The faery reel, p.45
The Faery Reel, page 45
Then he’ll move on, and do it again. Nothing makes up for the ones he’s stopped, but he can try, at least, to replace them.
Sleep, child, she’d said, and wake to a better world. He’d thought then she’d meant the sleep of death, but if she’d wanted to kill him, wouldn’t he be dead? He relaxes into the green darkness, the comforting magic. When he wakes this time, it’ll be the same old world. But some morning, for someone, someday, it will be different.
Emma Bull’s first novel, War for the Oaks, is a contemporary fantasy about a rock musician who finds herself drafted into a civil war between the high courts of Faery. So she’s been spying on the Fey for quite some time now.
Her third novel, Bone Dance, was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Her Bordertown novel, Finder, was reprinted for young adults in the summer of 2003. By the time you read this, she’ll have finished Territory, a historical fantasy set in Tombstone, Arizona in which magic affects the events surrounding the O.K. Corral gunfight.
Her most recent band, the Flash Girls, released their third album, Play Each Morning, Wild Queenon Fabulous Records.
Her web site is www.qwertyranch.com, where you’ll also find stuff about her husband, Will Shetterly, and maybe even a picture of their cat.
Author’s Note
In Sonora, Mexico, the Yaquis and Mayos say there are antlered serpents that live in the mountain springs and keep them from going dry. People make offerings at the springs, and ask the serpent for a good harvest.
If I still lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this story might never have occurred to me. But I moved to Los Angeles in 1996. Now I live in southern Arizona, which, as far as this story is concerned, is only more so. Someday, maybe, there won’t be anyone to tell this story about.
How to Find Faery
Nan Fry
Watch and honor your cat
when his green eyes look through
and beyond you. Do the same
for your dog when she sniffs
and barks at invisible things.
Find a beech forest or even
one tree. Stand under it and listen.
The rushing you hear will be wind
in the leaves or the murmur of elves.
Take a bath in the moonlight.
Where moonbeams touch
the water’s skin, sometimes
a nixie will swim.
Go to the shore and watch the tide
ebb at sunrise or sunset. Notice
how the wet sand holds the sky’s
hues of mauve and coral.
Gradually the light brightens or fades,
and the sand returns to its own color.
Even so the world of faery washes
over this one, then recedes.
Here and there a shell gleams.
Pick up the shell and go home.
If it fades in the dry light of day,
shine it with your own spit
as a sign of the magic within you
that rises to meet the world’s
darkness and flash.
Nan Fry is an associate professor in the Academic Studies Department at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Say What I Am Called, a selection of riddles translated from the Anglo-Saxon, and Relearning the Dark. The Poetry Society of America has placed one of her poems on posters in the transit systems of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland, as part of their Poetry in Motion program. Her poems have appeared in several recent anthologies including Poetry in Motion: From Coast to Coast and Opening a Door: Reading Poetry in the Middle School Classroom.
Author’s Note
As Robert Frost noted, a poem can say more than one thing at a time. When I wrote “How to Find Faery,” I was thinking of those hints of magic that we sense in our ordinary lives, of how such glimpses can transform our view of reality, of how fleeting they are, and of how, ultimately, they come both from within us and in our response to the world.
A Biography of Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow is an acclaimed, award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor.
Born and raised in New York, Datlow aspired to be a veterinarian when she was a child, but changed her plans when she realized how much she preferred reading and writing to math and science. Her first publishing job was in the New York office of Little, Brown & Co. in 1973. During the next eight years she worked at a handful of other publishing companies before finally finding her calling in 1981 as an editor of short fiction at OMNI magazine, where she worked until 1998. She has also worked at the online magazine Event Horizon and at scifi.com.
Datlow has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the bestselling collections Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, Supernatural Noir, and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror. She has published important science fiction and fantasy writers such as Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula K. Le Guin, Clive Barker, William S. Burroughs, and many more.
She has also edited or co-edited numerous critically acclaimed anthologies of speculative fiction, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. She often collaborates with renowned co-editor Terri Windling, with whom she worked on Snow White, Blood Red, a work of adult fairy tales that has been one of their most successful projects together.
Datlow is the recipient of several awards, including multiple Shirley Jackson awards and Bram Stoker awards, Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor, Hugo Awards for Best Short Form Editor, and Locus Awards for Best Editor, to name just a few. She also received the Karl Edward Wagner Award for “outstanding contribution to the genre.” In 2011, she was the recipient of a Life Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, and in 2014 she was awarded the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Association. Datlow also cohosts a popular reading series, Fantastic Fiction, at the KGB Bar in New York City, where she resides.
Baby Datlow in 1950. The so-called Gerber baby portrait was common at the time.
Datlow’s high school graduation photo, taken in 1967.
Datlow at home, wearing a vintage dress for a science fiction function in 1981. She says that she favors 1940s-era clothing.
Datlow sitting at her desk in the OMNI offices in 1981, roughly a year after she began working there. On her desk is a Kaypro computer and the Selectric typewriter she kept for addressing envelopes. On her bulletin board she pinned, among other things, a photo of King Kong climbing the Empire State Building.
Datlow in 1989, on the roof of the building where John Clute, renowned science fiction and fantasy critic, and his artist wife, Judith, live. The Clutes are based in Camden Town, London, and have graciously hosted many writers and editors over the past few decades. (Datlow usually stays with them on her annual visit to London.) Datlow is on the left, John Clute is in the center, and Datlow’s good friend Pat Cadigan, an award-winning science fiction writer, is on the right.
A manipulated photo of Datlow taken in 1990 by art photographer and illustrator J. K. Potter, giving her cat eyes. It first appeared on the original back flap of Alien Sex.
Datlow in front of an advertisement for OMNI magazine in New York City in 1991. That winter day, Datlow wandered Manhattan with her camera and her friends, the married writers Steven Gould and Laura J. Mixon. They happened upon the advertisement just north of Datlow’s West Village home.
Datlow with fellow editor Terri Windling in 1994. Datlow and Windling have collaborated on anthologies for more than twenty years, yet rarely see each other. This photo is from one of those rare yet cherished meetings.
Datlow modeled for J. K. Potter’s cover of the illustrated edition of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells, published in 1990. Potter gave Datlow a print of the image, which hangs on her living room wall.
A Biography of Terri Windling
Terri Windling is an award-winning writer and editor of fantasy, an essayist on the mythic arts, and a visual artist. She is the author or editor of bestselling books such as The Wood Wife, The Armless Maiden, the Snow White, Blood Red series, and the Bordertown series. She also contributed to The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales and other nonfiction works on folklore and fantasy literature.
Windling was raised in New Jersey and Pennyslvania, and moved to New York City after attending Antioch College in Ohio. She got a job as an editorial assistant at Ace Books at a time, she found, when the field of fantasy was a wide-open, upstart genre. Windling worked as an editor in New York throughout the 1980s, while also establishing the Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts in Boston in 1986. In 1990, she began to divide her time between a winter home in Tucson, Arizona, and a summer home in Devon, England. It was at this point that she began to focus on her own writing and painting, while continuing to edit part-time. She has written or edited over forty books, including adult and young adult fiction, anthologies, essays, and children’s books. She has frequently co-edited anthologies with renowned editor Ellen Datlow, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, in which she published such important writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King, A. S. Byatt, Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Louise Erdrich, Neil Gaiman, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among many others. She serves as an editorial consultant for Tor Books and works widely with other major book publishers. Windling is also founder and was the co-editor of the Journal of Mythic Arts from 1997 to 2008.
Windling has received multiple awards in the field of fantasy literature, including the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Solstice Award for outstanding contributions to the speculative fiction field, nine World Fantasy awards, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. She was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award and made the short list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, among others.
Windling is also a visual artist whose mythically themed work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States, Great Britain, and France.
Windling currently resides in a small village on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, England, with her husband, Howard Gayton, and their daughter, Victoria Windling-Gayton.
Terri Windling was born in December 1958 to a young single mother. To escape her often volatile home life, Windling found solace in fairy tales and fantasy. This picture was taken in Pitman, New Jersey.
Windling was in her early twenties when she began working as an editor and anthologist. Here she attends the World Fantasy Convention in 1982, when she won her first of nine World Fantasy awards. (Photograph courtesy of Beth Gwinn.)
Windling at the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis in 1987, where she was the Editor Guest of Honor. (Photograph courtesy of Beth Gwinn.)
From 1990 to 2008, Windling divided her time between a winter home in Tucson, Arizona, and a summer home in Devon, England. Here, she is photographed with Ellen Datlow at the World Fantasy Convention in Tucson in 1991. (Photograph courtesy of Beth Gwinn.)
In Tuscon, Windling lived surrounded by the Rincon Mountains. Here, she is pictured on a desert path in the foothills, in autumn 1996. This was the setting for her novel The Wood Wife, published that same year, which won the Mythopoeic Award. (Photograph courtesy of Carol Amos.)
Windling’s summer home was a 400-year-old cottage in a small village on Dartmoor in Devon, England. (Photograph courtesy of Alan Lee.)
In 2008, Windling married the English dramatist Howard Gayton and settled in Devon, England, fulltime. (Photograph courtesy of Ellen Kushner.)
Windling’s husband is a theater director, performer, and founder of Ophaboom Theatre, specializing in Commedia dell’Arte. The couple is pictured here in Devon. (Photograph courtesy of K. Marchant.)
Windling and Howard Gayton celebrate their wedding anniversary by following the old Devon marriage custom of “jumping the broom.” This picture of Terri, with their beloved dog, Tilly, was taken in their garden in Devon in September 2011. (Photograph courtesy of Howard Gayton.)
Windling’s paintings are inspired by myth, folklore, and fairy tales from around the world. This painting is based on “Little Red Riding Hood.”
A portrait of Windling and her dog, Tilly, created by her friend and neighbor, the book illustrator David Wyatt.
A portrait of Windling by writer and photographer Augusten Burroughs, taken in New York City in 2012.
About the Contributors
Steve Berman is the author of short stories for teens, many of which are queer and can be found in the collection Red Caps: New Fairy Tales for Out of the Ordinary Readers. He is also the author of the young adult novel Vintage: A Ghost Story. Berman resides in Western Massachusetts and works at Deerfield Academy, one of the foremost private boarding schools in the United States.
Holly Black is the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of over thirty fantasy novels for children and young adults. She has been a finalist for the Eisner Award and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and a recipient of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, a Newbery Medal, and the Nebula Award. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages worldwide and adapted for film. Black currently lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret library.
Emma Bull writes science fiction and fantasy of various flavors and lengths. She likes digging holes in the dirt and putting plants in them, making clothes out of string and two sticks, dressing up for Halloween, and bicycling. Oh, and writing. She likes that too. Bull frequently teaches creative writing at Hamline University. At the moment, she is working on Claim, a sequel to her novel Territory, and planning further nefarious acts of literature.
Bill Congreve is an award-winning writer, editor, critic, and independent publisher with MirrorDanse Books. His work has been featured in several international publications such as Terror Australis, Aurealis, Borderlands, Monstres!, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, Cthulhu Deep Down Under, The Best of the Scream Factory, and War of the Worlds: Battleground Australia, and his vampire stories are collected in Epiphanies of Blood: Tales of Desperation and Thirst. His most recent collection is Souls Along the Meridian. Congreve won the Peter McNamara Achievement Award in 2012, and has acted as judge for the Aurealis Awards on nine occasions. He works as a policy and procedure writer in the emergency services sector.
Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years as the fiction editor of Omni Magazine, as well as an editor of Event Horizon magazine and Sci Fiction. She currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited about one hundred science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual Best Horror of the Year series, and most recently Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Mad Hatters and March Hares, The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea, and Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories.
Datlow has won multiple awards for her editing work. She was the recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award at the British Fantasy Convention for outstanding contribution to the genre. She was also honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association, as well as the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.
Datlow currently lives in New York and cohosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com, Datlow’s Facebook page, or on Twitter at @EllenDatlow. She is owned by two cats.
A. M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Their fourth, A Daughter of No Nation, won the 2016 Prix Aurora Award for Best Novel. They have published over forty short stories on Tor.com and elsewhere. Dellamonica teaches writing at two universities—the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program and the University of Toronto Scarborough—and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Their sixth novel, Gamechanger, was released in September under the name L. X. Beckett and is a “hopetopia”, a story that imagines humanity surviving climate change and creating a post-carbon economy.
Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who calls Ottawa, Canada, home. The author of more than seventy adult, young adult, and children’s books, he has won World Fantasy, Aurora, Sunburst, and White Pine Awards, among others. Modern Library’s Top 100 Books of the 20th Century poll, voted on by readers, included eight of de Lint’s books. De Lint is also a poet, artist, songwriter, performer, and folklorist. He writes a monthly book-review column for Fantasy & Science Fiction. For more information, visit his website at www.charlesdelint.com.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and Ahab’s Return: or, The Last Voyage. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell.
Gregory Frost’s most recent work is the Shadowbridge duology from DelRey. It was an American Library Association Best Fantasy Novel pick. His novel Fitcher’s Brides was a World Fantasy Award finalist and a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award. His collaborative novelette with Michael Swanwick, “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters, H’ard and Andy Are Come to Town,” won an Asimov’s Readers’ Award. His short stories have been finalists for Bram Stoker, Nebula, Hugo, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards.
Nan Fry was an associate professor in the Academic Studies Department at Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in Washington, DC. She was the author of several collections of poetry, including Say What I Am Called, a selection of riddles translated from Anglo-Saxon, and Relearning the Dark. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast and Opening a Door: Reading Poetry in the Middle School Classroom. Fry died in 2016.
