He raises his large head, looks to where the snowfall had once formed a door to their den. It is gone now and in its place are puddles of melt, and beyond it the sight of Edmea’s Wood, the trees bristling with new leaves, branches, and bright colours. Birdsong rings through, the sky is a warm blue. At first he thinks to bound forth, to try out his new shape, the four paws with their powerful claws, then another swat, a little less gentle, and he settles, curls back to back with the she-bear. There will be plenty of time to learn the world anew, he thinks sleepily; he knows what happens to cubs who stray from their mothers too soon.
Afterword: Author’s Notes
Sourdough
While I was doing my MA, I was reading a lot of fairy tales, then re-writing them, and also writing new ones. I had an idea about a girl who made bread into works of art; I thought about the fairy tale “Donkeyskin,” where the princess puts her jewellery into food for the prince and I thought about what a silly, dangerous act that was. I’d read Margo Lanagan’s tale “Wooden Bride” and the city she described gave me an oblique inspiration for Lodellan. I chose the name Emmeline for my protagonist because it means labourer and labour she does over the making and baking of her bread creations. I chose Peregrine as her lover’s name because it means both a pilgrim and a wanderer, and he does indeed wander for a time. “Sourdough” was one of the tales that didn’t make it into my Master’s collection (Black-Winged Angels), but I’d sent it off with a query to a bunch of small presses, including Tartarus Press. The lovely Rosalie Parker replied to say they weren’t interested in a collection, but she was very interested in taking “Sourdough” for Strange Tales II. This is also the tale I chose as a project with Kathleen Jennings, to turn into a graphic story.
Dresses, three
This story was commissioned by Mary Robinette Kowal for Shimmer’s Art Issue in Spring 2008. I was given a piece of art by the amazingly talented Chrissy Ellsworth for inspiration: “Life as a Fashion Designer” had a woman with a dress of birds, feathers, and words. I thought about the fairy tale “Donkeyskin” (again; an inspiration for me on more than one occasion). The princess in that story demands three dresses from her father, one like the stars, one like the moon, the other like the sun. I knew I wanted an echo of that idea, but the dresses were part of a larger spell: one of peacock feathers, one of butterfly wings . . . but in the end I found I needed to chat with my sister about the form of the third dress. Shell helped me get the idea to crystallise: a dress of words. Of course! The story was short-listed for the Aurealis Award Best Fantasy Short Story in 2008.
Bluebeard’s Daughter
Gerry Huntman contacted me to say they were doing a special fairy tale issue of SQ Magazine and would I contribute. I was pressed for time but said “yes,” because: fairy tales. I sat down at the computer and this is one of the fastest stories I’ve ever written, all done in an afternoon. From the first line: “Here,” she says, “have an apple.” I had the story fully formed: ideas about bad dads (who’s worst than Bluebeard?), stepmothers, teenage daughters, romantic crushes, and gingerbread houses all coalesced most obligingly. It’s short, sharp, bitter, and I’m tremendously fond of it.
The Jacaranda Wife
This was another of my challenge stories—a friend had told me that Jack Dann was looking for tales for his Dreaming Again anthology. I’d sent him one of my MA stories (a version of “Little Red Riding Hood” called “Red Skein”). He liked it, but not enough and said,“What else have you got, kiddo?” I had nothing. But I’d had the idea of jacaranda women in my head for a while, just nowhere to put it. My study at that time looked out into the backyard where there was a giant jacaranda tree and one rainy day I was writing—or rather, not so much writing as staring out the window at the tree, which was in season and the bunches of purple flowers were so heavy with rain that they looked, well, pregnant. At last I knew what to do—a kind of weird selkie story—and added a personal connection to it: my mother’s family came to Australia with the Second Fleet and initially settled in Port Macquarie. Their property was called Rollands Plain. The jacaranda has been transplanted all over the world—just like ideas and stories and fairy tales—and I like the sense of it not quite belonging, of a strangeness in the landscape, an Australian fable with its roots in a European fairytale tradition. This story was first published in Dreaming Again in 2008.
Light as Mist, Heavy and Hope
This story sprang from one of my stranger ideas. I’d been thinking about how to rework “Rumpelstiltzkin” while watching a crime thriller late one night, in which a character observed that paedophiles don’t wear big signs or the mark of the beast to distinguish them from everyone else. The idea was that it was so damned hard to know who was safe and who wasn’t. I’d always wondered about the little fairytale man’s motivation—and since Rumpelstiltzkin has always creeped me out I just made him a bit creepier.
The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter
Editor Stephen Jones emailed asking if I’d submit something to his A Book of Horrors anthology (Jo Fletcher Books)—the catch was that it had to be more horrific than what I usually wrote. So: I was casting about for ideas with a bit of personal terror; I don’t really think of myself as a horror writer. My first effort was deemed “Good, but I think you can do better.” After some fist shaking and howling (on my part), I went back to work. I was listening to Florence and the Machine’s Lungs for the first time . . . when “My Boy Builds Coffins” came on, I imagined a society that regarded coffin-making not simply as a necessary service, but also as an art form. On top of that, it was an eldritch art form required to keep the dead beneath the earth. I wanted a story that had layers of unspoken secrets—and also different sorts of ghosts.
When I heard “Girl with One Eye,” I got an image of Hepsibah: this thin girl standing in front of a heavy door. She had a short gamine haircut that was growing out and curling, and she wasn’t overly given to worrying about her appearance. She wore a brown woollen dress, a bit Jane Eyre-like, with long sleeves, buttons up the front, and long skirts, and she had on a kind of baker boy’s cap. At her shoulder was the spectre of her father, and Hector is a nasty piece of work. I could hear his voice and knew how adversarial their relationship was, but that no matter how much Hepsibah hated him, they shared some fundamental characteristics and that’s why he was still hanging around. When I first drafted the story, the society was a kind-of mirrored Victorian setting but mixed with elements from the world of Sourdough and Other Stories.
Hepsibah is one of my favourite characters—she’s a terrible mess of a human, but really fascinating. I wanted to give a reader one picture of her, then twist that around at the end and show that she wasn’t as well-adjusted as she at first appeared. That she and her dreadful father had more in common than anyone might think. And she was very important because as soon as I’d written this story, I knew I had the start of a new collection—The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings—because she wasn’t the sort of character who would just quietly go away. It also won me a British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story.
By the Weeping Gate
This story first appeared in Stephen Jones’ Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome (Jo Fletcher Books). I was thinking about pirates and ports, bordellos and brides—as you do—and the name came to me to describe a place where you pass from land to sea and those who watch you go or wait for you to come back, weep. I liked the idea of a girl who is terribly plain amongst all her beautiful sisters, but the sisters aren’t cruel to Nel. Her mother is, though: Dalita is a terrible woman, the epitome of a mother trying to relive her life through her favourite daughter. I have a whole history in my head for her—how she fled her family and marriage, and made her own way in the world, how it turned her tenacious nature harsh and hard, and how—even though she’s got a strong idea of family—she sees even her own children as a means to an end. Except Nel, who isn’t physically lovely, so she can’t be used as Dalita’s usual currency. Although Nel’s plainness is a so
urce of some distress, she finds a way to use it to her advantage—she’s able to pass unseen when others would attract attention, so she can collect secrets as well. I love how Nel learns and changes and becomes something else in this story, how she takes her courage in her hands and goes out into the world to make things right, even though she is, at the end, someone who can no longer hide. This story later appeared in The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings.
St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls
The title for this story came from a friend’s throwaway line about St Dymphna’s Home for the Wealthy Insane (thanks, Dr Carson). I thought “No, St Dymphna’s Home for Poison Girls,” and my mind went off on its own and sat in a corner, conjuring visions of a boarding school like the one in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette except with more murder and fewer French lessons.
I thought about finishing schools for young ladies and the sorts of girls who are sent there, and the kinds of families they come from. I thought about the strife between grand houses caused by matters of pride and honour (not to mention thefts), and wondered what might happen if the female offspring from those grand houses might be taught something useful, like the art of assassination rather than napkin-folding and the Minuet . . . which was then still misused by said houses. I wondered about the sorts of young women who might not think beyond what their families were sending them to do, who didn’t say to themselves, “Sod this for a game of soldiers—I’ve just been taught these great and terrible skills by independent and terrifying women, why should I go off to die in the service of my family? Why shouldn’t I too become an independent and terrifying woman?” That’s precisely what Mercia does—even though her surrogate family has set her to do something dangerous, she’s not one of the herd; in the end she follows a different path. This story first appeared in The Review of Australian Fiction 2014 (Volume 9, Issue 3)—and won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story in 2015. It later appeared in The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings.
By My Voice I Shall Be Known
In “By My Voice I Shall Be Known,” I wanted to combine elements that contained echoes of legends about the Lorelei Rock, the rusalkas, and Melusine, all wrapped up with a traditional kind of betrayal and revenge tale. The title comes, I think, from something I read about one of the sibyls . . . but unfortunately I can’t quite remember which one and I don’t seem to have kept a note about it. Bad writer. But I love the bold statement that her voice will be all she needs . . . even though it’s been taken from her. My mother is a quilter and I find what she does absolutely fascinating and very beautiful, yet I’m not a person with any talent for crafting things with my hands—I tend to sew my shirt to my pants or craft-glue my fingers into my hair—so the endeavour does seem a kind of witchcraft to me. When I was writing, I remembered a comment by my friend, Alan Baxter, who’d said that watching his wife knit was like watching folk magic happen—and I thought that quilting was pretty much like that too.
Sister, Sister
“Sister, Sister” has its roots in my childhood: one of the books we had to read was an old collection of my mother’s, a thin forest-green tome with silver lettering called Norwegian Folk Tales. I suspect she’d won it as a school prize—it’s long since disappeared, though I found a later edition earlier this year and bought it. (Still not the same, just saying.) In it were all sorts of tales of hulders and trolls, of women whose back side was hollowed out like a tree trunk, and yet others who looked perfectly normal but for their cow tail . . . but the bit of information that most appealed to me and stuck over the years was that trolls were known to steal away human babies and leave their own nasty, mewling offspring in the cradles. Even at a young age I loved the idea of the changeling child—and even more I loved to torment my younger sister, telling her when she annoyed me that she wasn’t really my true sibling, but a troll’s daughter left in the crib to cause trouble. All this probably says more about me than my sister, but when I began to think about new stories for Sourdough I knew I wanted a troll tale and I knew I wanted to use the changeling child as a motif.
The Badger Bride
I love badgers—yes, I know all the arguments against them, the great list of their sins—but I love them all the same. I’ve also always loved transformation stories, but they generally run along the same lines: one character must be transformed from animal to human in order for there to be a happily-ever-after. That ending assumes that whatever was threatening the star-crossed lovers has been defeated; but, I wondered, what if it’s not? What if the threat remains, blundering about, looking for its dearest, darkest desire? What might our heroes do in order to escape? The characters in this story are among my favourites. Gytha seeks answers no matter what the cost, and Adelbert the ex-Abbot and Larcwide the Bibliognost are direct products of my love for monastic libraries and the preservation of knowledge—due in no small part to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and my Uncle Rod, who’s also a collector of books and no mean bibliognost himself. And I love the idea that sometimes, just sometimes, though you don’t get what you think you want, you get what you actually want.
The Tallow-Wife
“The Tallow-Wife” began with a dream of a woman within a dark woman, waiting for I knew not what. All I knew when I woke up was that she’d been hard done by and suffered terrible losses . . . but that she had also survived and in doing so she would take her revenge. I talked with my husband about it to try and pull more information from my subconscious and he made a throwaway comment about someone using candles to change things. I looked at him and said, which set off a series of ideas in my imagination and the rest of the story flowed from there. She begins life in this tale as Cordelia, a wife and mother, ends it quite differently, but not without hope. “The Tallow-Wife” is a novella and the first story in The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, which will eventually be the third Sourdough universe book. Remain patient! But please note that the last three tales in this book (two of them brand, spanking new) are a Tallow-Wife suite and will open the new collection—you’re welcome!
What Shines Brightest Burns Most Fiercely
This is the second story in the Tallow-Wife series, and I wanted it to specifically connect the action of the novella to the tales in Sourdough and Other Stories because I envision this to be the final instalment in the Lodellan cycle. Sourdough is the second book, so it acts as a bridge between the first (Bitterwood) and second (Tallow-Wife) collections in the series, and I wanted to hark back to characters like Theodora, and show the bloodlines are still running through like threads. Jacopo is the son of the daughter Theodora had with Faideau, and his life is as strange as that of his grandmother; he’s got the power of shifting his appearance, and he finds Cordelia when she escapes from the Rosebery Bay hulk, and they form a bond, and things begin to happen . . .
Bearskin
“Bearskin” is another of the tales from what will be The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales collection. It follows Cordelia’s youngest child, Torben, after his parents disappear. He’s been cosseted and protected all his life, and now he’s under the supervision of a brute called Uther, who tries to teach him to hunt, and the only person who might be his friend, Tove, is angry at him most of the time.
Publication Data
“Sourdough,” Strange Tales II, ed. Rosalie Parker (Tartarus Press, 2007).
“Dresses, three,” Shimmer Art Issue, Spring 2008.
“Bluebeard’s Daughter,” SQ Magazine, May 2015.
“The Jacaranda Wife,” Dreaming Again, ed. Jack Dann (HarperCollins, 2008).
“Light as Mist, Heavy as Hope,” Needles & Bones, ed. Deena Fisher (Drollerie Press, 2009).
“The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter,” A Book of Horrors, ed. Stephen Jones (Jo Fletcher Books, 2011).
“By the Weeping Gate,” Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome, ed. Stephen Jones (Jo Fletcher Books, 2013).
“St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls,” The Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 9, Issue 3, February, 2014.
“Sister, Sister,” Strange Tales III, ed. Rosalie Parker (Tartarus Press, 2009).
“The Badger Bride,” ed. Rosalie Parker, Strange Tales IV (Tartarus Press, 2014).
“The Tallow-Wife” is published for the first time in this volume.
“What Shines Brightest Burns Most Fiercely” is published for the first time in this volume.
“Bearskin,” The Dark, Issue 7, February 2015.
A Feast of Sorrows, Stories Page 32
