Myths of Origin (57 page)

My Dinner with King Arthur

The inclusion of this last novella might seem anachronistic, as it came out in the fall of 2009, three years after
The Grass-Cutting Sword
and four years after
The Labyrinth.
In fact, it came out on the day of my second wedding, on a bright day in November when the world was much better than it had been for some years. However, it was written much earlier. Novellas are notoriously difficult to find publishers for, and it stayed in my “trunk” the word we still use to describe the no-man’s-land of our crowded hard-drives where unpublished work lives until it does or does not find a home.

In fact, the Galahad chapter of
Under in the Mere
is the first piece of fiction I ever wrote when I was twenty, for a class in experimental writing in which I wholly failed to impress upon my professor that I had any ability whatever. She thought there was something to this chapter though, written as though Galahad were wandering through San Diego, where I then lived, looking for his Grail.

All of these books have strong ties to the places I lived when I wrote them.
Under in the Mere
is no exception—but I wrote pieces of it in San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Japan, Virginia, and finally I finished it in Ohio. It is part of that confessional style, that other period of my writing, before I ran out of my own angst and had to start figuring out how to tell someone, anyone else’s story.

And this was the beginning of that.

I have been obsessed with Arthuriana since I was a child and my father, who had some peculiar ideas about baby’s first King Arthur, gave me Steinbeck’s Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. I loved Morgan le Fay—she was described in Malory as a “clerk of necromancy” which I took to mean she worked at some kind of magical grocery store, packing bags of spells and potions. Later, I found out clerk meant cleric, and my image of her changed to a magical secretary. Morgan was the hero of my childhood. When I grew to be a teenager, my circle of friends and I not only obsessed together, but wrote an Arthurian play and, when it was performed, we played the parts we had always assigned to ourselves in our fey afternoons in the California woods It’s not hard to guess who I was. It is to that circle that the book was eventually dedicated.

And yet when I came to write about King Arthur, it was in the 2000s, when Morgan and her sisters had been done to death in the fantasy of Arthuriana market. And really, no one writes about Arthur himself—it’s always his friends that steal the show. I felt I could say little more about her, other than my grocery-girl or my secretary. I was moved instead to the minor knights, and the idea of the Otherworld all Arthurian knights must eventually travel into as California. California, where I moved when I was thirteen, has always seemed to me a kind of Fairyland, a desert of illusion, full of the fey and the cruel as well as the kind. I couldn’t let go of that connection, and this book, which took as long to write as books of mine three times the size, came out of that. Each chapter is a connection between the modern and the ancient, and the knight is the path between them, with it’s Kay as a Turing machine or drunken Galahad. It is a work full of both my youthful not even knowing what rules to break, just rushing pel-mel at literature like Chung Li in the old Streetfighter game, her legs on fire, and my graduate study in medievalism. If you are a medievalist, well, you’re welcome—this is a book full of the tiny and irrelevant and beautiful and mad things we know. If not, I hope it will lead you to our little fortress.

It was also my first work to deal primarily with masculinity and masculine POVs, something that excited and worried me—would I get it right, so many do not, when dealing with the opposite gender. I hope I have done well by that, and most especially by the stories that have possessed me since I was a girl.

I sit by my long window in Maine and a storm slowly clears outside. Blue sky peeks through the deep forest just outside my house, the old hoary New England forest that might be full of anything, maidens or monsters or knights. Spatters of rain start to dry on the glass, and my chickens crow for the sunshine.

There is a kind of map that connects these four novels, a ley line connecting Rhode Island to Japan to Ohio to California and finally to Maine. A map with strange place names and stranger roads, perhaps the kind of map a kid draws when they don’t know how to stay in the lines, perhaps the kind men drew a thousand years ago, when the difference between the real and the unreal seemed less important. It is a map of my heart, a heart in four chambers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Catherynne M. Valente is the
New York Times
bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including
Palimpsest
, the Orphan’s Tales series,
Deathless
, and the crowdfunded phenomenon
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making.
She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.

OTHER BOOKS BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

Deathless

A Dirge for Prester John, Volume One: The Habitation of the Blessed

A Dirge for Prester John, Volume Two: The Folded World

A Dirge for Prester John, Volume Three: The Spindle of Necessity

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making

The Grass-Cutting Sword

The Ice Puzzle

The Labyrinth

The Orphan’s Tales, Volume One: In the Night Garden

The Orphan’s Tales, Volume Two: In the Cities of Coin and Spice

Palimpsest

Under In the Mere

Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams