When I first started writing, I had no idea my heroes would journey through fairytale territory—through those enchanted lands so interesting to the Mythopoeic Society. I got here through temperament and blind instinct, patting my way along the walls, in the dark. All of my novels have been fantasies, but my first attempts were flimsy things, drawing on no particular tradition and thus (at least in my case) without substance. These were never published, and for that, as the first-person narrator of The Folk Keeper might say, “Praise the Saints!” It took me years to let my voice and heart guide me to what I’d always loved: fairytale and myth. My first published novel, Well Wished, draws on E. Nesbit’s tradition (itself rooted in tradition) of foolish wishes with disastrous consequences. And when I chose one of the selkie stories as the spine of my second novel, The Folk Keeper, I stepped squarely into the world of folk and fairytale. I thought I had invented the Folk, until a friend suggested that The Folk Keeper bears a considerable resemblance to The Princess and the Goblin, a book I must have read a dozen times as a child. I’m now leaning consciously on tradition: my third novel (still in progress) deals with the “Strange and Secret Peoples” Carole G. Silver writes of in her book of that title (winner of the 2000 Mythopoeic Society Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies).

I am very happy to be walking these magical lands with all of you, and I am honored that the Society has affirmed that this is where my voice and vision belong.

Published in Mythprint: The Monthly Bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, September 2000