gaaaaaack I did it I did it
by which I mean I just sent an e-mail to Robin McKinley's actual factual e-mail address.
Amazing.
I am going to post it here, because why not? Apparently by sending her mail I give leave for her to publish any questions and responses to her blog, which is alright by me.
Dear Ms. McKinley,
Recently I was nudged to, for real this time, write to you. I saw
Sunshine on the library shelf last week, and got it out to encourage the
library in this behavior. I'm rereading it, and it's been long enough
since I read it the first time I am rewarded with the slacker bookworm's
greatest prize: I don't remember most of it. Lovely book!
This kind of rediscovery is impossible for me with The Blue Sword and
Beauty, after more than a decade of owning them. (I suppose that may be
a dismaying idea, but I don't mean it that way.) They were two of the
book I read over and over again during a book-starved teenhood, and my
abstract-and-useless-for-facts memory learned even how each page is laid
out in them.
There's a bit of a story to that, beyond obsession. When I was thirteen
(and I am twice that age now) my mother bought Beauty for me.
Soon after that, my family moved to Japan.
I'd already moved around the US a lot, and my mother was enamoured of
going overseas, so I knew about culture shock, but oddly enough knowing
what you suffer from does not make the suffering easier...
Our first weeks in the small city where we'd been transplanted, we were
holed up in a hotel room. Eating the odd collection of things my mother
could recognize in the market (or things she thought she
recognized--'peanut cream' is not peanut butter, though delicious, and
she disapproved). With so little to do in a place we couldn't even ask
directions yet, I got out my copy of Beauty and aggressively persuaded
my brother to listen while I read it aloud.
We lived for four years in that city (which I came to love fiercely),
far enough from other metros to have only our own library to draw on. I
curated this as a sort of communal treasure for any interested
foreigners.
I had always been a ravenous reader and was now becoming a fairly
prolific teen “novelist”. The box of books we would get annually were
priceless. One of these boxes contained The Blue Sword and The Hero and
the Crown.
At some point I read the bio in the back of these, which mentioned your
nomadic childhood, what books you first read where, and it resonated
with me incredibly. I felt quite alone as far as literary ambition goes,
not just as a white kid in an Asian city. The wish-fulfillment of Harry
acquiring a new language by help of _kelar_ was a particularly fetching
concept, and her sense of belonging and not-belonging was vivid to me,
as well.
The idea that these books that I practically lived in, sometimes, were
written by someone who had a similar background was amazing.
I've been wanting to write a letter for a long time, and could go on
about how Beauty made me understand fairy tales as the bones of stories,
not dry ghosts of folklore.
How Sunshine and the rich world that seems written into the margins
rather than presented on the page reinvigorated my ideas about the
fantasy genre. Slyly alluding them them here will have to do for now. I
don't want to let myself drone on.
This letter is really a roundabout 'thank you'. For your stories, which
kept me company, and the work you put into them.
I send this with quite a bit of shy love.
Sincerely,
Bethany Powell
fantasy poet and fiber artist, who now lives in Darkest Oklahoma
I also sent three short stories out, an act which I haven't done even for *one* short story in many, many moons.
So basically my virtue is restored except I'm not sure this really makes up for watching about 17 total episodes of drama in the past week, but yanno.
Each day is a clean slate?
Amazing.
I am going to post it here, because why not? Apparently by sending her mail I give leave for her to publish any questions and responses to her blog, which is alright by me.
Dear Ms. McKinley,
Recently I was nudged to, for real this time, write to you. I saw
Sunshine on the library shelf last week, and got it out to encourage the
library in this behavior. I'm rereading it, and it's been long enough
since I read it the first time I am rewarded with the slacker bookworm's
greatest prize: I don't remember most of it. Lovely book!
This kind of rediscovery is impossible for me with The Blue Sword and
Beauty, after more than a decade of owning them. (I suppose that may be
a dismaying idea, but I don't mean it that way.) They were two of the
book I read over and over again during a book-starved teenhood, and my
abstract-and-useless-for-facts memory learned even how each page is laid
out in them.
There's a bit of a story to that, beyond obsession. When I was thirteen
(and I am twice that age now) my mother bought Beauty for me.
Soon after that, my family moved to Japan.
I'd already moved around the US a lot, and my mother was enamoured of
going overseas, so I knew about culture shock, but oddly enough knowing
what you suffer from does not make the suffering easier...
Our first weeks in the small city where we'd been transplanted, we were
holed up in a hotel room. Eating the odd collection of things my mother
could recognize in the market (or things she thought she
recognized--'peanut cream' is not peanut butter, though delicious, and
she disapproved). With so little to do in a place we couldn't even ask
directions yet, I got out my copy of Beauty and aggressively persuaded
my brother to listen while I read it aloud.
We lived for four years in that city (which I came to love fiercely),
far enough from other metros to have only our own library to draw on. I
curated this as a sort of communal treasure for any interested
foreigners.
I had always been a ravenous reader and was now becoming a fairly
prolific teen “novelist”. The box of books we would get annually were
priceless. One of these boxes contained The Blue Sword and The Hero and
the Crown.
At some point I read the bio in the back of these, which mentioned your
nomadic childhood, what books you first read where, and it resonated
with me incredibly. I felt quite alone as far as literary ambition goes,
not just as a white kid in an Asian city. The wish-fulfillment of Harry
acquiring a new language by help of _kelar_ was a particularly fetching
concept, and her sense of belonging and not-belonging was vivid to me,
as well.
The idea that these books that I practically lived in, sometimes, were
written by someone who had a similar background was amazing.
I've been wanting to write a letter for a long time, and could go on
about how Beauty made me understand fairy tales as the bones of stories,
not dry ghosts of folklore.
How Sunshine and the rich world that seems written into the margins
rather than presented on the page reinvigorated my ideas about the
fantasy genre. Slyly alluding them them here will have to do for now. I
don't want to let myself drone on.
This letter is really a roundabout 'thank you'. For your stories, which
kept me company, and the work you put into them.
I send this with quite a bit of shy love.
Sincerely,
Bethany Powell
fantasy poet and fiber artist, who now lives in Darkest Oklahoma
I also sent three short stories out, an act which I haven't done even for *one* short story in many, many moons.
So basically my virtue is restored except I'm not sure this really makes up for watching about 17 total episodes of drama in the past week, but yanno.
Each day is a clean slate?