Our Lady of the Dark Country

<Mother of the World, by Nicholas Roerich 1937>

What follows is the full introduction to a brand new book of mine called Our Lady of the Dark Country, a collection of my short stories, poems and a novella about powerful women, about the deep feminine, about Earth's magic. I am deeply happy to set it before you in this slow, dark, nourishing root of the year like an egg set in a quiet pool, for you to take in deep as starlight in this winter season. Something is shifting deep below the surface of things; the ancient ways of snake and woman are rising. This is a women-made book. My friend and the amazing designer at Heyday, Ashley Ingram, laid the book out for me as a freelance project. The artwork of Catherine Sieck and Nomi McLeod is featured within. And the cover painting is by none other than Rima Staines, a wild madonna-sibyl that she painted for our collaboration on the latest Dark Mountain volume. 

This book is an opening and a rooting. May it serve you well. 

*For US orders-- buy a copy here, or at any online bookseller, or request through your local shop! *

*For UK orders-- buy a copy from the Hedgespoken shop here! *

Introduction to Our Lady of the Dark Country

Women of America, of Europe, women of my blood and mothers of my ancestors, women of all the lands of this Earth: the words in this book are needles. Thread them where they need to go: through your body, through your life, into the ground as roots. They have come from a true place in me, from the place where forgotten stories have been buried, and I give them to you in these pages gladly.

We have come to an epistemic crossroads, a crisis of the “real.” I will not be able to win an argument with an archaeologist, an academic, a business man, or possibly even an old friend, by trying to state facts about the indigenous feminine traditions of Europe, about the Neolithic, about the work of Marija Gimbutas, about war, about peace, about menstruation, about sexuality, about freedom, about truth, about the heart, about the reality of magic, because facts have become a slippery thing and it seems that these days what matters is who fears what, and who gains what, and not What Is True. A fact is not What Is True. A fact is only an arrow that points toward who has the power and what story they want to tell.

A dozen times a week, sometimes a day, I want to write angry essays, immaculate in articulation and bombproof in argument, essays that are swords, cutting through two thousand years of tyrannical, imperialistic, misogynistic, life-denying narratives—the ones that are presently calling climate change a “pagan” notion, the ones that allow big oil and big gun lobbies to persist even in the face of the deadliest public mass shootings in history and a planet on the brink of devastating environmental chaos, the ones that enable the exploitation of just about everything and everybody remotely exploitable and objectifiable—but if I write angry essays like I am beginning to do here I will be dismissed by many as an angry feminist. Hysterical. It’s just her womb talking.

Well, actually, it is, and I’m proud to say it. I’m bleeding today. My womb is shedding like a snake. It is windy outside and just started to rain, loud and sweet on the roof. It is dusk. There’s a cake of quince, saffron and almond flour baking in the oven, and wood pigeons roosting in the bay trees, and I am indeed an angry woman writing but it is time, women of my blood, women of America, women of this Earth, that we were not ashamed. That we no longer believed anybody who told us our bodies and the wisdom of our bodies was not true. It is time we were proud and not embarrassed to say “I am bleeding today.” It used to be that a woman bleeding was sought for what she knew, for what she thought, because she was closest to something bigger. A moon, a tide. It is time we started at the very snake-center of our bodies and saw again the birthright of our strength, our power, and of a knowing that is older and vaster by far than the life-destroying cultural story we are currently living in.

You don’t have to know all the details about what happened, and who did what, and why—the series of Bronze Age invasions from the Russian steppe, the rise of the Roman Empire and a fanatical Christian state, the Inquisition and witch burning times, the colonization of the “New World” and onward—and how all of it is still embedded in the legacies we enact today, to feel what is beneath, in the dark country of our bodies, out of sight. All you have to do is begin at the center of yourself and listen. Earth’s language and the language of the living world will speak directly to you there, and tell you What Is True, from that wellspring which has long been associated with the womb (if you have a female body), and the center of yourself and your lifeforce (if you have a male body).

I want to pause here and make it clear that this book, though deeply feminine, is not only for women but for men too, and everyone between, around, above, below and sideways from those gender designations. I want to make sure you know I am not disparaging the male gender here as such, but only an aggressive manifestation of it—called patriarchy. There is little good in hate, and especially something so silly as the hate of an entire gender. Over-simplification, as my good husband often says, is rarely useful. And I have been blessed in my life with strong, caring examples of masculinity. I am married to a wonderful, respectful man. I was raised by a wonderful father, with a wonderful brother, kind and protective uncles, two loving grandfathers, and am now blessed to have a generous and good-hearted father-in-law and two brothers-in-law I am proud to call my family. Some of my most cherished teachers have been men, and some of my loveliest friends.

The violent objectification inherent in extreme patriarchy affects men as much as it does women. Differently, but terribly too. As I heard Lyla June Johnston (the Diné and Tsétsêhéstâhese poet, musician and activist) say in an interview last spring, the witch hunts damaged the men of Europe as much as the women. The witch hunts broke them too, for there is no faster way to destroy a man’s spirit (besides enslaving him or sending him to the trenches of a senseless war) than to take away and kill the women he loves—mother, wife, daughter, sister—and leave him with the horrific belief that it was his fault, that he didn’t do enough, that he could have done more. That he failed them. So while this book may appeal more to those who identify as “women,” it is not only for women. I write these words for all, in celebration of what the feminine might look like untrammeled and in balance with the masculine—in the past, in the present, and in the future.

I believe we are walking around with the witch trials still burning in our blood, and it is time to turn and look. There are lies still branded in our culture and the story of what it means to be a woman in the West, put there by the ancestral memory of breast ripper and hot rod and iron maiden and shackle and pyre, put there by forced marriage and forced silence, corset and shame. No manner of rhetoric would save you if the men of the Inquisition wanted you dead, even when you confessed to a mythology made entirely by them. Satan and the Devil do not belong to witches or to women, but to the life-denying story that says: to be born of a woman’s body is to be soiled. This is our original sin, they say. You must spend your whole life atoning, paving your path to elsewhere, away from Earth. To be a woman who practiced the old indigenous ways of Europe, who knew her power and the power of earthfast stone and holy spring, bird and knot and hare and womb, a woman who was a priest in her own right, a doctor, a seer—this was to be a direct threat to male Christian power. Some women were carried to “trial” in baskets, so their feet wouldn’t touch the ground, because the men feared that they would get power from the Earth that way.

But the worst part of it all is that the Inquisition worked so well it not only killed hundreds of thousands of women, but actually erased the truth of the witch and her (or his) indigenous roots from the old land of Europe. Erased them right out of the field of history. It is only very recently that this narrative is being amended. The story of the witch replaced the reality of the witch and we are left in its ashes still, alternately scoffing at the notion that a witch was ever a real person, or caricaturing her as a terrible old woman with warts who deserved to be killed by a young hero because she put babies in her oven and ate them.

Imagine if we spoke of the Holocaust with a snicker—“well, I mean, Jewish people weren’t real, it was just a mistaken hysteria, and that’s over now, don’t be silly.” And then we dressed up like them for Halloween to scare each other, and to laugh. Don’t be fantastical, witches were never real anyway, and if you want to talk about it, about women’s oldest knowing and a time when we were not objects under the hands of more powerful men, well, that’s some weird goddess shit, go ahead, suit yourself, but you will immediately be written off and shoved into a women’s studies department or the occult shelf. Meanwhile the rest will go on calling the real thing History and not men’s studies, starting with the earliest so-called “real” civilization, Mesopotamia, and the old Epic of Gilgamesh in which a man clearcuts a forest and builds a city, or the Enuma Elish, in which the newer gods kill the older gods, including the dragon-creatrix Tiamat, using her body to make the world. This is how you do it, this is how you build a civilization, see? they tell us. But if you read between the lines and into the more marginalized texts (the ones called “Women’s Studies,” for example) you might begin to suspect that to be built upon the carcass of dragon might be a metaphor for the overhaul of an older mythology by a violent, patriarchal one—the conquest of a peaceable, fecund, matrilineal agrarian culture that had been flourishing for the previous five thousand years or so without trouble or resource depletion.

Don’t get me wrong. I spend a lot of time in the bookstore in the Women’s Studies section. I make a beeline straight for the mythology shelf and the science fiction and fantasy wing. Deeply intelligent, important things are being written and published and placed in these sections, and I feel most at home among them. Here be dragons. But I think there’s something inherently troubling about the way this genrefication of both fiction and historical studies creates a hierarchy that looks a whole lot like the hierarchies of the Roman Empire, the Christian state, the US government, the workplace, and in many cases the home, whatever we say about feminism.

The eminent Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas provides a fascinating, and to me very frustrating, case study. After enjoying great esteem among her male colleagues for many years of work on Bronze Age Proto-Indo-European culture in the 1950’s and 60’s, she began to point out that there were an awful lot of female-shaped figurines in the ancient substratum of sites across southern, eastern, and central Europe long before said Indo-Europeans arrived. She went on to suggest, based on decades of study not only of ancient Neolithic cultures but also the folklore of eastern Europe, that they might have had religious value, possibly as representatives of goddesses in a matrilineal clan culture. She noticed what she thought were many small temples and a remarkable lack of weaponry or ornate burial mounds with kings in them, having dug most of the sites herself and read the reports for the rest in one of the eleven languages she was fluent in and her male colleagues were not. As if this wasn’t apparently bad enough (using the word “goddess” and “matriarchy” seems to immediately make the academic community uncomfortable) women who weren’t academics got excited about her work in the 1970’s because they felt she was uncovering at last a feminine heritage that was empowering, a new narrative that honored women’s bodies, women’s ways, and returned to them a millennia-long tradition of goddess worship across the ancient western world.

As far as many of Gimbutas’ colleagues were concerned, this was the equivalent of digging her own scholarly grave and burying her academic reputation alive, although her work was no less thorough, thoughtful, or well-researched than before. But she had begun to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach, weaving in her knowledge of folklore and linguistics to interpret the figurines she was uncovering, and probably a bit of imagination and intuition too. A more feminine way, maybe, but still founded upon thirty years of study and thought.

I’d be curious to know if the reaction would have been the same had she noted a remarkable number of male figurines, and suggested the worship of predominantly male gods. I have little doubt that there would have been no academic outcry. But a goddess is a very different thing than a god. Today, her work is much beloved among feminists and goddess followers, but generally dismissed by the academic community, and while we can laugh it off as a big loss to them, I think it’s actually quite chilling. An essay by a man who’d clearly not read all of Gimbutas’ work and certainly hadn’t thought very much about it is the only one included in the best contemporary volume on Old European culture. In his piece he dismisses all of Gimbutas’ conclusions with a writerly sneer and says not much of anything else besides that they might have been sex objects, pornographic in some way, maybe dolls or maybe just female bodies but, come on people—you can feel his sarcasm between the lines—let’s not be ridiculous here, let’s not be fanciful, sacred? Religious? Wide-hipped female figurines with possible snake heads, how could they be sacred or religiously important in any significant way? Let’s not get worked up about this, that’s just what the women want them to be and they can’t be right because, well—

And here we come at last to the terrible crux of the problem, and my diatribe. They cannot be goddesses with central significance to the cultures they were found buried within because—because—

It’s subconscious at this point, deeply so. You can see the trend. Why should we be so outrageously embarrassed when a woman suggests matrilineal goddess-worship that we won’t even consider it a real possibility?

Because it upsets the entire narrative of academia, of “progress,” of what we think we mean when we say “civilization.”

Because it takes us straight back to the woman beneath the apple tree speaking to the snake in the garden. Whatever she knew, whatever the snake was telling her, they’ve been trying to silence for at least the last two thousand years. And we’ve been trying to silence her in ourselves.

But I think something is changing now. I see it in the news, and it I feel it in the air, and in the center of myself, and in the ground.

Women and men of heart, Earth’s snakes are speaking. It is time we listen for the truth they tell us through the centers of ourselves. Women and men of heart, we make a spiral around this planet. It is time to tell the old stories that have damaged us differently. To go beneath what we’ve been told and into the dark country, into the Earth, where the other side of those stories is hidden, the truth that was carried all along in the roots of the trees despite thousands of years of war.

In this book I offer stories of that place, from the dark country that was never truly conquered or secondary, no matter what they told us. The place that was always the beginning, the center, the root. The place the snakes and dragons went when they had been called monster, and evil, and finally just a fantasy, one too many times.

The rain is falling harder now. The bishop pines roar with wind. Soon the owls will be calling. The house smells of quince and almond cake.

Come in. There are doorways, very near, that the dragons will walk through if we listen, and thread, and have the courage to stand up in our bodies and call them home.

SYLVIA V. LINSTEADT

The Bishop Pinewood

Inverness, California

November 2017 

Tatterdemalion, Almost Born

From the beginning, Tatterdemalion has been its own creature, a being of instinct, of old mystery, of the magic lands that lie just beyond our dreams. All throughout its creation, I've been following a thread that I can hardly call my own. I followed it to England last autumn, where I met Rima in person at last, and found Unbound. This autumn I followed it again to Dartmoor, to the 2016 Dark Mountain gathering at Embercombe. There, we gathered by the Hedgespoken hearth to share fires and tea and words with friends now very dear.

Of a Friday evening that long September weekend, Rima and I, with the help of her Tom and my Simon, wove together a theatrical presentation of our Tatterdemalion, its first ever performance, on the Hedgespoken stage as the stars pressed out and the crowd gathered near on blankets. 

It was an evening that seemed to have walked right out of the book. The Hedgespoken stage a place of warmth and comfort and also deep transformation and vision. Kind faces clustered across a canvas, holding ciders and pieces of cake and cups of beer. A fire in a dish the only light besides the lanterns and the stars. The music of Crow Puppets before, and after our Tatterdemalion, a strange and wonderful Welsh gypsy tale told by Tom until the hours were close to turning small again. 

We dressed in clothing that felt ceremonial, with dark colored scarves covering our hair. I read by the light of a red lantern, and Rima played the accordion, and brought to life her puppet, threading those two hand-magics in and out of my words. Simon and Tom joined their voices to open the scene, and the music of a flute, coming from within a bell tent, lilted on in places of sorrow. When the reading was over, we removed our scarves, stepping out of that place of making, that landscape we both have walked in our different crafts, and talked with that kind and lovely audience a bit more about the making of the book.

The whole weekend, held by the lovingly-tended, generous land of Embercombe, with its rambling orchards and wet beech woods, and the brilliant Charlotte du Cann & Dougie Strang of Dark Mountain, was a kind of hearth fire. Base Camp, they called the gathering, and so it felt, especially in quiet, simple moments around nightfires with new friends, talking of the Northern Lights and listening to accordion and fiddle and flute, or during the rain with tea in the snug warmth of Hedgespoken, laughing over the sinister madness of American politics, and feeling the sheer medicine of good company and the simplicity of warm shelter that nevertheless lets the rain and wind quiver through. 

Amidst all of this, Tatterdemalion felt at home, even a sense of homecoming, as if it had always intended its first recitation to be here, amidst the ripe apples and hungry fires and longing hearts of many for something other, something older, something wiser and wilder and free. 

Something important transpired there, in the air, in the stars, by the dancing fire, by the warmth of big-hearted people, on that stage crafted of dreams, of dedication, of hard work and patience. Tatterdemalion was no longer a thing inside my own heart or pen, nor inside Rima's brush and canvas and dreaming. That performance was a ritual of sorts, the opening of a new door. The book went out into the world, spiritually. Into the hawthorn-daubed lane. Into the earth. A seed sown at the cusp of autumn. Finding a path for itself, ahead of its physical birth. 

But, hurrah! I'm rejoicing where I sit because at last it is time to tell you all that Tatterdemalion is almost ready to go to print! Layout, text, and cover design are all but complete! Tomorrow, Monday the 24th of October is your last day to get your name in the back of the book! These editions will reach subscribers around Christmas time. Otherwise, you will have to wait until June of 2017 to get your hands on a trade edition copy, which will be a beautiful book, but the subscriber edition is made to be something special. It will feature Rima's gorgeous endpapers, and a beautiful,  haunting dust-jacket of her cover painting, which you will be able to pin on your wall as a print if you so desire. 

And, speaking of which.... At last, at last! The Grand Cover Reveal is upon us! Rima has written all about the process of painting the Tatterdemalion cover right here. Below is but a glimpse... 

Follow here for the whole Making, and to get a book if you haven't already!

Rima and I await its official birth with much joy and inheld breath; this book has long been a thing of Dreams. Now it is close to real, and who knows where it will go or how it will fly? One thing we do know for certain is that sharing of it together on the Hedgespoken stage is a thing of great and heartening magic. Women's magic, its own and precious terrain. Our Dark Mountain performance was, I sense, the first of many. We are weaving plans for future Tatterdemalion shows—next year, at the end of spring, when the book is on the shelves of the world. 

For now, it is still in its blossoming-- the long, slow way of birthing books! So, come help it along, get your name in the back and wish it well as it wings off to the printer, and then to your wintry doorstep! 

Dreaming On Dartmoor

There are stories on Dartmoor that come up singing through the stones. There is a silence underneath the wind on the tops of the granite tors that is ancient with human song. I could feel it, just underneath the skin of green. The wind and the stones and the pulse of story came in like a hallowing, and I was changed.

What I mean is, I felt seen by some Dreaming underneath the moor. Like that Dreaming wanted to be known. It was new to me, but not to the many dreaming artists who live in and near Chagford, on Dartmoor. Their work is in conversation with it; with the stone crones and the rooty doors, the elven folk and the Bronze Age queens, with the bones of primordial horses and the ghosts of the Wild Hunt, with the long dead Bear and the scream of the kestrel, who has been screaming and diving here for hundreds of thousands of years. I have never visited a place like this before. Where you can see the land Dreaming through so many of the humans who live there— in their painting, in their weaving, their story-telling, their singing, and their dancing, in their sculpting, their metalwork, their felted textiles, their clay.

I came because of Rima Staines, and because of Tatterdemalion. (You know this already, those of you who read my last post.) To meet the woman and the land with whom my stories and therefore a part of my soul had been in long conversation. In many ways our meeting was like the gathering up and dusting-off of an old friendship newly discovered again. Something you might sift from out the stones at Grimspound; a gleaming, flint-dark kind of kinship.   

Perhaps I was able to hear whispers of the moor dreaming, to feel the weight of its myriad and ancient eyes (granite, heather, moss, hawk, mouse, root, ghost, bone, tin-vein, thorn) because it was Rima and Tom (and the Boy, the truest little shouter and moor-whisperer of them all) who introduced me. Surely, this made a difference. The vast difference between meeting someone cold on the street, and being introduced by a dear friend by the warmth of the fire.  

For Rima and Tom, in their painting, their story-making, their performances, and also the daily rhythms of their lives (close to the quick, to the fire, of the soul's hearth)—they are dancing with the moor. They are letting its Dreaming through in any way they can—out their brushes, their pens, their words, their bones, their (soon-to-be) wheels. And so being brought by them across hill and dale and down among the stones and Bronze Age circles of Dartmoor was a sacred kind of introduction. 

At Grimspound, a Bronze Age fort (named thus by Viking settlers much later), I felt the stories come singing up especially strong. I saw them; glimpses of a skirt-hem, a leather shoe. Did women once come walking down those hills through the old stone gate with sheep at their heels, bells clattering, talking about the old wolf someone saw down at the river; the long labor of someone else's sister; the ripening of the sloes? Did they go down to the river valley, to the damp and forested places to gather berries in well-woven baskets? Hawthorn, blackberry, wild rosehip, sloe. Did the brown bears forage for sloes nearby, and did the women take care to never speak badly of them while in their hearing?

Did they gather yarrow from the meadows and the sides of pathways in summer, to give to their daughters in childbirth, their sons with wounds from hunting or battle?

What did they murmur to the heather when they gathered it for tea, for ale?

On the muddy paths, what pawprints did they encounter, and how did they tell the tales of them back home, around the hearth? What did they say of Badger, heading home to her sett at dawn? 

Some say these smaller circles of stones within Grimpound's wall are the foundations of granaries; others believe they were little houses. The stones are laid in such a way at the entrance—a sharp turn on your way in—that whatever was inside would have been protected from the elements, from wind and rain. Their shape and size is reminiscent of the clochán huts (the beehive shaped stone buildings) on the Irish coast used by monks and priests as religious hermitages. What was it like, to sit by the fire in here while the wind blew hard; or alternately, to duck inside for a bushel of grain? 

A little leat wound along the outskirts of the ruin, dug by Bronze Age arms to convey water to the settlement. It had a sweet voice like copper bells, all hung with bracken and heather. It is still here, these thousands of years later, like the stones ringing Grimspound, and like the stones it holds whispers, threads of human story, scraps of Dreaming come up from the underground, where the groundwater swells, where the heather roots, where the badger sleeps. Whispers that found their way right in, and rooted, so that I couldn't seem to stop thinking about story, and how it is held in a landscape, and how it arises through the people who live there. 

At night, I slept in Rima and Tom's arctic bell tent in a cow pasture, in the deep dark of that round and heavy canvas. Strange birds sometimes called in the small hours, and everything smelled green though I could hardly see until poking my head out the flaps at dawn. 

My sleep was sound, and round, and soothed by the damp ground below my bedroll and skins, by the creature-dark, by the smoke from my fire (and a lot of smoke it was at first, for this California girl used to dry kindling, and not the ever-damp of England!) At first, I didn't dream, or nothing that I could recall very well. Perhaps it takes a few days to settle in, to let the stories waft up from the underground and into your sleep. 

For suddenly, there they were, vivid and strange. Dreams that I can remember still. In one, I ran through an apocalyptic city with an old childhood friend, chased by gunfire, but everywhere underfoot there were hawthorn berries, and we were slipping on them as we fled. 

In another, I hoisted myself up bareback onto a paint mare, wrapped my hands up in her mane, and galloped like I have never galloped before, knowing that the horse would not stop until she felt like it,  not minding at all, feeling that for once I was completely unafraid. 

In another, I found a hazelnut with the distinctive chew marks of a dormouse, a little treasure on the floor of a silvery hazel grove. This dream must have come from an overheard conversation about the endangered English dormouse, and how its presence can be tracked by examining hazelnuts for a certain pattern of toothmarks—a perfect hole made in the nut, like the opening of an owl den, with a smooth inner rim and tooth-marks at a particular angle.

But also I think that dream drifted up from some longing to meet the quiet and ancient ones of this land more intimately, to follow the wise old mouse through the hazel grove, and into the place of Dreaming, where the Salmon of Knowledge swims under the hazel trees and eats the Nuts of Poetry as they fall into that Well.

The land here, from Dartmoor west and south into Cornwall, was a Celtic holdout, a place where the old ways and the old stories were safe and harbored for a little bit longer than elsewhere in England. Where the stone circles got sung and danced, where people kept their ears to their earth and listened, and perhaps whispered the things they heard back to the stones for safe-keeping, so that when the time was right, another soul, ear pressed to granite, might hear them, and keep the fire lit.

In his book of essays, The Voice That Thunders, the intensely wonderful English writer Alan Garner (turn to him if you want to know how a human being can listen to a place his whole life, and shape those listenings into words) says that even if no one speaks them anymore, and even if no one writes them down, myths are never lost. Not in the Eternal Time of stones and moors and bones and dreams. Only in linear time can they be lost, for a little while anyway.

They can always be recovered again, in some form. Not by "scavenging" them by tooth and nail, as Garner writes, but by earning their trust again. By sitting for hours, for days, for years, by the river that has carried the souls of moor-creatures for millennia (horse, vole, kestrel, ancient bear).

By wading through leaf-mold and the silence of trees to the edge of the amber river, and asking for nothing but to walk by its side....

....and while walking to dream on ancient acorn harvests and why it is that the river gleams like bronze, and all the things that it has seen.  

Trust is earned again by leaning on the stones, and waiting for the faint murmuring of their mica-voices, and the things they have been protecting there. 

By going out in misty weather to listen to the wind. By introducing your children to that wind, that mist, that granite, that river-gleam, as Rima and Tom and so many of the wonderful folk of this community seem to do. 

This is the work of a lifetime, not a single visit, and so my glimpses and my musings of the Dreams of Dartmoor are only that; threads gathered up in a traveler's pockets. A little wooden box of rememberings, like compass points: a string of hawthorn berries, a chip of granite, a sprig of heather, a shard of pottery, a pouch of dreams full of dormouse-chewed hazelnuts. More to the point though is the shape of this place, and this journey, and what it is we bring home. As I wrote in my journal after our afternoon at Grimspound, "There's something I'm trying to work out around story and myth here; how this is to be carried; why this land so cultivates mythic thinking and dreaming; what to do about it in my own life."

How, in other words, to care for the stories of my own place, this bit of coast on the edge of California, near the Golden Gate, where I am from.

How to listen for the stories in the blood, the ash-house tales just beyond the gates of memory, back in the bones where my ancestors sing.

How to hitch the oak trees of my bloodline, the oak trees of old England, old Ireland, old Russia, old Austria, old Hungary, old Germany, to the oak trees of this homeland I love with all my heart, this California of coast live oaks, black oaks, tanoaks, valley oaks, the memories of grizzly bears coming to feast beneath the trees in autumn, the thousand thousand generations of Coast Miwok and Ohlone people singing for the acorns as they fell, and eating thousands of generations of bowls of acorn porridge.

How, most importantly, to do this not just for myself, but together, here in the Bay Area, in Point Reyes, in California, on the edge of the continent, on all the lands we love; excavating our own myriad ancestries at the same time as we are out by the trees and rivers and stones, listening for theirs, and honoring the people who were here before us: that fraught and tender terrain. 

After only eight nights with my head to the sweet earth in a dark round tent in a village nestled on the great hill-rounded moor, a week driving and walking the tall, close hedgerows of Devon with Rima and Tom and the Boy, I felt as though time had closed into a circle, and that I had been there always. That I had always slept in a tent in a field and spent evenings in a round yurt by the fire with new-old friends talking of things ancient and close to the heart. That I had always felt the snug arms of the hedgerows, and the old voices of the stones, and the big winds of the moor where ravens flip and croak their velvet words. 

When I was a little girl, I dreamed that I would one day live in a stone cottage in England. I have since developed too much of a love for the land I was born to, its mountain lions and coast live oaks, its coyotes and buckeyes and bay nuts and wild irises, to uproot myself in such a way, but I believe that I have discovered the root of this dream. That I found it when I first beheld Rima's artwork. That I found it when I stood at Grimspound, and put my hands to the old granite, and wondered what stories the First People told here. If the leat or the amber River Dart still remember them.

That here is a community carrying the stories of the land as best they can, and with much beauty and care and heart (think of the incredible folkloric work of Terri Windling, of the mythic art of Alan Lee, of Brian and Wendy Froud, the magnificent story-telling and myth-carrying of Martin Shaw,  not to mention of course the truly transformative and deep-rooted painting of Rima Staines and the powerful storytelling and poetry of Tom Hirons, to name just a very few!). That here is a seed of inspiration to bring home again. 

  

And of course, it is our Tatterdemalion which did the threading, which brought me to England, to Dartmoor, to the stones. This book born out of many years'-worth of Rima's paintings, each one a conversation between her heart and the world around her in all of its storied and sad-strung glory, and what happened when I walked through their doorways into my own place here in California, and saw it all anew. (And dear friends, if you would like to be part of our novel's birth, to have your name in its back pages and a hand in its blossoming, you can do so here. We are now over three-quarters of the way there; come race with us across the final hillsides!)

To finish these musings properly, and not on a parenthesesed note, I will  leave you with the words of Alan Garner, from his essay, "The Voice in the Shadow."

By reciting a myth, the storyteller remembers a creation and, by remembering, is part of that creating. It is best understood in that dreadful solecism 'walkabout.' In walking, the Australians speak the land. Their feet make it new, now, and in its beginning, by step and breath that meet in its dance, so that land and people sing as one. It is a symbiosis of multiple times. 

A Book is Born: Presenting Tatterdemalion!

Dear friends and wild hearts, 

I have a glorious thing to tell you this Imbolc morning.

Today, a Book is Born! 

<<Books here! >>

(For the very eager among you, look no further than the image above and click through for your book!)

It is a book many years in the making, a collaboration between myself and the extraordinary artist Rima Staines. 

Come, follow us down the lane and through the hedge... 

... along the path all damp with the humus of leaves...

... between the gnarled old oaks whose branches are roots and whose roots are branches....

...and far out across the fields you know...

There, beyond the waters of the rain-made well, speaking the tongues of the Wild Folk, lives our magical book. 

It is called Tatterdemalion, and it is being published by Unbound. This means the book depends directly on you, dear and blessed readers, to be birthed into this good world. 

If you are as excited as we are, you can cut to the chase and PRE-ORDER YOURS RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT, look no further. Click right here. You can always come back and finish reading my ramblings later. They aren't going anywhere. :-) 

Tatterdemalion began several years ago when one of Rima's beautiful paintings sparked a doorway in me, a doorway into another world that led me, wielding my pen, through thirteen more of her paintings, the result of which was a novel in fragments that, stitched together, creates a whole mythology.

Then, this past autumn, I at last had the pleasure and the privilege of visiting Rima (and Tom, and the Boy) on mythic Dartmoor. 

I slept in a bell tent in a cow field...

... and woke up to mist over stone barns, dreaming of horses and ships, thinking of old tales and hawthorn trees.

Tatterdemalion came with me (in spirit, in the way that books travel with their writers wherever they go, sometimes sitting up inside the soul and saying yes, this.) It seems the book wanted to visit the land of heather and gorse...

...of Bronze Age ruins and the great hills of bracken. To walk the old, old roads laid by ancestral hands five thousand years ago.

For Tatterdemalion is rooted equally in Old European folklore and a wildly reimagined Northern California a few centuries in the future. The book had lived and journeyed with me in the wilds of Point Reyes and the Sierra Nevada for several years, and it was time for it to absorb the old, old bone-deep wisdom of Dartmoor, of Rima's England. (For more on what the book is about, well, you'll just have to visit it's official page here!)

During this time I met with the wonderful folk of Unbound (at which point Tatterdemalion sat up inside me and said yes, this!), a publisher that is revolutionary in the sense that they put the fate of books directly into the hands of readers; they foster a community of readers that supports writers. In an increasingly corporatized publishing world, this is a breath of fresh air. It means that we walk this road together, author and readers, this old road of story shared between hearts.

So, practically speaking, what this means is that we have a crowdfunding campaign now up on Unbound's website, where you can pre-order a copy of the book (ebook, hardback, signed!), along with many other special things, including exclusive classes, prints, and tickets to a Hedgespoken launch party! And the sooner we reach our fundraising goal (the cost of printing the book), the sooner it will be in your hands!

This book was created with a deep and fierce love. It was written with all of my heart, through the doorways in Rima's revolutionary artwork. It is a great honor, and joy, to birth it into the world with your help.

On that note, if (once you go view the book itself and the accompanying film ) this rings bells in your heart, we would be so grateful if you shared it with any and all folk you think might feel the same!

We are ridiculously excited to be sharing this book with you; do come along and join us!

With Love,

Sylvia & Rima