This is where all pathways lead me

Thanks to n1jdu, a panel I was on at Arisia—"Non-Genre Films That Fans Love," with ericmvan, yendi, and Julia Tenney—is now online in RealPlayer, sound-only as mp3. The first ten minutes are also available on YouTube, which is the only format in which I have been able to view the footage. I am never used to my face or my voice at third-person remove. Boy, do I talk a lot about Powell and Pressburger.

I do not ordinarily post e-mail correspondences, but teenybuffalo wrote this to me last night about "The Salt House" (Sirenia Digest #22) and it may be the best thing anyone has said about a story of mine, ever:

I LOVED IT. I would have read it sooner, but home computer has been being wonky, and when I was on the school computer I didn't want to have someone glance over my shoulder and see the illustration of hot mutant girl-on-boy action from the first Sirenia Digest story.

Well, it was worth waiting for. It was soul-crushingly sad, for one thing [. . .] You hit the high points of just about every single sea-people story, song or archetype I've ever loved, so it set off a big emotional reaction for me.

And I don't mean "sad" just as in "tragic", though that's a big part of it. I mean that it hit me right in my yearning. It helped crystallize the feeling of desire that sneaks up on me whenever I see rivers or the sea. You may have had the same feeling as I did when I looked at Bill in Dead Man's Chest—part of me just felt bad for him but the other part wanted to go where he'd gone all those years and be like him, a part of the ocean. Even being overgrown with kelp and barnacles is appealing when seen in that light. I guess I talked about this when I posted those lines from "Death By Water". Oh, well, it makes sense inside my own head, but when I try to write about it...! So I'll just say it was a lovely, lovely story.

I do not know if I can adequately explain what this means to me. But that sense of yearning is what I never feel I can communicate, how much the sea makes me hungry, desiring and desolate at the same time, because the world fades off forever into the horizon and I cannot shrug into another skin and swim away, I cannot breathe salt water undrowned; I braided kelp into my hair as a child, but it never took root. That rich and strangeness in the songs of other singers, in other writers' words. I put so many things I loved into "The Salt House." To know that it touched someone else amazes me.

"I did not expect anyone to love my own private autumn," nineweaving says, "but there, the sea and the seasons are elemental: they possess us to be handed on."

I can think of worse honors than to be possessed by the sea.

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full!
—Rudyard Kipling, "The Song of the Dead" (1896)