GUEST POST: Phyllis Irene Radford on Heroes, King Arthur, and Creating the "Merlin's Descendents" series

When I read Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur for the first time in junior high school, I knew I’d found the heroes lacking in my life.  I think that’s one of the reasons Arthuriana has lasted so long.

Everyone has times when they need a hero.  This first reading of stories about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table was long enough ago that heroic figures were still supposed to be men, and I hadn’t seen enough of the world to realize that heroism can be a feminine characteristic as well.  More about that later.  

 At that time in my life, I knew I was smarter than the football stars in school that my classmate worshipped and lusted after.  To me that made these heroes less than ideal.  I knew that my teachers were ordinary people doing their job and going home to their families, like everyone else.  I knew that my father had a bunch of military medals, but he kept those in the safe and didn’t talk about them.  He was away from home serving his country so much in my early years that I had trouble identifying him with heroes.  Later I knew better.

I was hungry for someone to look up to, someone who could solve the world’s problems and still have time to nurture the love of his life.  I still appreciated the great Romance in heroic stories.

A New Anthology: Beyond Grimm: Tales Newly Twisted

First of all, a Happy Editor dance... [dance, dance, dance]

This is the first anthology I've edited (actually, co-edited with Phyllis Irene Radford) for Book View Cafe. It began, lo these many many months ago, with an in-house discussion along the lines of "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to..." Book View Cafe has already published several anthologies (Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls, Dragon Lords and Warrior Women -- which has a story of mine! -- The Shadow Conspiracy I and  II), so there was some precedent. We knew to ask things like, Will this be reprint, original stories, or both? Will it be a benefit for BVC or will the authors receive shares of the proceeds? How will we define the theme? At a certain point, we'd reached a sufficient level of enthusiasm and clarity so that someone had to put on an organizational (aka editor's) hat.

Thinking this would be marvelous fun, I volunteered, and the way it worked out, Phyl co-edited it with me. I supplied time and my own editorial experience, and she had the expertise of working with the BVC anthology publication procedures. Because there were two of us, we could submit our own stories to one another, thereby avoiding the editing-your-own-work scenario.

One of the things I love about editing anthologies is watching the process, the landscape of that adventure, unfold, discovering moments of truth and hilarity and heart-wrenching sadness and sheer beauty and poetry in prose. Beyond Grimm was no exception. Although we started with "let's retell classic fairy tales," our imaginations took us in other directions as well - the sun-drenched islands of Greek mythology, legends from the frozen north, Arthurian tales, nursery rhymes, even my own riff on the plots of classical ballets. Fairy-tale lands, contemporary urban settings, magical and not-so-magical steeds, spells and epistles of the people's revolution, mysterious locked chambers and shape-shifters...moonlight and storms.