She was tall for her age, and lean, a great tree-climber and a magnificent storyteller — Patricia McKillip’s Winter Rose
Here in this quite remote Scottish Estate where the nearest town’s a good thirty-five miles away, the group of less than thirty souls here year round forms a community that’s at its most cohesive when the weather turns decidedly cold and oftimes unfavourable to travel. This ‘hunkering down’ is a gradual process that starts in early Autumn and doesn’t really end ’til after lamb season in April as it’s hard to be a good host when you’re covered with blood, shit and other stuff that’s unpleasant in general.
Pumpkins are versatile food here, so you can help us harvest them now that our first light frost has passed; likewise apples and potatoes need harvesting and proper processing for the uses they’ll be put to. Gus, our Head Gardener, uses for staff anyone physically healthy and able to be properly picky at what they’ll be doing.
However there’s the of some creatures to deal with. We’ve a trio of Folkmanis Puppets of an Autumnal Nature such as a Worm in an Apple.Intriguing? if so, go read the review here.
All work and no play makes Gutmansdottir an unhappy girl indeed, so there’re contadances pretty much weekly here. Tonight a visiting band, The Black Eyed Susans, are playing. But first, let’s see what’s in this edition
Wandering around the Archives, I chanced upon the Patricia McKillip reviews and a story. There are two novels by her, one called Winter Rose and one called Solstice Wood, the latter are supposedly a sequel to the first. How the latter is a sequel to the first is something that escaped me though I suppose there is now even she admits that you can read the sequel without having read the first one which begs the question, is it really a sequel?
Here are those reviews along with an interview with her and a short story collection she did.
Reviewing Winter Rose, Robert said, ‘The story is told in McKillip’s characteristically elliptical style, kicked up an order of magnitude. Sometimes, in fact, it is almost too poetic, the narrative turning crystalline then shattering under the weight of visions, images, things left unsaid as Rois and Corbet are drawn into another world, or come and go, perhaps, at will or maybe at the behest of a mysterious woman of immense power who seems to have no fixed identity but who is, at the same time, all that is coldest and most pitiless of winter.’
He also looks at that might be sequel Solstice Wood: ‘McKillip has always been a writer whose books can themselves be called “magical,” and it’s even more interesting to realize that she seldom uses magic as a thing of incantations and dire workings, or as anything special in itself. It just is, a context rather than an event, and perhaps that’s the way it should be.’
I feel that many writers are best when running short fiction and she’s no exception to that, so I was pleased Richard reviewed McKillip’s final story collection: ‘With Dreams of Distant Shores, Patricia A. McKillip delivers something that is not quite your typical short story collection. While the point of entry is a series of shorter pieces, the collection builds to and is anchored by the lengthy novella “Something Rich and Strange”, with an essay on writing high fantasy orthogonal to the usual tropes. The book then ends with appreciation of McKillip’s work (and the stories in the collection) by Peter S. Beagle, an elegant coda to a warm, thought-provoking collection.’
Deborah J. conducted an interview with Patricia A. McKillip for us in 2008, in which she generously discussed the purpose of fairytales, her writing process, and much more.
Gary here with music. In new reviews, Deborah tells us about a new single by an old friend, “Ol’ Coquille” by Lauren Murphy, inspired by her Louisiana hometown. ‘The town of Madisonville itself provides some of the soundtrack: rain, the local birdsong, traffic on the bridge, church bells. Lauren’s vocals are as deep and smoky as they’ve ever been; time and the exigencies of life these past years have brought layers and undertones to an already astonishing set of pipes.’
I review Minnesota, the latest from Norwegian guitarist and composer Trond Kallevåg. ‘This time out, Trond draws inspiration from an artist residency he spent on the remote northern Norwegian island of Træna, weaving his instrumental story songs from the emigration stories and old photos he found there into his signature “Nordic Americana” tapestry lovingly shaped from traditional music with elements of jazz and ambient folk.’
I got pretty excited about Roy Brooks’s The Free Slave, a vinyl reissue of a live album by the New York based, Detroit raised drummer. ‘Masterpiece is in no way an overstatement regarding this album. It’s a master class in hard bop by some of the best musicians of their generation, working to bring jazz back to the people and communities where it came from, at quality venues like this one in Baltimore.’
I’m really enjoying another jazz reissue, Kenny Barron’s Sunset To Dawn. ‘The program combines solid acoustic jazz with lots of funky electronic grooves that testify to just how interesting the jazz scene was in the 1970s. It opens on some of the latter, the deliciously funky “Sunset” with Barron’s Fender Rhodes set to max reverb on a long ostinato intro, that eventually opens out into a jaw dropping solo of chorus after chorus, each more intense than the last.’
‘Cindy Walker is one of the most underappreciated American country music songwriters among the listening public, but she’s a legend among her fellow musicians of several generations,” as I note in my review of a various artists’ compilation called It’s All Her Fault: A Tribute To Cindy Walker. ‘When Americana singer songwriter Grey DeLisle — who counts Walker as among her chief influences — learned that Walker’s childhood home in Mexia, Texas, had fallen into disrepair, she gathered some friends to record some of Cindy’s hits.’
From the Archives this Halloween edition, I covered The Torture Never Stops, a DVD release of a Frank Zappa band concert filmed live at the Palladium in New York on Halloween in 1981. ‘The program includes 24 songs and lasts about two hours, starting with “Black Napkins” and ending with an encore performance of “The Illinois Enema Bandit.” In between, he challenges pretty much every aspect of Western culture, music, religion, sexual mores and more with songs that include “Montana” (about a dental floss ranch), “Harder Than Your Husband,” “Broken Hearts Are For Assholes,” “The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing,” “Heavenly Bank Account” and “Suicide Chump”.
I reviewed an album of “dark polar ambient” music by Ugansie, the performance name of Russian musician Pavel Malyshkin. ‘If you like drone or ambient or dark experimental music, Border of Worlds is for you. If you just want something spooky to play in your haunted house at Halloween, ditto.’
Not exactly “music” but Faith reviewed a record by Minneapolis storyteller Steven Posch, Radio Paganistan: Folktales of the Urban Witches. ‘ “The Bride of the Forest” sounds much more European, a tale of a bad bargain that turns out to everyone’s satisfaction after all. To me, “If the People Keep Samhain, Samhain Will Keep the People” sounds like a First Nation’s tale set in Europe. “Witch’s Work is Turning the Wheel” is a short poem about the structure of the universe, where “the only constant is constant change.” As for the witch, she “is the agent of change,” keeping the whole thing wobbling along.’
Judith rhapsodizes about Robin Laing’s The Water Of Life, which includes the song “The Ghost Wi’ the Squeaky Wheel.” ‘Here is a fine tune for Halloween about the ghost of Old Bob Laing. Bob was doomed to push around a barrel with a sqeaky wheel for eternity. Lucky he met up with Willie, who poured some good malt out over the wheel, and the screeching stopped.’
Michael, our resident authority on all things Steeleye Span, gave a positive review of Folk Rock Pioneers In Concert, taken from a 2004 world tour. ‘Rick Kemp’s bass work is alternately tasteful and funky when required, and he also provides lead vocals on a few songs including his own “Samhain” – which also happens to show off Liam Genockey’s rock drumming credentials!
Michael also sings the praises of a trio of albums by one of his musical idols, Heather Alexander: Wanderlust, Midsummer, and Life’s Flame, which contains this particular song: ‘ “Samhain” tears away the veils between one world and the next on the most mystical day of the year, when ghosts and things best left unspoken come closest to the world of the living. Spectral, haunting, and chilling in turn, it’s another example of Heather’s amazing versatility.’
I’ve got some music for you that I think befits the Autumn season. It’s Michele Walther and Irina Behrendt playing Aaron Copland’s ‘Hoe Down’ from his Rodeo album. I sourced it off a Smithsonian music archive which has no details where or when it was recorded which surprised me given how good they usually are at such things.
Oh and Gary did a review of Howard Pollack’s Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man which you can read here.
