stories and new thoughts viscerally in three dimensions.

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.

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This week, for fantasy work-in-progress, I wondered how—or whether—a couple of characters should be shod for a summer spent on foot. I've borrowed the banner title from Shoes in the Middle Ages because I love seeing its example of bare feet and a possible shoe. It was one of a handful of websites I looked at for the lazy author's approach to research. Two others were Medieval Shoes and Pattens and Cordwainer, Shoemaker, Cobbler?

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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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