Mythcon 2007

Delia Sherman
My Apprenticeship to the Inklings
Guild

I
’ve known about the Mythopoeic Society, in one way or another,
for most of its forty years. For many of those years, it existed on
the borders of my consciousness, a friendly source of interesting
bulletins and newsletters. But there have been three specific occasions
when it moved into the center of my consciousness. A magic number,
three, and certainly significant, especially in view of when they fell in
my personal journey as a writer.

One: Apprentice.
In 1968, I was in high school and the Mythopoeic Society was
a cheerful one-year-old known as the Tolkien Society of America. I
was in the full flush of my love affair with The Lord of the Rings, and
I wanted more, more, more. When I discovered the existence of the
Society (I no longer remember how), I joined it immediately. As I recall,
it was pretty much a West Coast affair at that point, with outriders
further East, but nothing within allowable bus-riding distance of my
Manhattan home. Reading accounts of discussions about mathoms
and the History of the Riddermark, I discovered a world as foreign
to my experience as Middle Earth itself, a world in which fantasy and
fairytale were taken as seriously as Shakespeare.
This was a revelation to me. I think I’d always known that
fantastic fiction was important. I grew up on the Narnia books and The
Screwtape Letters, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, The
Wonder Clock  by Howard Pyle and Andrew Lang’s fairy books of
many colors. I read E. Nesbit, and Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies.
Even the more realistic novels I read seemed fantastic to me, reflecting
as they did a world as far removed from my apartment in Manhattan
as  Narnia. Books like Elizabeth Enright’s  The Saturdays and  Gone-
Away Lake, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and A Little
Princess and even Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson transported me
to enchanted lands inhabited by large families of squabbling children,
hidden gardens, shipwrecks, and boundless invention and good luck. 
In high school, my friends abandoned children’s books for  The

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Valley of the Dolls  and the latest Ian Fleming. While I never turned
my back entirely on my favorite authors, I branched out past the
children’s section of the library, ranging through Thomas Hardy and
Charles Dickens, biographies of Elizabeth I and Eleanor of Aquitaine,
Bertold Brecht and Shakespeare and Milton, looking for that familiar
frisson of wonder, that cell-deep knowledge that what I was reading
was true in a way that the sordid goings-on in Peyton Place were not.
I found that wonder, of course, in The Lord of the Rings. And The
Lord of the Rings led me to the Tolkien Society.
I was used to dead authors, you see. The Bulletin of the Tolkien
Society of America told me that Tolkien was still alive and still writing.
It also told me that he was a friend of my beloved C.S. Lewis, who
had not only written the Narnia books, but also three science fiction
novels, The Space Trilogy.
Now, I didn’t really know anything about science fiction at this
point in my life. The 79th street branch of the New York Public Library
either didn’t have any or I wasn’t ready for it. I had read Madeline
L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, pressed upon me by my school librarian
when it first came out, and liked it enough to seek out everything I
could find by L’Engle thereafter. But as far as I knew, she was the only
person in our world writing about persons and things outside of it.
So The Space Trilogy burst upon me like the Pacific upon stout Cortez,
endless and mysterious and filled with danger and beauty.
I loved the trilogy as I loved most books at that point in my
life—immoderately. I didn’t understand much beyond the plot at
first, but I recognized the separate beauties of each book: the stern
chill pervading Out of the Silent Planet, the triumphant emotionality
of  Perelandra, the intrigue and drama of  That Hideous Strength. The
images, the characters, even the philosophical arguments, furnished
my mind and my imagination. Again, I wanted more, more, more,
and so I turned to the third member of the fantastic trio mentioned in
the publications of the Tolkien Society, Charles Williams.
Williams’ novels weren’t as easy to find as Tolkien’s and Lewis’s.
I borrowed The Greater Trumps from a school friend, and it plunged
me into a kind of trance. For the most part, I hadn’t the foggiest idea
what was going on in the story at any given moment, but I didn’t
care. Williams’ language, his images and cadences were beautiful
and moving and made me feel huge and beautiful things. Later,
I recognized what my friend and I came to call the Williams effect
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when I read the poetry of William Blake and the fiction of William
Faulkner, even in pre-French Lieutenant  John Fowles and early A. S.
Byatt. Williams-effect fiction is rigorously intellectual, but its final
appeal is to the emotions. It is moral, but never preachy. It transforms
reality. It is true magic.
I wanted to do that too. All of it. I wanted to be a scholar and a
mystic and a teller of tales. I wanted to be an Inkling.

Two: Journeyman
By 1994, the Tolkien Society of America had matured into the
Mythopoeic Society. I had discovered that I was not temperamentally
suited to be a mystic, and had experienced almost as much difficulty
with the academic life as Mark and Jane in  That Hideous Strength.
I had, however, become enough of a scholar to earn a doctorate in
non-Shakespearean Renaissance Drama and had written a handful
of stories and two novels. One of them, The Porcelain Dove, won the
Mythopoeic award that year.
This came as a considerable surprise to me. When I began writing,
what I wanted to write was secondary-world high fantasy. I did have
the sense to realize that I was not Tolkien, that high politics and epic
journeys and huge battles in which the fate of the world hangs in the
balance were not my subject. I was more drawn to the quieter, more
personal quests of William Morris’s “W” fantasies (The Well at the
World’s End,  The Wood Beyond the World,  The Water of the Wonderous
Isles), which I’d discovered in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. I
was also drawn to Morris’s gloriously archaic language and to his
heroines, who were at least as strong and complex and central to the
story as his heroes were. Birdalone—practical, self-reliant, shrewd—
is one of the great unknown heroines of modern fantasy. She is not
a goosegirl and she doesn’t become a princess, but a prosperous
shopkeeper. Love for her is the icing on a cake she has made and
baked herself, which was a notion as revolutionary in 1970 as it was
in 1896. There were many reasons I became a feminist, but I’d have
to say that William Morris contributed his bit to my conviction that
women’s stories are as interesting, and as heroic, as men’s are.
My college efforts at Morris-like fantasy were not crowned
with success. The language was too precious, the medievalism too
egregious, the symbolism too obscure, the plots too negligible, the
characters too hieratic, the whole endeavor too, too utterly, utterly
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non-20th Century for words.

I put my fiction notebook in a bottom drawer and gave my heart
to the English Renaissance.
Over the eight years it took me to get my PhD, I learned a number
of important things that did not figure in the official curriculum.
Loving Shakespeare and Marlowe and Webster and Middleton does
not automatically guarantee that one will love graduate school.
Enjoying the process of grappling with a text does not guarantee
that one will enjoy, or even be good at, literary criticism. A PhD in
Renaissance Studies does not mean that one will be hired to teach it.
At the end of eight years, I had learned that I was a better scholar than
a critic, that I liked teaching, that I loathed literary theory, and that I
was, to all intents and purposes, unemployable in my field of study.
So I did what thousands upon thousands of newly-minted PhD’s
have done in a similar position: I taught Freshman Composition. And
in the interstices of grading papers and meeting with students, I read
fantasy.
My graduate student years coincided with the glory years of the
Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. From wandering a desolate plain
where every modern adult novel seemed to be concerned with issues
that had nothing to do with the way I viewed the world, I found myself
come to pastures of plenty. Not only did the Adult Fantasy Series
provide all the Morris that’s good for a girl to have, but it introduced
me to James Branch Cabell and Hannes Bok and Lord Dunsany and
(glory of glories) E.R. Eddison. I’d been surrounded by fantasy all this
time without knowing it. What’s more, people were still writing it,
lots of it. Men like L. Sprague de Camp and Peter Beagle and Poul
Anderson. And women. Women were writing fantasy. Patricia
McKillip, Evangeline Walton, Hope Mirrlees, Joy Chant. And other
publishers were publishing fantasy, which was appearing in easily
found bookstores, to be bought and devoured in the little pockets of
time I could take out of the business of learning to be a teacher and
an adult.
A lot of those fantasies were brilliant. The Last Unicorn made me
weep with sheer joy at the beauty of it. So did The Forgotten Beasts of
Eld. But many of them were contrived, not especially well-written—
mundane, in fact, and uninspiring. I found myself saying, as many
have said before and since, “I can do better than that.”
I couldn’t, of course—not at first. Writing during office hours,
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when students didn’t show up for conferences, between grading

papers and domestic life, is not the most efficient way to learn one’s
craft. It took me years to learn to construct a short narrative from
beginning to end, and if it hadn’t been for my knowledge of fairy
tales and traditional British ballads, I wouldn’t have been able to do
it at all.
Plotting is difficult for me. Inventing exciting events and
marshalling them in an order that is both surprising and inevitable are
not my strong points. I’m more interested in characters and settings
and images and difficult emotional situations—all the things that folk
narratives skip over or take as read. 
Listening to Martin Carthy’s “The Famous Flower of Serving
Men,” for instance, I was plagued with questions. Why did Fair
Elinor’s mother kill her husband and child? If she hated her so, why
not kill her? Why did Elinor not seek justice in her own person? When
she went to court to serve the king, why did she disguise herself as a
man? Why, why, why? And the biggest question of all: How did the
king really feel about discovering that his beloved Sweet William had
been Fair Elinor all along?
Through a Brazen Mirror started out as a short story--a long short
story. Encouraged by Jane Yolen, with whom I took a week-long
fantasy writing course in Amherst, I sent it to a young editor and
writer named Ellen Kushner, who kindly informed me that it was
actually a novel--a service she has been providing for me pretty much
ever since. She must have been right. Terri Windling bought it as a
novel, anyway, with instructions to add 20,000 words to the 15,000 or
so I’d already written.
This took me 5 years, more or less.  The Porcelain Dove  took me
even longer.
The first version of The Porcelain Dove was 20 pages in a notebook.
It was a Howard Pylean fairytale about a beggar’s curse on a noble
family and the quest for the bird that would break it. Somewhere
along the line, I decided that the quest itself was a lot less interesting
than the plight of those left at home, waiting for the quester to return.
I decided to set the book in France (I like France), in the eighteenth
century (I like the clothes), and to have it narrated by someone who
wasn’t directly involved in the action (I like challenges). Then I started
to research.
As happens with projects like this, the more I learned, the more
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complicated everything got. Synergy built upon coincidence and

happy accident, and finally, 7 years later, I had a long historical/
fantastical/pastoral/urban/tragical/comical/romantic novel full of
realistic details of daily life and philosophy and politics--and clothes--
which looked not at all like any fantasy I’d ever read. It was published
by Dutton as a mainstream historical, and reviewed as a chimera.
But the Mythopoeic Society was undismayed by questions of genre. I
found myself, in Washington D.C., walking up to the dais to accept an
award from Madeline L’Engle.
It was like being knighted by the Queen. I don’t remember what
she said—except that it was kind and gracious. I don’t remember
what I said—except that it was not what I’d meant to say. In fact, I
don’t remember much of anything about that banquet except a huge
sense of joy and wonder.

Three: Master
If being given the Mythopoeic Award by Madeline L’Engle was
like being knighted, being invited to be a Guest of Honor at the 2007
Mythcon is like being crowned. It is an honor and a responsibility and
a statement that, in the opinion of the selection committee at least, I
am someone who has something to say that is worth listening to.
This is very humbling.
Among the things fantasy has to teach us, one of the most important
is that mastery is not an absolute state. Gandalf, with centuries of
learning and wisdom behind him, fails to recognize Saruman’s slide
towards corruption and Denethor’s growing madness. Aragorn, long-
lived Ranger of the wilderness, wood-wise and canny, has occasion to
cry that all his choices have gone awry. Being absolutely certain that
you’re infallible is a reasonably accurate indicator that you’ve gone
right off the rails. Look at Uncle Andrew in  The Magician’s Nephew.
Look at Jadis of Charn, who turns into the White Witch, and Gregory
Persimmons in  War in Heaven,  and Saruman. Look, at a completely
different level, at pre-dragon Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Arguably, anyone who has had a novel or a short story accepted
for publication is a master of the craft of making up stories and writing
them down. She has been accepted in the fellowship of authors as
having the skills necessary to ply her trade.
Well, yes, and no.
One thing I have noticed over the years of my writing life is that
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every project is a new adventure, a different quest. Every time I sit

down to begin a new story with a new cast of characters, I must learn
how to write  that  story, how to embody  those  characters in all their
idiosyncratic glory. I like the challenge—I must, since about 5 years
ago, I leaped into the untried waters of writing for younger readers.
I’ve read lots of children’s books, my reasoning went. I still read
children’s books. I love children’s books. They’re shorter than 600
pages (this was before Harry Potter swelled the acceptable page count
for YAs). They only have one plotline, which I can steal, er borrow,
from fairy tales. I can write about New York. Piece of cake.
Well, a good cake isn’t actually that easy to bake, and a
good book for younger readers isn’t all that easy to write. While
writing  Changeling,  I revisited my journeyman years, turning out
draft after draft of material that was too sprawling, too cryptic, too
nebulous, and too over-explained. Learning to pace and plot more
succinctly was frustrating and exhilarating, and I couldn’t have done it
without—as the Not Ready For Mythcon Singers told us last night—a
little help from my friends.
Writing, like magic, is popularly supposed to be an entirely
solitary endeavor—the artist in her isolated tower, wrestling with the
blank page or computer screen. Ours, as Uncle Andrew says, is a high
and lonely destiny.
Poppycock.
Real mastery, as fantasy shows us over and over again, includes
working within a community. There has to be a certain amount of
solitary wrestling, certainly—the spells have to be practiced, the
words have to get on the page. But hobnobbing with your peers,
seeking and giving advice and support, broadens your experience
and strengthens your work. Taking on apprentices by teaching and
hiring journeymen by editing anthologies helps ensure the future
of your art by encouraging others to follow it. Writers of fantasy do
not lack for fictional models of good and responsible teachers, from
T. H. White’s Merlin to Le Guin’s School for Wizards on the Isle of
Roke. They do not lack for real-world models either. The speculative
fiction community has a rich tradition of teaching and mentoring,
from offering courses in fantasy fiction in colleges and universities to
the professional workshops, Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, Viable
Paradise, and the young writer’s workshop, Alpha. I’ve been lucky
enough to have two great mentors, two Merlins to lead me along my
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road to mastery: Jane Yolen and Terri Windling.

Jane was the first person to encourage me to take my writing
out of my study and send it into a wider world. Terri was my first
guide to the mysterious world of publishing and editing. It was Terri
who suggested that I take my Freshman Comp. teaching skills and
turn them to editing. Under her aegis, I became a contributing editor
at Tor and co-edited The Essential Bordertown. Their example taught
me that good editing and good teaching have a lot in common. The
point of both endeavors is not to get writers to produce work that is
as much like yours as possible. It’s to get them to produce stories that
are entirely theirs.
Even when what you are teaching or editing is theoretically
fantasy and the stories your students or authors are writing aren’t
exactly—or not only—traditional fantasies.
It is the nature of art to venture outside genre boundaries, and it
is the nature of the market to try and force it back in again. As a reader,
I am noticing that a growing number of new writers in the field is
producing work that challenges and stretches traditional definitions
of fantasy literature, hybrids of fantasy and realism or history and
science fiction or philosophy and tragedy and realism. You could call
them chimeras, slipstream, New Weird, steampunk, oddities. You
could call them Interstitial art. Which is why Terri and Ellen and I
started a foundation to encourage its production and dissemination,
and why I edited  Interfictions  with Theodora Goss, a young writer
who is on the cusp of becoming a Master of Fantasy (or Interstitial
Fiction) in her own right.
In the end, I believe that art, at its best, creates community:
The community of writers who support and advise each other. The
community of fans who buy and read our work. The community of
scholars who analyze and place it in context. All of us in this room
belong to at least two of those communities. Many of us belong to
all three. Together, we create a culture in which young writers and
readers can learn that the proscriptive truths of the dominant culture
are not self-evident, that uncertainty does not have to be a sign of
weakness, that virtue wears many faces, that good and evil are not
necessarily absolute states, and that the powerless can have an effect
on a hostile world, if they can find the right people to help them.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a magic talisman, or a good
metaphor, on your side.
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Ellen and I would like to thank David Bratman, Eric and Bonnie
Rauscher, and the rest of the Committee for Mythcon 38 for bringing
this community together this weekend, to give us the chance to talk
to its members personally, to eat with them and drink with them and
share jokes and ideas and information. 

This article was published originally in something else, somewhere else in

this year. It is reprinted here with permission from someone. Leslie will
insert these.

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