From the Editor's Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the Summer 2004 edition of the Journal of Mythic Arts. This time, we're looking at love, courtship, and marriage in myth and the mythic arts, exploring relationships between men and women, humans and animals, mortal beings and creatures of magic. As I prepared this edition, I was delighted to find that the spring issue of Parabola magazine is also devoted to marriage and contains a fascinating range of articles on the subject: on the Roman tale of Baucis and Philemon; on Sappho's Songs of Marriage; on Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Anishinabe wedding traditions; on alchemy, and more (including a Maori story retold by Jane Yolen). I hope Endicott readers will seek out Parabola (if you're not already subscribers!) for a look at marriage traditions and stories from cultures around the world.

Our focus here is on "magical unions" - that is, on the union of men and women with Otherworldly beings: divinities, spirits, fairies, animal brides and animal bridegrooms. Tales of beastly lovers and fantastic brides have much to tell us about the affairs of the heart, and also about all relationships in which we encounter the mysterious Other. These are liminal tales in which love and passion lead us over the threshold to Mystery; they call us from our safe, cozy hearths to the dark of the mythic forest. In that woodland, we find deer women, fox maidens, and other alluring, dangerous creatures; we pass through thickets and briars where the line between Eros and madness can be thin indeed.

These stories also explore the relationships between the human and animal realms, and between civilization and the natural world. As folklorist Boria Sax has noted, "Just as marriage between two people unites their families, so marriage between a person and an animal in myth and fairy tale joins humanity with nature." In some folktales, such a union can not be sustained and the magical bride or bridegroom returns to the wild. In others, which end happily-ever-after, a true and lasting exchange is made: the magical partner is gifted with humanity, and the human partner is gifted with the creative forces of the fantastic realm. But even when the story ends with union, the magical spouse or lover must never be underestimated, as Midori Snyder notes in her essay The Monkey Girl. "The beastly bride, while she may shed her skin or commit herself as a sensual partner, never surrenders her power and therefore always remains a little dangerous, a little unpredictable. There are beastly brides who hide their scales, their fur, and don the bodies of women in order to marry men for their own reasons, and to have children. Perhaps these brides should come with warning labels-disrespect us at your own peril!"

In contemporary mythic literature, a number of writers have drawn from animal bride/ bridegroom stories, myths of magical lovers, and fantastical unions to create fiction exploring the timeless mysteries within modern relationships. In her award-winning novel The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich writes in the voice of a man who has managed to capture an animal bride: "She twists, strong and lithe, for the door, but I block and try to ease her down. She pounds at me with hard fists and launches straight into the bathroom, pulling down the mirror, breaking her teeth on the tub's edge. What can I do? I have those yards of sweetheart calico. I go back. I tear them carefully and with great gentleness I bandage her cuts. I don't know what else to do — I tie her up. I pull one strip gently through her bleeding mouth. Lastly, I tie our wrists together and then, beside her, in an agony of feeling, I sleep." In Kij Johnson's exquisite novel The Fox Woman, a young fox who has fallen in love with a nobleman in ancient Japan prepares for the spell that will transform her into the semblance of a woman. "What did I know? All I knew about pain was from thorns and pulled muscles, the knife cut on my shoulder, and the ache of my interrupted breeding with my brother. Thorns worked themselves out; muscles healed; the cut's scab had flaked off, leaving healthy pink flesh and new hairs. Pains were not permanent. Any of these things seemed a small price when I saw Yoshifiji sit alone drinking sake and watching the night." In Second Nature, Alice Hoffman writes of a man from the wild pulled between his love for a woman of the civilized world and his desperate longing for the world of the forest. "By new, he had imagined, he would have already begun the journey home, but the atlas lay on the floor of the guest room closet, unopened.... He could not go home and still have Robin, and still he was greedy, even though he knew if he held onto both, he'd be pulled apart, until all that was left of him was scattered, like stars, across the dark space that separated what he wanted most."

In "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" (The Bloody Chamber), Angela Carter writes of a modern Beauty and the leonine Beast who courts her: "How strange he was. She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her. There seemed a heavy, soundless pressure upon her in his house, as if it lay under water, and when she saw the great paws lying on the arm of his chair, she thought: they are the death of any tender herbivore." A snake woman appears in a backyard swimming pool in A.S. Byatt's "A Lamia in the Cévennes" (Elementals): "The creature watched him, then opened its mouth, in turn, which was full of small, even, pearly human teeth. Between these protruded a flickering dark forked tongue, entirely serpentine. Bernard felt a prick of recognition. The creature sighed. It spoke. It spoke in Cévenol French, very sibilant, but comprehensible. 'I am so unhappy,' it said. 'I am sorry,' said Bernard stupidly, treading water. He felt the black coils slide against his naked legs, a tail-tip across his private parts." A young woman in New York is visited by a mysterious lover in Isabel Cole's retelling of "The Brown Bear of Norway" (Black Thorn, White Rose): "His body would rest on mine no more heavily than the soft sheets or the breezes, the gentle wings of the air. The Bear, ashamed of his coarseness, stripped itself down to its core, to shapes without weight, as tender as leaves, rain. One night marble; another, warm wood; he was the smoky ink of Rackham elf kings and the shadow and silver of Cocteau's Beast; I felt the base of wings that opened across the room in the dark above me, beating slowly and brushing the windows. He smelled of old books and theaters, roses, the trees below my window. As long as I could not see him, he was everything; I held the whole weightless world in my arms."

Charles de Lint (Medicine Road), Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Animal Wife), Carolyn Dunn (Outfoxing Coyote), and other writers have also reworked the themes of folktales and myths portraying the union of lovers from different worlds. Such unions can transform us. They can also destroy us, and their danger is part of their attraction.

In our Reading Room this month we have an article that looks at magical lover/bride/bridegroom tales, and a personal essay by Midori Snyder reflecting on the story The Monkey Girl. Our fiction offering this month is a brand new piece by Laurie J. Marks, author of the novels Fire Logic and Earth Logic (which I highly recommend). It's a haunting contemporary story based on an old Scottish legend. In our Gallery, we're honored to feature the extraordinary art of Jacqueline Morreau. In our Coffeehouse, you'll find poems by Jane Yolen, Emma Hardesty, Kim Antieau, and Mario Milosevic. Biographical notes for all of these contributors are listed below.

Endicott News

As I write this letter, we're preparing for the Mythic Journeys conference, June 2-6 in Atlanta, Georgia. A number of Endicott Studio contributors will be speaking, playing music, or exhibiting art at the conference: Ari Berk, Charles de Lint, Carolyn Dunn, Gregory Frost, Brian Froud, Wendy Froud, MaryAnn Harris, Stu Jenks, Ellen Kushner, Alan Lee, Virginia Lee, Helen Pilinovsky, Karen Shaffer, Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, William Todd-Jones, Charles Vess, Jane Yolen, and yours truly, as well as Karen Joy Fowler and Holly Black. If you're at the conference, please come up and say hello.

We've just held the first in an on-going series of writers' workshops and readings at Endicott West, an arts retreat in Tucson, Arizona. This one, "The One-Day Novelist," was taught by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, and proceeds from the workshop have been donated by Will and Emma to help keep this site on-line. If you'd like to hear about future events, you can sign up for the EWest Events newsletter by sending us a note at EndicottStudio@yahoo.com.

The cost of keeping this site going has been steadily growing, and we're hoping that our readers will be willing to pitch in and help. Our goal is to keep the Journal of Mythic Arts on-line, to keep it free to all users (and free of annoying pop-up ads), and to bring more mythic material to you, more regularly and more often. Please visit our new Friends of Endicott page to find out more - and to see the mythic art prints that we're sending out as premium gifts.

We have a new webmaster for the Journal of Mythic Arts: Homeboyz Interactive (project manager Jim Otepka). Homeboyz is a dual-missioned web development and youth training organization. The Homeboyz motto, "Nothing stops a bullet like a job," is fulfilled through an apprenticeship training program that provides gang-influenced young people with the skills needed to succeed in high technology jobs. Because of our emphasis in supporting programs for "youth at risk" here at the Endicott Studio, we're particularly happy to be working with this talented team of web designers. Anita Roy Dobbs, I'm also pleased to add, is still doing web design work for the site. She's the webmaster for the Scuttlebutt section, and will be working on Gallery archive pages for the Journal of Mythic Arts as well.

Just in case you've missed it, the Endicott Studio now runs a Mythic Arts Community Bulletin Board. This is where we post book reviews, event listings, market reports, etc. We encourage you to post on the bullletin board too — to recommend good mythic books you've read, to announce publications and events you're involved with, or other information pertinent to myth, folklore, and mythic arts.

In closing, I want to let you know that our latest anthology, The Faery Reel (Viking Press) will be in bookstores by the time this letter goes live. Ellen Datlow and I edited this collection of Young Adult stories inspired by faery legends from around the world; it is a sequel of sorts to The Green Man, winner of last year's World Fantasy Award, and it also comes with lovely cover art and illustrations by Charles Vess. Ellen and I think this may be the very best book we've edited together (and we've edited a lot of them now) - with credit due not to us, but to the twenty authors who gave us an amazing range of stories and poems for the volume: Charles de Lint, Delia Sherman, Tanith Lee, Katherine Vaz, Gregory Frost, Kelly Link, Steve Berman, Holly Black, Bruce Glassco, Ellen Steiber, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Patricia A. McKillip, Gregory Maguire, Hiromi Goto, A.M. Dellamonica, Neil Gaiman, Bill Congreve, Jeffrey Ford, Emma Bull, and Nan Fry.

Thank you, once again, for stopping by the Endicott Studio. We'll be back in the autumn for a new edition of the Journal (featuring Baba Yaga, Little Red Riding Hood, and more) - but keep your eye on the Scuttlebutt and Bulletin Board, where changes are afoot and updates are posted more frequently. Contributors' notes for the current issue of the Journal are below.

Cheers,

Terri Windling

Tucson, Arizona and Devon, UK.

Contributors Notes, Summer 2004

Midori Snyder has written six novels for adults, published in the U.S. and Europe, as well as children's books and many works of short fiction. Her most recent adult novel, The Innamorati, winner of the Mythopoeic Award, was inspired by living in northern Italy, and her most recent Young Adult novel, Hannah's Garden, is set in the American Midwest. Midori and her husband live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Laurie J. Marks is the author of Dancing Jack, The Watcher's Mask, and the "Children of the Triad" series. Her most recent novels are Fire Logic, winner of the 2003 Spectrum Award, and Earth Magic, published in 2004 — two volumes set in an imaginary realm that is beautifully, skillfully rendered. Laurie lives with her partner near Boston, Massachusetts.

Jacqueline Morreau was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1929. She studied art with Rick Lebrun in Los Angeles, and received a degree in Medical Illustration from the University of California in San Francisco. She also worked as a research assistant at UCLA for various groups, most notably with Dr. Ellsworth C. Doughterty and Dr. Timothy Leary. She did post-graduate studies in etching and lithography in San Francisco and Boston, the settled permanently in London in 1972. In addition to a long and distinguished career of creating and exhibiting her art, she has lectured on art at Oxford Brookes University, Regents College, and the Royal College of Art.

Jane Yolen is the multi-award-winning author of over two hundred books for children, teenagers, and adults. Among her many recent publications are Mightier Than the Sword, a collection of folktales; Sword of the Rightful King, an Arthurian novel for Young Adult readers; The Radiation Sonnets, poetry, and Take Joy: A Book for Writers. She and her husband divide their time between homes in western Massachusetts and St. Andrews, Scotland.

Emma Hardesty has published both fiction and nonfiction — including "Rosie's Dance," a contemporary version of Cinderella in the adult fairy tale anthology Black Heart, Ivory Bones. She has worked in publishing in New York City, owned a vegetarian restaurant, helped to found an independent newspaper, and run the business office of an internationally best-selling author. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she co-manages the Endicott West Arts Retreat.

Kim Antieau is the author of the novels Coyote Cowgirl, The Jigsaw Woman, and The Gaia Websters, as well as works of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She is also a librarian and researcher whose avocation is folklore, myths, and legends. Kim was born in Louisiana, raised in Michigan, and now lives in Washington State with her husband, writer Mario Milosevic. In addition to reading and writing, she is a dedicated environmental and peace activist.

Mario Milosevic is a fiction writer and poet whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Asimov's, The Amherst Review, Light Quarterly, Rosebud, and Black Warrior Review, as well an in the anthology Poets Against the War. He lives with his wife, writer Kim Antieau, in Washington state.