The Enchanted World: To Vincent Price and Back Again

The Enchanted World: To Vincent Price and Back Again

Recently, I read a large number of online lists of favorite books. In general I found these lists inspiring. Sometimes, they frustrated me, i.e. will I ever read W.G. Sebald? Will I ever be in the in-group? I considered posting a list of my own but I didn’t quite get around to it, and like most other online flurries, the lists soon disappeared. But something stuck in the back of my mind, and eventually I realized what it was.

The truth is, if I heeded the hilarious instruction of one pass-it-on type posting to “not think too much before responding,” my favorite books were obvious. But in this age of cultivated online personae, how could I broadcast to the world that my all-time favorite books were published by Time Life, and I read them when I was 12?

Well, Vincent Price’s 1985 TV commercial for the books helps with that a bit.
 

I received the first one from my parents: Fairies and Elves. Soon to follow were Legends of Valor, Wizards and Witches, Ghosts, Magical Beasts, and Water Spirits. I don’t know who Time Life’s editors and consultants were for the Enchanted World series, but the stories and artwork they picked are classic, gorgeous, and not at all rated PG. Ghosts is terrifying, and that made it the best one of all. I fell in love with the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of nymphs and the lady of Shalott, Japanese fairy-tale illustrations, and provocative drawings of all manner of shapeshifters, hollow-mountain dwellers, undersea horsemen, selkies, warlocks, tricksters, ethereal fairies and elemental priestesses. The stories are told as if around a campfire. In them, there is a strong sense that magic lives in the world, even if it is declining. These stories of the fantastic, eerie, mysterious, and magical seeped into me in the best possible way. Deep, and entwined with my budding ideas about the creative process and making imaginative meaning of the world.

I adored these books for years, and then, during the second half of adolescence, I drifted away from my fantasy roots. I was embarrassed that as a kid I’d read mostly Arthurian legends and trilogies of novels in which the heroines  maintained telepathic links with their soul-mate spirit animals. Pretty soon I was an English major reading the 20th century literary canon (oh that horde of Johns!). That’s all fine, and Rabbit, Run is still one of my favorite books, but I had left the enchanted world behind. Then I was writing my first novel, set in Washington State’s Skagit Valley. Then 9/11 happened, then I was in graduate school. Then I found the love of my life. Then I was writing Among the Wonderful. Then I was navigating the publishing world and trying to market the book. Then my child was born.

Last August at my parents’ house, I saw those enchanted, albeit dusty, spines for the first time in a decade and a half, even though they’d been sitting in plain sight all those years. While my daughter slept, I opened up the books and again fell in love – this time with a gasp of unexpected love for my former self . I recognized the art on every page and realized that myth and folkways are threaded together with my reason for writing fiction in the first place, my connection with wild nature and my deepest aspiration as the mother of a wee one.

In an urban world that I often find confusing and troubling, there is a crucial nourishment and comfort for me in mythic stories and artwork, from the Inuit to the Scottish Highlanders. Partially for me, and partially for my daughter, I reclaimed the Enchanted World. Then, I poked around online, since I’d never heard anyone else mention the series in all those years. To my delight, I discovered there are 21 books in the series, and I have only ever read  7. New titles (well, new to me) included Night Creatures, Spells and Bindings, Seekers and Saviors, Giants and Ogres (shoot! I should have had that one while I researched Among the Wonderful), and Fall of Camelot. Even right now, at the moment I am writing this, I am giddy; I can’t wait to dive into those other enchanted worlds. How did I not know there were more?

It turns out that my good fortune didn’t end there. During that same haphazard online research session, somehow I landed on writer, artist, and editor Terri Windling’s blog, Myth and Moor. The post I read that day was Swan Maidens and Crane Wives, which exquisitely explores not only the power, lightness-with-knowing, and archetypal force of the swan, but also the complexities and difficulties of domestic life when part of your spirit is wild. As a new mother and a novelist, I could relate. Utilizing literary, artistic and musical (yes, the Decembrists’ Crane Wife is there too) sources, Terri Windling draws from the same well as the Enchanted World series to conjure a provocative portrait of these avian women, and she relates it all to the world as it is, right now. Terri Windling’s thoughtful, magical blog helped me then, and helps me now to anchor firmly in the world of myth and the fantastic that I’ve always loved, while also linking that world securely to the here-and-now of creative process.

One day, on Myth and Moor, I discovered that Terri Windling was packing up Endicott

West, the writers retreat she cofounded with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman in the Sonoran desert near Tucson, Arizona. Through Terri’s blog posts, I commiserated with Terri, and then Ellen too, as this powerful retreat for mythic artists folded up shop. But when they announced an online auction of books from the Endicott West library, I felt the enchanted world rush in. In recent months, I’d been challenged and enlivened by elements of the fantastic creeping into my novel-in-progress. I’d been wanting to read mythic novels and stories for inspiration and lessons on craft. Here was my chance! In a blur I bid on and then won two boxes of “mystery fiction” to be chosen by Terri. The auction proceeds were to help pay for shipping costs for Terri to bring part of the library back to Devon, England, where she lives.

After I found the boxes on my doorstep, I left them unopened for many hours, just so I could savor my exquisite excitement. But of course I couldn’t wait for long. And so it is that one enchanted world leads to another and another, and it just may be that magic is not declining after all. In me it grows.

My volcano

My volcano

Thirty years ago today, On Sunday May 18, 1980, at 8:32 in the morning, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake triggered the largest debris avalanche in history and a pyroclastic flow of magma blew off the side of Mount St. Helens. There was an ash column 12 miles high, over a million tons of sulfur dioxide, and within twenty-four hours the citizens of Edmonton, Alberta, were brushing ash off the tops of their cars. I was five years old at the time, and I was seventeen miles away from the mountain when it exploded.

The details are apocalyptic and beautiful: Stones the size of quarters rained down from the sky. The morning turned darker than night as the ash blocked out the sun. I swear I saw a web of something like lightning snake across the ground. The sky fell. This cataclysm, with which I had an intimate and hair-raising connection, was on TV for weeks. I was famous by association. I had a great story to tell for the rest of my life. The eruption became part of my creation myth, my identity. The volcano was mine.

I polished the story over time, sometimes at the expense of the truth…or what I remember of it. What I usually say at this point is, “Yeah, and it was my first time away from home.” That gets a laugh, and it’s true. My little elementary school was off on one of its semiannual camping trips, at Camp Cispus. Thirty-two kids running around with and a handful of parent chaperones, and our two teachers, Billie and Sharon. But lately what I really want to ask is, “What in the world were those teachers thinking?” By May 18, the mountain was decidedly active. The northern side was bulging and steam rose from the top. Billie and Sharon had either gotten bad advice from someone, or else they had no idea the mountain was getting ready to blow its lid as we all packed up into vans and parents’ cars and drove south from Seattle. It was 1980, for chrissakes. No internet, no USGS Recent Earthquakes notification list, no fresh experience of tsunamis/hurricanes/floods (at least for me). But still, how did we end up there? I guess it doesn’t matter. We were just a bunch of five-to-eight year-olds out in the woods. And I’m glad we were there, no doubt about it. If we hadn’t been, I would’ve just been a spectator, the volcano would be a story that had nothing to do with me, and I wouldn’t have it up my sleeve when I wanted to make someone say, “Wow, that’s amazing!”

So here’s what really happened: I was sitting on the steps of my forest service cabin waiting for breakfast and I saw my brother (or was it another kid? I always say it was my brother but now I’m not so sure) throwing a stick up in the air near the side of another building that had a fire alarm bell attached to it. I thought, “He’s really going to get it if that stick hits the bell and it goes off. Wouldn’t it be exciting if he got in trouble?”

I was making my way toward the mess hall when the alarm went off. My first reaction was glee, but then the sky did something unexpected. I heard the sound of what I thought might be hail (did I know about hail at 5?) bouncing off the car roofs in the camp parking lot. Then a pellet hit me and fell to the ground. I picked it up. It was a rock. That was really scary. In a matter of seconds the sky darkened past “storm” to “night” and I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. By the time I ran into the mess hall everybody was standing at the window, but we couldn’t see anything because outside it was totally black.

The next thing I remember is sitting in a van clutching my little backpack. I don’t remember the panicked conversation among the parent chaperones and teachers, wherein they debated whether to stay put or leave Camp Cispus and try to make it to Randle, the nearest town. The story I heard years later (and which I usually tell with a straight face) is that the grownups were evenly divided, half wanting to stay and half wanting to leave, and the deciding vote was cast by a girl’s mom who wanted to be back to Seattle that evening in time for a date.

At the end of the story, I usually say, “It’s a miracle I ever left home again!” and people laugh and laugh. The truth is I was utterly terrified. I never mention that on subsequent camping trips I had anxiety attacks and seemingly inexplicable angst. So there I was, sitting in the backseat of the van next to Julie Bowden, crying my face off with a damp strip of t-shirt pressed against my mouth so I wouldn’t inhale ash. We were inching along the road at 2 mph and at one point we passed an abandoned car pulled off to the side of the road that still had its driver-side door open. Julie Bowden leaned over to me and told me to shut up. The image of her bespectacled face when she said that is the second-most vivid memory of the whole day.

When we finally reached Randle, we took refuge in a church. They gave us small cans of Tab and white bread with margarine. I don’t usually say so, but these items comprise my most vivid memory of that day. Soda pop? White bread? These were things I never got at home. I guzzled and munched and asked for more, sitting on a folding chair set up right in the middle of the church. What I barely noticed at the time, but what has since taken center stage at this point of the story, is the fact that there were a bunch of ash-covered bikers (Hell’s Angels, I usually say) lounging around with us. It is such a cool image, these bikers, stretched out on pews in their leather and denim, waiting out a volcano. I wish I’d noticed them, I really do, but all I remember is making myself sick on Tab.

Eventually we made it back to Seattle. I don’t remember my mom and dad embracing me, or the looks on their faces as we stumbled out of the van. In recent years, that’s the part of the story I find myself thinking about, not my volcano at all, but theirs. What could they have felt, knowing their children were out there somewhere, trying to get home in the middle of a volcanic eruption? My volcano makes a great story, but theirs is more traumatic by far.