A few words of warning up front: I am in no way impartial about the House of Pomegranates, the wonderful people who run it, and David Keyes’ new collection of short short I Do So Worry For All Those Lost At Sea. The House of Pomegranates Press published my short story collection and the illustrated Chrysanthemum Shadows, the creative team at its heart are dear friends, and I’ve loved David’s work for years.

This new collection features 11 short stories, some linked (or are all of them linked by some mysterious factor we can’t quite grasp?), some published before in one of David’s exquisite limited editions, some of them original to this book. The central core of stories revolve around the family who live in the mysterious The House of Sleep and their neighbours. One of these neighbours is a cartographer who also happens to be a wolf. Another is a large Hare who rents the vacant mansion nearby and takes photographs of the O sisters in stripey tights in the rooftop studio.

Putting Emily to bed, a small nightlight casts fantastic shadows about the warm room. Her angel wings hang upon the door.
“William, I am writing a novel.”
“Are you? Of what?”
“Of the people who live in this house.”
“You and me?”
“No, silly, not us. I’m writing about the other people who live here.”

In the other stories there are ghosts, sisters who flee to Paris, and a mermaid longing for the sea. The writing can be lush and dreamy, with an air of Edwardian elegance, or as spiky and modern as a half-coherent conversation with a lover down a bad connection to the other side of the world. It reads the way David’s artwork (sadly not included in this book) looks – just as his art looks just like the images his words conjure.

Reading these stories is like curling up in the window seat and watching dusk darken across the lawn, watching the fireflies spark against the trees, and listening to your eccentric friends and family talk about art and dinner and the moon, knowing that in a moment you’ll hear the sound of someone shaking up the perfect martini. There is heartbreak ahead – just as there has been pain and loss and grief behind – but for the moment, this moment, everything is beautiful.

Nancy - then and now

At the recent World Fantasy convention here in Toronto (ok, Richmond Hill), I was on a panel about the late, much-missed Twilght Zone magazine. I was fortunate enough to make my first professional sale to TZ, after having entered their annual short story contest and finished as a runner-up for my story “The Party Over There”. The editor, Tappan King, returned the story with the comments that “perhaps I should rethink the ending” and “it needs to be deeper”. Since the ending was what the story was about and I had no idea what “deeper” meant, I didn’t do anything. Then one day he called me at work. After I stopped gibbering, I admitted that I hadn’t sent the story back because I didn’t want to change it. He said “so send it back as it was and tell me I’m full of shit”. I made some minor modifications and did just that (well, minus the shit reference). He bought it and my next story “Exodus 22:18” as well.

At the convention, the panel included Elizabeth Hand (to whom I lost the first TZ First Publication contest – and the best story definitely won), Scott Edelman, Darrel Schweitzer and Lawrence Connelly. We shared stories about our experiences and what the magazine and its staff had meant to us. I was a subscriber for a year or two before I entered the contest and I found the magazine to be an incredible resource for book reviews, introducing me to new writers as well as classics, and a place to find the kind of dark fantasy fiction I loved by the best writers around.

Thanks to the convention team and my fellow panelists for a great hour of memories.

For more information, check the article on Lawrence’s site.

By rights, Modesty Blaise should come much later in the influence sequence, but a friend mentioned this series the other day, which sent me back to reread the first two.

I think the second of the series (Sabre-Tooth) made it’s way into our house in one of the boxes of books that my Dad brought home (this was definitely a major benefit of having a parent work in the book business). After determining that no sabre-tooth tigers were involved, I ignored it for months, maybe even years. When I finally did read it, I was instantly converted to a fan. I gradually found the other books, mostly used, which results in a interesting range of cover treatments.

In my rereading, I discovered that they hold up remarkably well. The writing is economical and clear, the humour sophisicated and utterly embedded in the characters, the plots (at least in the first books) not too outlandish, and the ingenuity with which Modesty and Willie get out of yet another life-threatening situation always entertaining. However, it’s the characters that always set these books apart from so many other spy thrillers. Despite her comic strip origins, Modesty is a rich and complicated hero. There is nothing camp or comical about her, beyond her own sense of humour. She is fierce, strong-willed, intelligent, brave and professional. She can command criminals and soldiers, plan and execute complicated “capers”, and never backs away from the hard choice. She always gets the boy, so to speak, but none of them ever get her for a moment longer than she chooses. She is loyal, fair, and – to the benefit of the British government – a “compulsive payer of debts”.

I always thought “What would Modesty do?” would make a good mantra – but there’s no way I could ever live up to that.

I see reflections of her in the characters I created as a teenager and suspect that if I were to ever write a fight scene, it would be a lot like a Modesty Blaise one.

I wish that someone would make a movie that does her justice, if only to set a new group of fans hunting for stories about a character who was always so much more than just “the female James Bond.”

My website was hacked last weekend. Why anyone would hack it is beyond me, but there you go. Thanks to Deane for the quick restore.
“Understanding WordPress and Social media 101” is going on my “things to do” list now.

No one, even at their most charitable, would call me technologically adept. My brother, his friend (and my future husband, though we didn’t know it at the time) and I were once discussing an article that had posited that the world would be divided into techno-lords and techno-peasants. Richard claimed techno-lord status, I was clearly a techno-peasant and my brother decided he would be a techno-parasite instead. All of this to lead up to the fact that my web hosting service migrated their platform or some such other hand-wavy technical thing last week and I’ve had nothing but trouble since. Part of this is my own fault, since I failed to read the instructions with sufficient diligence (in my defense, I think it’s a good idea to put the single big thing you must absolutely do to get your service back in ALL of the many e-mails I received. Preferably at the top.) and partially because the parts I did read just made my brain hurt. But at least I eventually made it here again.

Another thing I’m bad at is noticing Facebook messages and as a result missed a request from Derek Newman-Stille at Speculating Canada regarding an article on my book “A Terrible Beauty”. When I finally did clue in, I went to read the review and was both flattered by the kind words and impressed by the fact that Derek had found imagery that had never even occurred to me while I was writing. His comments regarding the use of lake and water imagery struck me as absolutely true and a complete surprise to me.

The site features interviews, reviews and articles about horror, sf and fantasy from a Canadian perspective and it’s definitely going on my favorites list.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read Nicolas Stuart Gray’s Mainly in Moonlight. I know that I took it out of the North York Public Library Children’s Section so many times the librarians must have wondered why my parents didn’t just buy me a copy. (Actually, I’m not sure why either. My father worked in publishing until I was in my mid-teens and we were always surrounded by books, but for some reason it never dawned on me to ask them to get this one for me. I later bought my own copy at a used book store).
It was probably my first experience with a talented writer taking all the conventions of well-known fairy tales and playing with them with subversive glee. If it was, then the experience “took”, as this is still something I love. In this collection of short stories, you’ll find wit, beautiful prose, sorrow, feminist heroines (before I knew there was such a thing and that it would matter to me so much), love, magic, cats, sorcerers, goats, demons and more. Find a child you love to give it to – or to read it aloud to. Or, oh hell, just buy it for yourself.

One of my earliest reading obsessions – and on that has a had an ongoing influence on my writing – is fairy tales. My family had two collections that contained the classic stories, along with some more obscure tales, and while I can’t remember the titles, I can still see the illustrations clearly. I’m still a sucker for an interesting retelling of these stories and “A Terrible Beauty” is my take on Beauty and the Beast.
One of the things that I realized as I got older was that I didn’t really relate to the princesses. Possibly as a result of the pernicious influence of Disney, I perceived all princesses as blonde, blue-eyed, pretty and rather helpless. As it was apparent from an early age that I was never going to be blonde and pretty and when I was young my aspirations ran to starship captain or superheroine rather than princess (more on that later), I ended up with a secret sympathy for the Evil Queens and Wicked Fairies. At least they had power and agency within the stories. They caused things to happen, rather than passively waiting to be woken with a kiss or doled out as a reward to an enterprising third son. The fact that they were very rarely blond and pretty but dark and beautiful may have swayed me. I stood no more chance of being dark and beautiful than I did of being blond and pretty but that was far closer to my idea of beauty. Many years later I realized how much my mother’s looks had influenced that view, especially since I had failed to inherit her black hair and cheekbones.
Of course, the best characters are far more complex than that. Even blonde princesses have hearts and souls and secret shadows, sometimes evil is simply evil and magic, while a fine weapon in fairy tales, is a poor substitute for political equality. The endless retelling of fairy tales by writers, the shifting of sympathies and meanings between Princess and Queen, proves the power both of those archetypes have for so many of us.
A few years ago, I came across a t-shirt with the phrase “Evil Queen” on it. Of course I bought it.

My favorite fairy tale reimaginings:
Red as Blood, Tanith Lee
Beauty, Robin McKinley
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
Deerskin, Robin McKinley

I’ll be doing my first reading in two years on August 8th as part of the ChiZine reading series. If you’re in Toronto, come by and catch Carolyn Clink, Tanya Huff, Kari Maaren and me do our thing at:
The Augusta House, 152A Augusta Avenue, Toronto, ON
8:00 start

Now I just have to decide what I’m going to read.

Squirrel Nutkin

I was thinking about the early influences that have informed my reading and writing choices and shaped the kind of art I love so I’ll be posting on that topic over the next while.

My official bio always said “Nancy blames her love of horror on the first horror story she read – “The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin”. I included that because it was fun and flippant, but also because it shows that, as a child, you will find all sorts of things scary. I remember being horrified at the illustration of the owl holding Squirrel Nutkin down by the throat. Looking back, I realize that the story might also have disturbed me because it was about being punished for breaking the rules, for rebelling (well, and for being an obnoxious squirrel-brat). To this day, it’s a safe bet that no one would ever describe me as a rebellious rule-breaker. I dutifully follow the instructions, stand in the lines and don’t complain. Perhaps I’m afraid that someone will rip my metaphorical tail off.

That sums up my “career” as a visual artist. While I like art, own a fair bit of it and am known to swoon over lovely shot composition in films, I’m also the person who passed art in public school only because I handed in all my assignments. My creative activities have always been literary, except when I took an oil painting course as part of my research for A Terrible Beauty. That experience proved I could not draw and even falling back on the tried and true Neil Young line “That’s my style, man” and claiming a deep love of abstract art (which is true) did not really help.

Then my mother took up scrapbooking with my aunt and pretty soon I was going along, mostly as an excuse to hang out with my family, gossip, and eat very well indeed. To my surprise, I enjoyed the process itself. I happily sat there moving coloured paper and pictures around on a page until I was satisfied with them, even if my explanations for my choices sometimes baffled others (“The red and yellow strips fanning out from top of the page represent the rays of the god Amon-Ra.” Though, to be fair, that was in a scrapbook about a trip to Egypt.) I even liked the physicality of it and still prefer the old-fashioned method of playing with paper and scissors to the new electronic options. I realized that it was because my work life is lived with numbers and my other creative life with words and I needed to exercise that other part of my brain, as inadequate as it might be.

When I decided that one of the main characters in my current novel was going to spend part of her time repairing a mosaic, I did what I always do – I took a course. I turned out to be much better at mosaics than at oil painting and proceeded to make a flaming heart cocktail table and some skeletal fish panels on my own. I entered my sugar skull in the AWOL Gallery Square Foot Show and someone actually paid $200 for it. With my subsequent entries (a stylized Louise Brooks image and an attempt at an abstracted Provence landscape) my fuzzy artistic vision definitely exceeded my technical abilities and those currently adorn the walls here at home.

I bailed on last year’s event but finished off the mosaic this year and decided to enter it. Again, the image in my head worked better than the finished creation, but at least it’s done. Now I just have to starting finding a space on the wall for it…

If you want to see the real thing, go to the Awol Gallery Site for details.
You can see some of the earlier creations in past posts on this site.