Author Appreciation Week Wednesday : Charles de Lint
Author Appreciation Week is hosted by seaheidi
About 15 years ago, I was in Perth rummaging through a bargain book store - my first, I might add - when I chanced upon a short story collection called THE IVORY AND THE HORN by a Canadian author named Charles de Lint. The cover had a picture of a half-dressed, antlered woman in some sort of contemplative state.
I turned to the back and read the jacket copy.
In the city of Newford, when the stars and the vibes are right, you can touch magic. Mermaids sing in the murky harbor, desert spirits crowd the night, and dreams are more real than waking.
It sounded like something right up my alley plus it was only three dollars. It was kismet. So I paid for it and brought it home.
I wasn’t sure what it was that I was expecting when I sat down to read it but it certainly wasn’t the life altering experience that I got.
I had already been writing for several years at that point. I always seemed drawn to stories that had some sort of magic in them. Even though I was happy with the things I wrote, at the back of my mind there was always this nagging feeling that I wanted more.
The only problem was, I didn’t know what this more was.
The moment I read The Ivory and The Horn, everything fell into place. These were the kind of stories I wanted to write but didn’t realize until that moment. The stories were about people, both ordinary and extraordinary, whose lives intersect with those things that exist in the peripheral worlds. The stories were so achingly familiar, like something out of my own head only it was a million times better, more poignant and with more depth.
The following year when I visited Singapore, I scoured the bookstores for Charles de Lint’s books. Even though he had written twenty over books by then, I could only find two - MEMORY AND DREAM about a woman whose paintings were so life like, the portraits come to life and THE LITTLE COUNTRY where a talented musician discovers her grandfather’s book and unleashes the magic within to set off a chain of events that would sweep across America, Madrid and Ireland.
Over the years I had read a good portion of Charles de Lint’s works, thanks to awesome bookstores and better equipped libraries, but I think my favorite books of his still remain his short story collections - MOONLIGHT AND VINES, WAIFS AND STRAYS, and DREAMS UNDERFOOT. They were tender little of portraits of people’s lives when they fell into the twilight cracks and their view of the world is changed forever.
I don’t know how long it would have taken me to discover who I am as a writer if I hadn’t found that little nondescript anthology so long ago in that bargain bin.
So, during Author Appreciation Week, I would like to say a very big thank you to Charles de Lint for writing the kind of books that he writes.
I am so glad that I had been touched and changed by his magic.
To find out more about Charles de Lint you can visit his website at http://www.sfsite.com/charlesdelint/