GG: Have you ever collaborated with another writer?
JA: No, I’ve never collaborated with another writer—except my daughter Liz, writing a huge number of episodes for a BBC TV series about Arabel and Mortimer the raven.
GG: When your books are published in the U.S., do you do the changes, or does someone else?
JA: When my books are published in the U.S. someone else does the changes and I argue about them.
GG: Do you still write for, or are you at all involved with any magazines? Are there any magazines that you regularly read?
JA: No, I don’t any longer write for any magazines, though one occasionally picks up a short story from a collection. I regularly read the Times Literary Supplement, and when it comes my way, The New Yorker.
GG: Do you, or have you ever, written poetry?
JA: Yes, I have written poetry and still do occasionally. One collection, The Skin Spinners, was published in the U.S. and is now out of print. A new story collection, to be published in the U.K. by Cape, Ghostly Beasts, has a few poems interspersed with the stories.
GG: Who are your favorite children’s book authors?
JA: The list would be so long that it would cover pages. To name a few, George Macdonald, E. E. Nesbit, Francis Hodgson Burnett, John Masefield, T. H. White, J. R. R. Tolkien, Laurence Houseman, Walter de la Mare, Rudyard Kipling, Kastner, Peter Dickinson, Philippa Pearce, Susan Cooper, Barbara Willard, E. Weatherall (she wrote The Wide Wide World). I could go on and on.
GG: Do you think more adults will read children’s books after Philip Pullman’s and J. K. Rowling’s recent successes?
JA: Yes, Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling seem to have had a galvanizing effect on the children’s book market.
GG: Are you working on anything?
JA: I am working on a new Dido Twite story called Midwinter Nightingale, but it has been blocked by the illness of my husband who has recently needed so much care that it left little energy for anything else. But I don’t despair about it. Dangerous Games was first started in 1958 and had a 40-year incubation.
GG: What have you been reading recently?
JA: I have mainly been reading comfort books lately, due to the above. Comfort books are 19th century fiction, George Eliot, Trollope, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte. But I did read and enjoy The Amber Spyglass and Nuala O’Faolain’s autobiography, Are You Somebody?
GG: Do you have a good local bookshop?
JA: Yes, I have a small but excellent local bookshop which, if it has not got what I want in stock, will order and usually get it within a couple of days. The only book I can’t get hold of is an amazing school story, Gentleman’s Daughters, by Margaret Masterman, published in the ‘30s and long out of print. If anyone has a copy I’ll pay whatever they ask, within reason.
GG: And to end, a couple of questions from young readers, Madelyn and Liza Schwartz (ages 12 and 8):
What scares you? Do you ever get scared writing about these scary things?
JA: What scares me? Gangs, irrational rage, people who can’t be reasoned with. I don’t think I’d be scared of the supernatural, but then I have never really encountered it. I think I would be more interested than scared if I did.
GG: Has anything supernatural/scary/wicked ever really happened to you?
JA: About five years ago I was alone in the house at night and woke to see a torchlight [flashlight] flickering on my bedroom ceiling; I realized that someone was climbing up a ladder to my window. That was pretty startling, but I called the police on my bedside phone and the intruder made off leaving the ladder (mine) before the cops arrived. That left me nervous at night for a while, but the effect has worn off.
Copyright © 2001 by BookSense.com;
first appeared in BookSense.com;
reprinted by permission.
* * * *
Gavin J. Grant runs Small Beer Press and edits and publishes a twice-yearly small press magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He works for BookSense.com, an online portal for independent bookshops.
Ovigonopods of Love
By Joe Murphy
10/1/01
He for she, hae for shae, and a hundred thousand of us lovebuckers if there’s one. Silt from the Flooding fills my mandibles, tasting of salt and marsh blossoms. Pods flattening, I stroke through the water, racing the other hes. Like them, it’s my first time, and I’m filled from antenna tips to tail flukes with the urge to merge.
Upsee: four moons in a row. One for each sex. The first red as a shae’s eyes. Once in four years, the alignment comes, and we’re not long to follow.
The tide swells to cover the plain. Behind me, out in the sea, the twisting spires of Carnak, aglitter with phoskelp.
Downsee: mud and dying grass, underwater now. Bubbles burst as the newly born hes erupt from the chitinous ab-domes of their mothers, buried, dry since the waters last came, silent now with their mothers’ passing. Wide-tailed and big-eyed, the newborns dash through the currents and search for the city lights.
The songs have been sung, the poets’ words harvested. But who needs poets? Simpering in their guild spires, they call us lovebuckers. Spires the builders build, like everything else. Why waste time with words when there’s so much real work? I’ll never be a poet; all I’ve ever needed I learned in my mother’s ab-dome:
Build a tower
Build it well.
Partly pearl and
Partly shell.
Build a tower,
Every He.
Climb atop and
Wait for She.
“Watch it, offal shell!” Another he swims by; a hindpod smacks my mandibles.
“Out of my way, stonebrain.” Back I smack him. My forepod hits the bucker upside the antennae. His carapace flares; segments gleam like blades in the bright-as-day moonlight. Fool to fight because the flaring slows him down; my carapace sleek and nimble, I steal the lead.
There! Low and to the side, a flat shelf of shale swept clean by the tides. Tail flukes lash and take me down. Smooth, sweet shale, glowing dark. My pods form cups, and anchor me. Carapace flares while antennae stiffen with eager erections.
“Mine!” I shout. “Mine, mine, mine!”
Other hes surge around me, but none dash in, none try to steal my plot. Wide and glorious the tide plain, plenty of room for all, and it’s a fool who fights when there’s love coming.
Nipping a free-flowing strand of seagrass—a nicely pungent bouquet, I might add—I begin to chew. But the urge to flare my carapace becomes overwhelming. Hunching my head and thorax, squeezing my foreknees together, a sharp delicious crackling fills my ears and splits my shell.
I pull the longest segment from my back by twisting around until mandibles take hold. Regurgitating the seagrass with spit forms a milky glue—liquid pearl, as the poets say—to glue the shell to stone. My tower’s begun.
Upsee: shadows of haes overhead, dark shapes tracking the breeze as they skim the surface. Downsee: to the left the flood plains drop away. A good site. Have my pick of the shes when they rise from the depths.
Another strip of carapace, and then another. All hail most holy symbolism. The four longest pieces, one for each kind, form the tower’s base. The four shortest pieces, one for each guild, glued atop to form a wide platform, and I climb until my antennae break surface.
Fresh in my newly shining carapace, mandibles wide and grinning, I begin to stroke the shreds of chitin from my legs and abdomen. Good grooming is a must; the outer mandibles crush the segments, the inner ones pulverize and mix with spit and the very special secretions marking my maturity. Glowpearl, we call it, or he-shine, and I dab some on each tower corner—where it beams brightly—then sculpt my desires in swirls and glyphs known since time out of shell.
Upsee: the first moon has passed its zenith. He-towers rise on all sides. Long slender Haes sail between them, skimming along the surface, their pods flared as sails. Shadows under the moon as shaes flit through the sky with pods spread to glassy thinness in crescent wings. The second moon nears apogee.
Downsee: the shes come!
Sleek and black as the depths, wisest in wisdom, ready to spend the glory of their final cycle, the shes’ blunt bodies flow with the currents. My antennae twitch eagerly.
“Spindleye!” My mandibles click as my voice cracks. “Spindleye of the fourth quad, City Carnak, Guild Scrillthor, builder of towers and dreams extraordinary!” And the voices of other hes ring forth:
“Tanaspume of the third quad!”
“Rapanorf of the second, poet of poets!”
“Balandron, warrior supreme of the first quad.”
“You look likely.” A she drifts up level with me.
“Such a sheen to your carapace. Such a many-layered glint to your jewel eyes,” I answer, bending my knees in a courtly bow.