Hex: A Novel (32 page)

My grateful thanks to the editors whose magazines published individual stories from this novel:

“King of Hearts, Queen of Spades,”
Black Warrior Review Online
, ed. Kirby Johnson

“King of Hearts, Queen of Spades,”
Spolia
, ed. Jessa Crispin

“The White Horse,”
xo Orpheus, Fifty New Myths
, ed. Kate Bernheimer

This book owes a creative debt to some specific authors whose energy, indignation, sorrow and spirit of play I’ve been
uprooted by time and again. Without the work of Kathryn Davis, Noy Holland, A.S. Byatt, Rikki DuCornet, Barbara Comyns and Kate Bernheimer my own sentences would be chapped and paltry, creatures most miserable indeed. I also owe a great personal debt to Kate Bernheimer beyond the boundaries of her work. If she had not been my teacher at the University of Alabama, if she had not been my mentor and friend beyond that, if she had not said read this, then read this, then read this and this and this. . .so much would have gone unsaid, unthought.

Other sources consulted during the writing of this novel include: the works of the Brothers’ Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carrol, Italo Calvino, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya,
A Modern Herbal
by Margaret Grieve,
Disability, Deformity and Disease in the Grimm’s Fairy Tales
by Ann Schmiesing,
Individualism and Collectivism (New Directions in Social Psychology
) by Harry C. Triandis,
Narcissistic Wounds: A Clinical Perspective
by Judy Cooper and Nilda Maxwell,
The Hero With A Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell,
A Short History of Myth
by Karen Armstrong,
Impossible Exchange
by Jean Baudrillard,
To The Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf, “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” (
Peer Gynt
) composed by Edvard Grieg, “At Seventeen” written and performed by Janis Ian,
Lohengrin
by Richard Wagner and the architecture and frank madness of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany.

In terms of practical support, I owe a great deal to the following institutions and individuals: Dr. Roy Fluhrer at the Fine Arts Center for fiscal support and public exclamations of triumph; the Metropolitan Arts Council of Greenville, South Carolina for sending me to read; Vermont Studio Center for giving me a room to write in and a river to write beside. I am deeply indebted to the readers through whom this book passed
on its way to completion: John Pursley III, Melinda Zeder, Suzan Zeder, Claire Bateman, Mike Stutzman, Carl Petersen, Hilary Plum—thank you for getting past page fifty, and for your belief in what you found there. Thank you as well to the fellow authors at FC2 who have read with me over the past few years and welcomed me again into their company with this novel: Lance Olsen, Jeffrey DeShell, Noy Holland, Michael Mejia, Matt Roberson, Joanna Ruocco, Elisabeth Sheffield, Susan Steinberg, Michael Martone, Jessica Lee Richardson, Hilary Plum. And to Dan Waterman, Lou Robinson, and all the staff at the University of Alabama Press: many, many thanks for making the idea a thing.

Thank you to my mother and my father who, when I said I wanted to be a writer, said, “We know.” Thank you to my grandmothers who took me to see dragons and asked that, when I did write a novel, it have some cats in it. Thank you to my sister who listened to a lot of stories in the dark and never once pretended to fall asleep.

Helen and Louisa: you are right in the middle of everything, looking out.

John Pursley III: without you I would never have become a human girl, but would still be a bit of fluff, a lost left shoe, a thistle at the edge of the forest. All the good things in my life come from you.