A Dragon's Story (Online Novel)

Dear readers, Chapter 1 of our fiction editor Andrew Hallam's online novel/editor bio is now up at Dante's Heart: A Journal of Myth, Fairytale, Folklore, and Fantasy. Those of you who have been with us for a while know that our editor bios are unusual. They may take the form of a myth or a poem or (in this case) a novel. In any case, they are serialized - they come in installments. Come enjoy the Prologue and Chapter 1 of Andrew's story, drop us a line at editors@dantesheart.com to let us know what you thought of it or to suggest a title for the novel, and watch for Chapter 2, which is coming soon!

Here are the first few sentences of Andrew's tale of wit, misadventure, and panache, to whet your appetite:

At last measure, Andrew's wingspan exceeded forty-five feet. He only emerged from his chrysalis about four weeks ago, but he is already beginning to grow white feathers....

Endicott is closing

Dear readers,

I have sad news. Endicott, the Studio for Mythic Arts, is closing down and is preparing its final, farewell issue. If you do not know Endicott, please visit them at once! For many years now they have nurtured the growing field of artists, writers, and readers in the world of mythic and fairy tale arts. We wrote this to the editors, Terri Windling and Midori Snyder, as our appreciation of their work:

More than godmothers of the field, you have been the branching mother-tree, green with life and mystery, that allowed the rest of us saplings to take root. You have given us inspiration and nourishment. The sunlight that came to us through your boughs came green-tinted and wondrous: you helped us look around at our world again and see it as if for the first time.


The archives at Endicott will remain online, and - here is the bright morning news at the end of the grieving: both artists will now be free to move on to beautiful new projects that will surely astound and astonish us.

Terri & Midori have gracefully suggested that there is now a thriving field of mythic arts and many fresh venues for such work (Dante's Heart among them), so that they can consider their work well done. Yet they were the first. To look upon the retirement of such a venue as Endicott is to be deeply saddened: this was a place where, as in Cheers, everybody knew our name, they were always glad we came, and they were always ready to celebrate and support everything beautiful and wondrous being made in our field.

Visit the Endicott blog, and join me in both saluting and sorrowing for the closing of the Studio. I am rambling horribly in this post. I was thunderstruck by the news that Endicott was closing.

The beautiful artwork above is by Jeanie Tomanek.

(Small) Rant about Google

So, some of you may have noticed that last Thursday (May 22), Google's logo looked very different - in fact, it looked bright and colorful, and as though stepping between those giant letters in the word "Google" one might find oneself in some mythical land:


The new logo was the work of an elementary school student, Grace Suryung Moon from a middle school in California. You can read about it here. She was the national winner in a Google-sponsored logo art contest, and she won for herself a $10,000 college scholarship and for her school a $25,000 technology grant. All of this is beautiful. My one small rant is this: why did Google show Grace Moon's work for only a single day? It was so colorful and vibrant, that now I find I miss it terribly, and my favorite search engine now looks a bit dull and metallic in its absence. I am confounded with the persistent suspicion that we have somehow been treated badly: shown a flash of sunrise or sunset glory, just long enough to be teased with it, before being dropped back into the mundane and everydayness of web surfing. The message of the artwork is clear enough: "We are creative and we will take you to new and magical places" - it is a good message for advertising a search engine. But bring it back! You can't transform your logo into a magical art piece by the alchemy of a child's prodigious imagination only to change the gold back into lead the next day. That's just horrible.

//end rant

Thursday, May 29 - Addendum:

Another beautiful logo-day at Google. Did someone read this post and decide to spice things up with a mountain-climbing experience? It's more likely coincidence. In the thoughtful comments our readers have made to this post, we've learned that Google does this sort of thing more often than we'd supposed.... Maybe it will work itself up to the point where the Google logo invites us to a new and marvelous place each day.


We can hope so! I admire the risks this firm takes and its support of artists. Someone reminded me today of just how many people see this logo. (He said a "bazillion," I believe. I don't know how much a bazillion is, but it is surely many millions.) Let's clamor for more of this. As a man with a love of rock-climbing, I especially like today's.

The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces

For those of you in Colorado or visiting Colorado, here is something to check out: a traveling art exhibition curated by Jennifer Heath, showing in Boulder at the Dairy Center for the Arts until June 20th:

The Dairy

2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO 80302

303.440.7826
www.thedairy.org

The exhibition is a thrilling one. Here's the official blurb:

...an exhibition of the work of twenty nine artists from around the world, including videographers, filmmakers and new media artists, as well as painters, sculptors, performance and installation artists. Each considers and re-visions the veil in its many manifestations and interpretations and puts veils and veiling into context. The exhibit intends to engage received wisdom - particularly current clichés and stereotypes about Islamic practices - and to reflect on the great ubiquity, importance and profundity of the veil throughout human history and imagination.

The Autumn of the Patriarch

I have the delight to be reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, which is less often read than his One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, but very worth reading. The entire novel is one long prose poem, with neither chapter nor paragraph break, and it moves from one scene to the next with a mythic intensity. I offer a passage here to show what has delighted me and to encourage you to pick up a copy, as well, if you have not had the chance to read it. The passage is one of walking through the city -- a beautiful evocation of both the scenes of this city (its poverty and its vitality) and the mood of the observer:

...the fearsome tapestry of the woman who had been changed into a scorpion for having disobeyed her parents, the alley of misery of women without men who would emerge naked at dusk to buy blue corbinas and red snappers and exchange mother-directed curses with the women selling vegetables while their clothes were drying on the carved wooden balconies, he smelled the rotten shellfish wind, the everyday light of the pelicans around the corner, the disorder of the colors of the Negro shacks on the promontories of the bay, and suddenly there it was, the waterfront, alas, the waterfront, the dock and its spongy planks, the old battleship of the marines longer and gloomer than truth....

There are some writers that it is a crime not to read, and read fully.

The Seven Sages of Rome

By the way, if you haven't had the chance to yet, check out Roberta Payne's beautiful translation of The Seven Sages of Rome in our second issue of Dante's Heart. The Seven Sages is a very old cycle of folk tales, many of them quite dangerous: in these tales young women and old fathers are treacherous, and there is a price to be paid for ignoring the random wisdom of animals. My own favorites are "The Stolen Wife" and "The Jealous Man Locked Out of the House." What are yours?

Awe at the tornado

This tornado (click link to see video) is rushing by not too far from our editors' home base. Now, to any of our readers from Tornado Alley, this will not seem an unusual thing in late May. Here on the corridor of the Rockies, it makes a few of us stand up and gasp, though.


This storm renews my wonder at the raw energy of our world. Part of me wants to go at once and become a meteorologist! We need another fantasist of the caliber of Frank L. Baum to give us another myth of the tornado. Such a wild thing deserves a myth. Consider these myths from the past:

* Dorothy swept off to Oz
* Pecos Bill with a lasso about the tornado's funnel, waving his Stetson hat in the air and yowling his joy (now look at that shot above of the storm and imagine riding that across the open plain)
* The Shawnee Prophet climbing up the inside of the tornado as one might climb a stair, and looking out into all of time, in Orson Scott Card's Red Prophet

Are there others?