CFP: Call for Reviews on Werewolf Classics

Dear readers, Dante’s Heart: A Journal of Myth, Fairytale, Folklore, and Fantasy is now calling for book, short story, and film reviews on werewolf classics. Reviews will be perused by our panel of editors; those accepted will appear in Issue 3, forthcoming in fall 2008, a special issue on wolf folklore and werewolf lore.


Suggested titles for book or short story review include Lila The Werewolf by Peter S. Beagle, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Only the End of the World Again by Neil Gaiman, The Hero As Werewolf by Gene Wolfe, and Moon Dance by S.P. Somtow. We seek brief reviews (maximum 800 words) but not work that is over-quick; we are looking for both wit and depth and freshness of insight.

The deadline is June 15.

Send submissions to editors@dantesheart.com as Microsoft Word or RTF attachments.

We are also continuing to look over submissions of art, fiction, poetry, and essays pertaining to wolf folklore.

Spread the word.

P.S. I haven't actually watched Skinwalkers (above) - the poster just caught my eye: an astonishing amount of saliva.

Painting Elephant

This was sent to me by our art editor, and it is not a hoax. This Yahoo video features the paintings done by...an elephant! In Northern Thailand, artists are training elephants to paint with their trunks. Elephants are very intelligent, and have extremely dexterous trunks (with over 5 times as many muscles in the trunk as there are muscles in the entire human body) - perfect for wielding a paintbrush and creating fine strokes.

Most recently, the artists are training the elephants to paint other elephants. Unknown to me is whether the painting is from sight of a model as the cheeky trainers suggest or (far more likely) from memorization of the brushstrokes required ("an elephant never forgets"?). Either way, it is remarkable. Now the important question: do the elephants enjoy painting?

Here is another video with more footage:

Yang Liping - Moonlight

This is so beautiful. It is the Moonlight dance, by the Bai dancer Yang Liping, who has in the last 20 years become famous and sought after in China. In this dance you cannot even see her face: just the light and the shadow, the movement of the dance, the sound of the music, and the many shapes she makes with her silhouette:



"People limit the definition of dance," Yang Liping tells us. "Dance is everywhere. Sitting here is a gesture and writing is a movement." She is showing the world something about dance and about life that is so easy to forget - and she is working hard to preserve the memory of the culture she knew in the mountains as a young girl.

"When I was very young, my grandmother told me that singing and dancing is one way we live and one way we express ourselves. The bimo talks with the gods and communicates between earth and heaven through dancing. My grandmother herself is a typical example. When my grandfather died, she sang for three days and nights about his life, their love stories and to mourn."

You can read a full article about Yang Liping's dances and about what she hopes to preserve and celebrate at Xinhua Net - which is also my source for the quotations above.

Stonehenge Excavation: A Place of Healing?

Recent news from the BBC - forwarded to me in high excitement from one of our fiction editors who has only just recently flown back from England: this very week excavations are beginning at Stonehenge, the first practical archaeology (meaning digging) to occur there in fifty years. Professors Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill (how thoroughly British their names are!) have secured permission from the British government and funding from BBC Timewatch and the Smithsonian to undertake the dig in order to verify whether there is anything to their theories of Stonehenge's origin.


Archaeologists have been speculating for long decades about who built the monument, where it came from, and when it came to be. Most enthusiasts of archaeology and mysticism know that there are two types of stones at Stonehenge - the massive ring of gray sarsen stones, and the much, much older stones of dolerite that appear eerily blue. These are the 80 stones that somehow traveled 200 miles from Carn Melyn to the site of Stonehenge, in an age that had yet to discover bronzeworking. Some time over 4,000 years ago, something drove the ancestors of the modern Welsh to transport the massive blue stones over all that distance, through the darkness and wet of the stone age English countryside, without roads. Students of Stonehenge have postulated all types of reasons for this feat, reasons astronomical or religious (observatory? burial site? temple to the sun?). Wainwright and Darvill note that many of the human remains that have been disinterred at Stonehenge show signs of sickness or wounds. This has led them to an intriguing theory: that the blue stones may have been believed to hold healing properties - in short, that Stonehenge's purpose was curative, a holy place to which the sick and the dying were brought in hope of healing. Later, the sarsen stones were added in a great circle, but originally there were just the blue healing stones - if that is what they were.

This may be the most fascinating and compelling theory yet advanced, to my mind. Certainly it has struck the powers that be in the United Kingdom as such, and we are now witnessing one of the digs of our century - young as our century is. You can read more about it in the BBC article here, and you can find there two very good documentary-style video clips, one of them an interview with Professor Wainwright.

During the excavation, Stonehenge will remain open to tourists, and large plasma screens will allow them to see details of the work. The dig will last until April 11 (it is a "fortnight" dig - fourteen nights - another very British detail), and the archaeologists hope to verify the date that the blue stones were brought to Stonehenge, and to find further evidence to clarify the stones' purpose. We wish them luck, and hope that whatever they find, whether it deepens or resolves the mystery, will prove wondrous and offer much food for thought.

Moon Dance

One more wolf post before I change subjects! One of our fiction editors gave me a copy of S.P. Somtow's Moon Dance (1989), and it is a terrific read. It is a rarity - a tale told with both beauty and poetry for the heart and mind, and adrenaline and pulse-pounding excitement for the blood. It is great to find both in one book. If you want to watch a talented writer examine the clash of cultures or the psychology of alienation or the tragedy of extinction, or if you want to know what happened when European werewolves immigrated to the Americas and ran into their indigenous counterparts among the Sioux on this continent, or if you are just a lover of a chilling and well-told story, check this one out. Somtow understands his werewolf lore very well, and digs deep into what has made that lore so compelling to generation after generation of storytellers and wide-eyed listeners. He also tells his story with quirky and believable characters, and with a great deal of pathos. I give you a long excerpt here, because I cannot resist doing so:

1880 - Dakota Territory - half-moon, waxing

"Snow. Snow streaming down since the onset of night. Snow heaped up against the tent flaps, whipped up by the wind, seeping through the places in the walls where the hides have worn thin. Snow piling on the treetops outside and bending the branches to breaking. Snow on the ground packed hard, stubborn snow. Snow caking on the buffalo robes, not melting. Snow hanging in the air even beside the dying embers of the fire. Snow on your clothes and your hair and even your eyebrows, my son. Are you surprised, my son, that this winter the snow has crept inside me, and turned my old woman's heart to ice?"

He did not answer her but continued to squat cross-legged on the buffalo robe. Perhaps he was listening to the wind. Was he awake, even? But his eyes were open.

"It is time for me to go out into the snow, my son. There is only enough pemmican for you and your wives and their children. You will slaughter the dogs one by one to fill the hunger from moon to moon. The time has come. The wind whistles and whines, and sometimes I think I hear my name. Do not be sad. I know that is why you will not speak to me. You also hear my name on the wind, my son. Is it not so?"

He still would not look at her. She studied him. His hair was almost as gray as her own; here and there it was flecked with snow. In the shadow, away from the fire, a baby cried; she heard a young girl's soothing voice and did not know which of her son's wives it was, for her ears were failing her. She knew it was from deep reverence that he did not speak to her directly; whenever he did it was always with the politest of speech forms. She wished it were not so now. The cold had burned its way into her bones. She could feel them creaking. Her bones were like flutes through which the winter wind whistled.

"The hardest thing of all, my son..." She paused. He looked up at last. He is clenching back some terrible emotion, she thought. I must not shame him. "I can no longer change. Do you understand? I have lost the gift."

There, I will pause. Let that excerpt be our gift to you on the blog tonight, though it is really Somtow's gift. I am only fifty pages into the book, but it has such promise. Here is a writer whose craft is honed like a fine tool, who can keep you up during the night gasping for breath, and who always knows exactly what he is doing with the stories he is reworking. I must leave this post and get back to that book.

Tlingit wolf

So my mind is still very much on wolves, and I found this beautiful piece this morning - it is a greeting card published through Art Cards, Editions, Originals (ACEO). Isn't this something remarkable? The Tlingit-style drawing of a wolf juxtaposed with the more naturalistic, European-style rendering of a wolf. European and indigenous art, body and spirit set side by side. And seeing it makes me long for the part of the world where I was raised, for the scent of cedars and the mist on the shore.

The artist is Julie Thompson, creator of the painted feathers that some anonymous fan has been circulating so rapidly via chain e-mail.

For another post from our blog that samples folklore or fairy tale greeting cards, check out this.

Are You a Werewolf?

I've recently been introduced to the joys of Are You A Werewolf: A Game of Deception, Paranoia, and Mob Rule, an incarnation of the popular card game known as Mafia tailored to the tastes of horror readers and students of lycanthropy. The game is wild fun, designed for 15 people (though it can be played with fewer), and it works like this:

There is a village. Some of the people in this village are ordinary villagers, one is a seer, and two are werewolves. No one knows who the werewolves are. There is also a moderator who facilitates the game. Now the villagers close their eyes and mime going to sleep; the werewolves wake and take a look around - silently! - and decide on their victim. Then they close their eyes, and the seer awakes and asks the moderator - silently! - about one of the villagers, whether that person is one to howl at the full moon. The moderator replies yes or no (still silently). Then everyone wakes up, and the moderator removes one player from the game and lets everyone know that this person's entrails have been found smeared across the streets of the town, and one foot has been recovered from outside the church. (As you can tell, when it was my turn to be moderator, I was especially gory in describing the crimes of the night.) The conclusion is inescapable: the villagers have among their number one or more werewolves.

What ensues is either a careful game of detective work or a wild lynching, with villagers denouncing each other in a manner that would have horrified the citizens of Salem. The seer can of course speak up and identify one of the wolves (if he or she guessed right the night before), but if they lynch one werewolf and the other remains, the seer will probably be the next night's dinner.

The villagers win, of course, if they find and eliminate the predators, while the lycanthropes win if they devour the village first. I imagine they won't starve - there must be other villages around when they are finished with this one.

All the fun is in the denunciations and the mob frenzy of the game. It is remarkable what the fear of being eaten - or the fear of being lynched by one's neighbors - will do to quite apparently ordinary people. I told a friend of mine from South Africa about the game and she was horrified, which makes me wonder whether there is anything distinctly American about the game's appeal. It bears thinking about.

You can find out more about the game and its rules here.

On another note, we are actively seeking fresh work (fiction, poetry, art, essays, etc.) on wolves or werewolves, for our fall issue of the Dante's Heart journal. Have an interview with a werewolf you've always wanted to write? Maybe a short story about a funeral for a werewolf, where only one mourner was in on the secret? Or a poem with a new take on our dear little Miss Riding Hood? A painting critiquing the ecological devastation of the Arctic? A one-minute film clip showing the world in the night-colors of a wolf's eyes? You can find out more about what we're looking for here.