Shoulder to your setting pole, you push off and go
Happy solstice! My novelette "The Boatman's Cure" is now online at Lightspeed Magazine. I feel this is an appropriate time of year for it.
This story began life as a dream I had in the spring of 2011:
And I dreamed urban fantasy, except that it was taking place in the salt marshes of New England: retrieving an oar from a man who lived alone in a surprisingly well-kept house with nothing but curlews and cordgrass for miles. It wasn't much to look at, short and splintery; it had power over ghosts and a probably fictitious association with Odysseus (the only man to sail to the gates of Hades and return again, his crew all lost, reclaimed by those dark shores), and his refusal to lend it to me even under orders mystified me until I realized he was a ghost himself, hiding out from whatever he should have gone on to. I am afraid I threatened him into it. By the time I got to Brig o' Dread in the "Lyke-Wake Dirge," the air was full of half-seen foxfire in the twilight and he'd have given me his fingernails if that would have sent off whatever lovers or creditors he recognized in those desolate lanterns; but then he was too frightened to let the oar out of his sight, so I had to take him with me when I left. And facing a road trip with a cranky, chattery, insecure dead man, it became evident to me that this dream was meant for either strange_selkie or teenybuffalo and I woke up.
Apparently the dream was meant for me after all, because in the summer of 2013 I finished the story it had grown into and "The Boatman's Cure" was published as the prose half of Ghost Signs at the beginning of 2015. It received some very positive reviews, but it has never appeared anywhere else until Lightspeed. It remains one of the strongest stories I think I have written and one of the most important to me. I put a lot into it: ghosts, dead languages, singing, the sea. Some of its antecedents are very old.
I don't know if I have ever stated publicly that Evelyn looks like Roddy McDowall circa The Legend of Hell House (1973), but he does, for the simple reason that that's who was playing the dead man in my dream. I had just seen the movie for the first time earlier that month. Delia's first impressions of Evelyn, his house, and what happens when she opens up the underworld to let all the ghosts with whom he has history flock to him represent my single most successful transfer of material from a dream to fiction. (For poetry, it's probably "The Anniversary.") The codemaker came from another dream later that month, but the rest of the ghosts come from history and my own invention. Ari in the sense of her name—Aurelia Margrete Tabor—goes back to some extraordinarily unsuccessful stories I never finished in college, so it feels appropriate to me that the character herself came to light only after her death. Delia does not look like anyone except herself, including me. She is named after the folksong rather than the composer, but since I used Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson's electronic score for Hell House as writing music, I don't mind the connection.
I did not keep track of all my writing music over the course of two years; anything name-checked or quoted in the story went through the rotation. There was a lot of Kipling as set by Peter Bellamy. Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Lyke-Wake Dirge." Cordelia's Dad. Kate Bush. A mix made by Renée Johnson for the cast of Theatre@First's The Lady's Not for Burning saw a lot of play, especially the tracks by Carbon Leaf, A Night in the Box, and four instrumentals by Andrew Bird. The title comes from the song by George Ward, which I first heard sung by John Roberts on a CD I got from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
choco_frosh in the summer of 2010. As far as I can tell, it was there almost from the start.
I never know how much to say about something I've written—or I don't know how to say anything that isn't already in the work itself. When Ghost Signs was first published,asakiyume sent me a short interview of very good questions that I was too badly life-stressed to answer, but one of them was "Tell me about how the sea comes rising in your work. What is the sea? What brings the sea and ghosts together?" I still don't have a good answer to that last: the closest I can get is the line in this story where Delia thinks of the sea as "as vast as death and even less known to her." Otherwise I have to fall back on the Odyssey, where the shades of the newly dead follow Hermes past the streams of Ocean and the White Rock, past the gates of Helios and the ward of dreams, and Odysseus protests that "no one ever came to Hades in a dark ship," but then Kirke gives him the directions to do just that. The road of the dead is a sea-road, the sun's road.
The sun comes back; the ghosts come up; the tide comes in; let's do the same.
This story began life as a dream I had in the spring of 2011:
And I dreamed urban fantasy, except that it was taking place in the salt marshes of New England: retrieving an oar from a man who lived alone in a surprisingly well-kept house with nothing but curlews and cordgrass for miles. It wasn't much to look at, short and splintery; it had power over ghosts and a probably fictitious association with Odysseus (the only man to sail to the gates of Hades and return again, his crew all lost, reclaimed by those dark shores), and his refusal to lend it to me even under orders mystified me until I realized he was a ghost himself, hiding out from whatever he should have gone on to. I am afraid I threatened him into it. By the time I got to Brig o' Dread in the "Lyke-Wake Dirge," the air was full of half-seen foxfire in the twilight and he'd have given me his fingernails if that would have sent off whatever lovers or creditors he recognized in those desolate lanterns; but then he was too frightened to let the oar out of his sight, so I had to take him with me when I left. And facing a road trip with a cranky, chattery, insecure dead man, it became evident to me that this dream was meant for either strange_selkie or teenybuffalo and I woke up.
Apparently the dream was meant for me after all, because in the summer of 2013 I finished the story it had grown into and "The Boatman's Cure" was published as the prose half of Ghost Signs at the beginning of 2015. It received some very positive reviews, but it has never appeared anywhere else until Lightspeed. It remains one of the strongest stories I think I have written and one of the most important to me. I put a lot into it: ghosts, dead languages, singing, the sea. Some of its antecedents are very old.
I don't know if I have ever stated publicly that Evelyn looks like Roddy McDowall circa The Legend of Hell House (1973), but he does, for the simple reason that that's who was playing the dead man in my dream. I had just seen the movie for the first time earlier that month. Delia's first impressions of Evelyn, his house, and what happens when she opens up the underworld to let all the ghosts with whom he has history flock to him represent my single most successful transfer of material from a dream to fiction. (For poetry, it's probably "The Anniversary.") The codemaker came from another dream later that month, but the rest of the ghosts come from history and my own invention. Ari in the sense of her name—Aurelia Margrete Tabor—goes back to some extraordinarily unsuccessful stories I never finished in college, so it feels appropriate to me that the character herself came to light only after her death. Delia does not look like anyone except herself, including me. She is named after the folksong rather than the composer, but since I used Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson's electronic score for Hell House as writing music, I don't mind the connection.
I did not keep track of all my writing music over the course of two years; anything name-checked or quoted in the story went through the rotation. There was a lot of Kipling as set by Peter Bellamy. Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Lyke-Wake Dirge." Cordelia's Dad. Kate Bush. A mix made by Renée Johnson for the cast of Theatre@First's The Lady's Not for Burning saw a lot of play, especially the tracks by Carbon Leaf, A Night in the Box, and four instrumentals by Andrew Bird. The title comes from the song by George Ward, which I first heard sung by John Roberts on a CD I got from
choco_frosh in the summer of 2010. As far as I can tell, it was there almost from the start.I never know how much to say about something I've written—or I don't know how to say anything that isn't already in the work itself. When Ghost Signs was first published,
asakiyume sent me a short interview of very good questions that I was too badly life-stressed to answer, but one of them was "Tell me about how the sea comes rising in your work. What is the sea? What brings the sea and ghosts together?" I still don't have a good answer to that last: the closest I can get is the line in this story where Delia thinks of the sea as "as vast as death and even less known to her." Otherwise I have to fall back on the Odyssey, where the shades of the newly dead follow Hermes past the streams of Ocean and the White Rock, past the gates of Helios and the ward of dreams, and Odysseus protests that "no one ever came to Hades in a dark ship," but then Kirke gives him the directions to do just that. The road of the dead is a sea-road, the sun's road.The sun comes back; the ghosts come up; the tide comes in; let's do the same.
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Thank you so much! I am very glad you did.