Deborah J. Brannon

Terri Windling, Faerie Godmother of the Mythic Arts, needs our help.

Here are some things you likely already know about Terri Windling: she’s a fantastic artist, creating captivating sketches, paintings, and collages of tree-people and rabbit-people and fairy tales and faerie creatures and more. She’s a distinguished editor, responsible for co-creating Bordertown, co-editing The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (with Ellen Datlow), and a great other fairy tale anthologies and novels besides. She’s the author of The Wood Wife and more, the mother of Endicott Studio, and a gracious, generous woman.

Here is something you don’t know: Terri Windling’s work helped save my life.

Terri Windling has been through some shit in her time, and she’s turned those experiences around into both overt and embedded outreach in her work. An especially potent example is an anthology entitled The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors. Reading that collection gave me the wherewithal to break down some walls, battle the monsters that plagued me beyond them, and emerge from my inner-labyrinth a stronger, more capable person. Terri Windling is one of those amazing creators, women and men I have never met, who have built this sword in my hands through stories of strength, grace, and survival.

I’m not the only one. She’s helped people professionally, of course, but I’ve also heard from no few others about how she’s helped them personally through her creative works and endeavors.

Now it’s our turn. To quote The Color of Angels, a fundraiser to benefit Terri Windling:

Terri Windling and her family have been coping with health and legal issues that have drained her financial resources at a critical time. Due to the serious nature of these issues, and privacy concerns for individual family members, we can’t be more specific than that, but Terri is in need of our support. As a friend, a colleague and an inspiration, Terri has touched many, many lives over the years. She has been supremely generous in donating her own work and art to support friends and colleagues in crisis. Now, Terri is in need of some serious help from her community. Who better than her colleagues and fans to rise up to make some magick for her?

A truly staggering number of Terri’s friends, colleagues, and fans have gotten together and put together a fundraiser of equally amazing proportions. This fundraiser already offers a custom poem by Jane Yolen, character-naming rights in Catherynne M. Valente‘s next Fairyland novel, a personalized story of how you survived the faerie apocalypse by Janni Lee Simner, an original painting by Brian Froud, an original handmade doll by Wendy Froud — I would go on, but the sheer wonderment of it all has made me quite dizzy.

The fundraiser is growing with every passing moment as more people flood in with offers of baked goods, signed books, fandom portraits, and more. In the days to come, auctions will go up from Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Amanda Palmer, Emma Bull, Alan Lee… Honestly, there’s just more awesome here than you can shake a stick at. Two sticks, even.

So, please, come down to the Goblin Market – come buy, come buy! Help Terri Windling, get yourself something beautiful or unique or delicious. If you can’t buy, offer something of your own.

Terri Windling is definitely a woman who deserves it.

We close now with a word from the auction’s mascot, namely Tilly (Terri’s beloved black labrador):

Note: The quote in the subject line reads, in full: “Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality — for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.” From Terri Windling’s essay, “Surviving Childhood” in The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors.

Diana Wynne Jones died last weekend, surrounded by loves ones. Her death was not unexpected – she had been coping with lung cancer for some time. However, no forewarning could prepare her friends and fans for this serious loss: by all personal accounts, she was a generous friend, and creative, fierce, and clever. These qualities also permeate her books; she stands a wondrous titan in the contemporary fantasy genre.

I always meant to read more of her novels, and had not yet gotten around to it for all that The Dark Lord of Derkholm and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and the Chrestonmanci books sounded extremely up my alley. I would have liked to have been more familiar with Diana Wynne Jones before she left us; it saddens me to know that we now have all the books by her that we’re going to get.

Gorgeous, touching or just heartfelt things have already been said by a number of people:

Neil Gaiman – “Being alive. Mostly about Diana.”
Pamela Dean – “I want to tell of our journey down the river.”
Delia Sherman – “More Precious was the light in your eyes that all the roses in the world.”
Marie Brennan – “A Seed of Hemlock.”
Robin McKinley – “Diana Wynne Jones.“

In memoriam here, I now give you the story of the first and only Diana Wynne Jones book I’ve read, a theatre-outing to see Haoru no Ugoku Shiro, and two silly gaijin.

I am an ardent admirer of the Studio Ghibli films directed by Hayao Miyazaki, most prominently of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) and Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) at the time this story takes place in late Fall 2004.

At the time I moved to Tokyo, I actually had no idea that Miyazaki would soon be releasing his newest offering: Haoru no Ugoku Shiro, or Howl’s Moving Castle, inspired by a British author’s book of the same title. A fantastic girl I worked with – Becky, who would soon resolve as one of my fastest and best friends in Tokyo – clued me in to the forthcoming Studio Ghibli feature, and soon we were both intrigued by the film’s premise and eagerly awaiting its release.

One problem: neither of us spoke more than a few phrases of Japanese.

To counteract our ignorance, I hied myself to the nearest bookstore after work one day and purchased a copy of Diana Wynne Jones’ novel. I figured we could both read it, and then follow the basic story as it unfolded in Miyazaki’s film.

I didn’t expect to fall head over heels into such a marvelous narrative. I didn’t expect the sly humor, the meta-inclusion of fairy tale tropes, the urban fantasy mixed in with secondary world fantasy and a dash of portal fantasy. I didn’t expect this novel to push so many of my buttons, indulging my fascination with the heart and witches and fairy tales. And strong women: in a time when I was often feeling vulnerable and lost, Sophie’s irascible strength filled me with a sympathetic conviction.

We saw the film in the theatre at Roppongi Hills a couple of weeks later, reveling in super-plush seats and the fact we didn’t have to wait ages to see it in an indie theatre back in the States.

For the first five minutes, the fact that we understood none of the film’s dialogue wasn’t a problem. (Especially considering there isn’t any dialogue for the first several minutes of the film.) We were armed with our knowledge of Diana Wynne Jones’ fantastic book. We were prepared!

Of course, then Miyazaki took us for an utterly fantastic ride away from the source material and into his own, equally genius vision. We were soon utterly lost, but it didn’t matter. The intoxicating imagery moved us, the music enthralled us, and I sat transfixed as even more of my thematic fascinations played out on screen: fallen stars, the lure of power, the glory of flight.

I may have missed all the nuance of Miyazaki’s concept in that first viewing, but I had a wholly complex two hours there in the dark: Diana Wynne Jones’ narrative and Miyazaki’s vision collided in my heart, leaving me immersed in an artistic experience beyond language that enthralled much deeper than either the novel or the film could have on their own.

It’s an experience that has stuck by me, and it need not have happened at all. The theatre we visited apparently also does a small number of showings of Japanese films each day with English subtitles. We had just missed that detail, and didn’t realize what the beleaguered ticket lady was trying to communicate to us before she just gave up and sold us tickets to the Japanese-only showing.

Still, I’m glad Becky and I were such silly gaijin. Otherwise, I would have missed out on a potent experience.

If you’re not familiar with Diana Wynne Jones’ work, do yourself a favor – find her books and read them.

That’s one of the best memorials such a fine writer could have.