Sister Emily's Lightship (31 page)

“I apologize for my shaggy ally,” Emily said.

“There is no need.” The gray creature bent over a panel of flashing lights, its six fingers flying between them. When it had finished, it leaned back into its own chair and the webbing held it fast.

“Now I will show you what your own planet looks like from the vantage of space. Do not be afraid, Miss Emily Dickinson.”

She smiled. “I am not afraid.”

“I did not think
so,”
the starfarer said in its peculiar English.

And then, with a great shaking, the lightship rose above Amherst, above Massachusetts, above the great masses of land and water and clouds and air and into the stars.

She lay on her bed remembering. Carlo, still moaning, had not seemed to recover quickly from the trip. But she had. All she could think about was the light, the dark, the stars. And the great green-blue globe—like one of Ned's marbles—that was her home.

What could she tell her family? That's she had flown high above them all and seen how small they were within the universe? They would say she had had a dream.
If only I could have returned, like Mother from her ramblings, a burdock on her shawl to show where she had been,
she thought.

And then she laughed at herself. Her poems would be her burdocks, clinging stubbornly to the minds of her readers. She sat up in the dark.

The light. The marble of earth.
She would never be able to capture it whole. Only in pieces. But it was always best to make a start of it.
Begin,
as Cook often said,
as you mean to go on.

She lit a small candle which was but a memento of that other light. And then she went over to the writing table. Her mind was a jumble of words, images.

I do not need to travel further than across this room ever again,
she thought.
Or further than the confines of my house.
She had already dwelt in that greatest of possibilities for an hour in a ship made of light. The universe was hers, no matter that she lived only in one tiny world. She would write letters to that world in the form of her poems, even if the world did not fully understand or ever write back. Dipping the pen into the ink jar, she began the first lines of a lifetime of poems:

I lost a World—the other day. Has Anybody found? You'll know it by the Row of Stars Around its forehead bound.

I have been known to reply to the question “Where do you get your ideas?” by saying “I don't know. The stories simply leak out of my fingertips.” Where stories actually come from, though, is one of the great mysteries of the literary world.

How easy it would be if there were some central warehouse where ideas were stored, waiting to be claimed. A lost-and-found of usable motifs. A clearinghouse for plot ideas. A place where writers could send away for story starters.

But the truth is that even if such storage areas existed, what the ordinary visitor would find there would be only bits of rags and bone shanks and hanks of hair.

Writers are peculiar archeologists. We gather the backward and forward remnants of our own and others' histories, mining the final part of that word:
histories.

What we find there is always a surprise.

But there is a secret, a magical spell, that successful writers know—and I shall impart that to you now.

Ready?

The magic word is: BIC.

That's right.

BIC.

Butt In Chair.

There is no other single thing that is as helpful to a writer. William Faulkner understood this well when he said, “I write only when I'm inspired. Fortunately I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.”

BIC.

However, for those who would like more precise answers as to where individual stories come from, here is what I remember—or think I remember—about how the stories in this book began.

A warning, though. I have a notorious bad memory. And I am, after all, a storyteller.

There was an article in the
New York Times Book Review
section about Henri Pourrat, the great collector of French fairy tales.

That article started me thinking about how certain stories have, indeed, changed cultures. Or charged them. Or infused them. Folklorists would say that stories follow the culture, not precede it. But I am convinced that sometimes—as I say in this tale—“Only through stories can we really influence the history that is to come.”

I sent the piece to Greg Bear for his influential anthology
New Legends.
He wanted it rewritten in a “straightforward space setting.” I thought that he was wrong and sent it on to Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow for their
Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears
anthology. They thought I was right.

Obviously I did, too.

In a book about fairy tales that I have written with my daughter
(Mirror, Mirror,
Viking) I wrote: “The first time I remember reading the Grimms' ‘Snow White' I was six years old…living in Manhattan. My mother had warned…both my brother and me not to open the door to strangers. In fact, she spelled out in some detail why not.

“So when Snow White—despite a similar warning from the dwarves—let the old witch woman in, I knew that she deserved what she got. With that peculiar moral certainty that six-year-olds (and some Republican congressmen and religious groups such as the Taliban) have, I was not at all surprised or horrified at what happened to Snow White. In fact, I believe I was somewhat miffed that she was rescued in the end.”

That's why I began this story, an Appalachian version of the Snow White tale. Aided and abetted, I must add, by my husband and his relatives, all West Virginians. And by a book called
Salvation on Sand Mountain,
by Dennis Covington, which is all about snake-handling sects.

The story was first published in a Windling/Datlow anthology.

One of the three brand-new stories written for this anthology, this story includes an enormous amount of autobiography. Everything but the actual wind ride is true.

Terry Windling was putting together an anthology about fairies. That was the outside impetus. The inside was my interest in redactions, or old (fairy/folk) stories told from a different point of view. Once you start a story in an outsider's voice, all sorts of strange and wonderful things can happen.

Another redaction, this story began with a discovery. I was working on a variety of fairy tales for a children's literature course I taught at Smith, and one of them was “Rumplestiltskin.”

I was considering the moral center of the story. Something was horribly wrong. Here was a miller who lies, his daughter who is complicitous in the lie, a king only interested in the girl if she can produce gold. And the only upright character in the tale is sacrificed in the end.

So I looked more carefully at the little man, Rumplestiltskin, himself. He has an unpronounceable name, lives apart from the kingdom, changes money, and is thought to want the child for some unspeakable blood rites.
Thwack!
The holy salmon of inspiration hit me in the face. Of course. Rumplestiltskin is a medieval German story. This is an anti-Semitic tale. Little man, odd name, lives far away from the halls of power, is a moneychanger, and the old blood-rites canard.

I wrote an article about this idea and it was published in an academic book on Holocaust themes, edited by Dede Weil and Gary K. Wolfe. But the idea would not leave me and so, after a bit, I wrote this story. Windling and Datlow (again) to the rescue. It was published in one of their anthologies.

This is actually a prequel to the novels
Sister Light, Sister Dark, White Jenna,
and
The One-Armed Queen.
(The first two were nominated for the Nebula.) Those novels and this story take place in a mythical kingdom called The Dales, which is—and is not—Great Britain. In The Dales, women have been brutalized, marginalized, and left out on hillsides as babies to die. Now they live together in communities known as Hames. In those books—as well as this story—I am looking at ways we tell
history:
through narrative, parable, balladry, folktale, and academic explanations. Like the old man and the elephant, we cobble together history and call it truth when it is actually just story. This was first published in an anthology called
Am I Blue: Coming Out from the Silence,
a book of stories that explored gay and lesbian adolescence.

I woke up one morning with the four presents given to the young prince in my head. How could I refuse to go on? Later I found it was the perfect piece to submit to an anthology by Marty Greenberg and Richard Gilliam, called
The Book of Kings.

I'm not sure when this one started, but it certainly received its impetus from my conviction that the Greek gods and a lot of artists have something in common: vanity, ego, a belief that what they do is more important than what anyone else does. I hope that's not the kind of artist I am. But for that, you'd have to ask my husband, children, grandchildren, and friends. This story was first published in 1980 in the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
and has had many reprints since.

A part of a series of stories I'd planned around the family of fey in “The Thirteenth Fey,” only this and “Dusty Loves” have been written so far. It was first published in the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

A part of a series of stories I'd planned around the family of fey in “The Thirteenth Fey,” only this and “The Uncorking of Uncle Finn” have been written so far. It was first published in the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

You Know Who is, of course, O. Henry, and the story is a Beauty and the Beast version of “The Gift of the Magi,” where a poor husband and wife sacrifice for each other, and find they have given gifts that are, in some ways, no longer useful. She sells her hair for a watchfob; he sells his watch for special combs for her lovely long hair.

I couldn't resist the ending of this story. I couldn't.

My story was a long time coming, as I had gotten a
Complete O. Henry
for my thirteenth birthday and didn't write this until I was in my fifties.

The story was simultaneously published in the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
and Marty Greenberg's
Christmas Bestiary.

I was asked for a story by Barbara Hambley for an anthology she was planning on female vampires, called
Sisters of the Night.
I was still in Holocaust mode when she wrote to me. My Holocaust novel,
Briar Rose,
had come out three years earlier, and my short stories, “Granny Rumple” in '94 and “The Snatchers” in '93, were both stories on the Jewish/pogrom theme. So it was only natural that I thought about the great female demon—possibly a vampire—Lilith. I like the line “What are Jews that nations swat them like flies?”

Barbara placed the story last in the book, one of the two places of honor (the other, of course, being the first story).

What can one do with a short-short story? Well, use it for fillers at a reading, of course.

I'd written this little piece and had been using it as filler for some time, and could think of nowhere to send it.

Then Robin Adnan Anders, the great drummer of the rock-and-reel band, Boiled in Lead, asked me to write a story for the liner notes of his latest solo CD,
Omaiyo.
(I'd written the song, “Robin's Complaint,” with Robin for Lead's
Antler Dance
album. And—oh yes—lead singer and guitarist, Adam Stemple, is my son. It's good to know people in high places. Even better to be related to them!) I was not to be the only author on the CD. Robin had asked other friends, too, among them authors Steve Brust, Emma Bull, and Adam's wife, Betsy. I sent Robin this story, which he duly printed.

Occasionally I write real science fiction stories. Though in the end they always seem to be about poets or singers or dragons or some other fantasy-oriented critter. This one was published in Asimov's.

Winner of the 1999 Nebula for best novelette, this story may possibly be the first children's story to win that honor. It came from my children's constant complaint, “It's not fair.” (To be honest, they were all grown up and long past that whine when I wrote the story.) It also came from my conviction that Peter Pan and his boys might have been having a lot of fun, but not Wendy.

This story was first published in my own collection,
Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast,
and then in
Realms of Fantasy.

I was at a children's literature conference in San Diego when the awards were announced. Calling home, I picked up messages from my machine, and discovered word of the Nebula. I couldn't find anyone to burble at for hours, so I finally told two relative strangers in a mall.

Interestingly enough, Pat Cadigan wrote a story on the same theme in the same year. The two stories were published months apart. Neither of us knew the other was working on such a piece. And they are absolutely and totally distinct and different from each other.

I do want to note that the book's editor, Michael Stearns, adores this story. So does my husband. But Bruce Coville, my best friend, finds it appalling. “Don't f**k with my childhood icons” is the gist of what he said to me. Or maybe something stronger.

Belle Bloody Merciless Dame

We have a house in St. Andrews, Scotland, where we spend long summers. Or as long as we can manage. I wrote this story there, overwhelmed by Celtic mists.