FAERIE

Catherynne Valente
Laura Marjorie Miller
traps piled along the shoreline. “I hadn’t even lived here a year,
yet one thing that really struck me was how in winter, the snow
collects in them, so they look like snow cages, meant to capture
the snow. Then in the spring, flowers come through them, and
it looks like you’ve been fishing for flowers.”
Valente’s favorite features of the island reflect the array
of its natural and cultural history. She takes us on a tour of
Battery Steele, a World War II fortification on the ocean
side of the island. When you first see it, Battery Steele is an
imposing blockade built into the side of a hill that yawns its
maw at you from the wetland surrounding it. But inside is a
warren of chambers that every year at harvest-moon time is
gloriously transfigured by the islanders into a combination of
art installation, performance, and ritual space for a festival
called Sacred and Profane. One year, for example, Valente
explains, three redheaded women floated nearby in a wooden
boat, singing “The Lady of Shalott.” And every year, this raw
concrete cave is beautified with brightly colored graffiti of the
highest caliber.
“Battery Steele is constantly changing,” Valente says. “It’s a
palimpsest. Some of that graffiti is really old, and some of it, I
know at which festival it got added. There is always something
new on the walls.” She describes her favorite graffiti: a passage
from C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, and a quotation she
herself wrote out from Mike Ford’s “Sonnet: Against Entropy,”
which we can’t get to at the moment because that room is
flooded. As we explore the dark passages, our flashlights
illuminate modern cave paintings that leap out at us in bursts.
“Some of the graffiti is really cool, by art students,” says Valente,
“and some is like “Van Halen 1984!!!” and I love that.”
Peaks Island is a compact world full of such juxtapositions of
art, history, and even microclimate. The part of the island that
faces the Atlantic is primordial Maine coast, boasting a geologic
feature called the Whaleback—a twisting spine of rock that
surges from the ocean like a stranded whale. Yet Peaks’s interior
is thick forest, where sea crows gather at night. At the base of
some trees you can find piles of gleaming shells left over from the
mussels that the crows gather and shuck in the branches.
Valente rattles off some of her other favorite features. “I love
the back shore,” she says. “There is a little beach there that is
not there at high tide, only at low tide. I love the very, very end
of the boat dock at sunset—I like to take picnics there in the
summer.” The Puritan names in the graveyards intrigue her—
Thankful Griffin is one, a woman with a first name to evoke a
virtue—as do the barrow mounds that shelter some of the dead,
for the soil is often too rocky here to dig a deep grave.
As homey as Peaks is, Valente has to leave it often to go
dashing around the country and globe on book tours. The
Fairyland novels have strong elements of travel narrative, with
September encountering different characters, cultures, and even
dimensions within that parallel universe. So what is the author’s
feeling when she goes traveling?
“I like to have days off in various cities, which is wonderful
for feeling like you’ve gone somewhere,” she answers. “On the
last tour I went to Petoskey, Michigan, the furthest north you
can go without being on the Upper Peninsula. It’s not even
near an airport—you have to drive an hour to get there. This
is the first time in my life I’d boarded a plane to a place that I
didn’t know where it was: Traverse City. But I felt like I did get
a sense of Petoskey. The bookstore people insisted I go eat at
this particular restaurant, which is the nice restaurant in town.”
Valente describes an awkward yet ultimately connecting moment
with the kids at the reading: “I was talking about my office at
the Umbrella Cover Museum, and I started explaining what
‘the season’ was. And they just gave me a look, like, Why is she
explaining what a season is to us? And I realized it was literally insane
to explain this concept to them. ‘Oh, right! You are on the Great
Lakes, and you have the season too!’” She laughs at the memory
and at herself.
There are many more places in the world Valente wants
to explore: Andalusia in Spain, Poland, Argentina, and
Newfoundland—particularly Ironbound Island, with its
“amazing Game of Thrones name.” And Maine itself, vast and
wild state that it is, beckons with much more to offer: “I want to
go way up north, to Bucksport, where the sun hits the U.S. for
the first time.”
There truly is magic everywhere. But far from being an
escape, travel in Valente’s fairy realm is laced with responsibility
and presence, learned from places the author has lived and from
places dear to her. There are natural laws with consequences
by which even the fairies, larking and dazzling, must abide, as
well as humans. The residents of Peaks keep raised gardens, for
example, because of the heavy metals left behind after World
War II, when the soldiers, rather than convey much of their
equipment back off the island, ground it up and distributed it
into the soil. And in Western Australia, where Valente’s partner
Heath Miller hails from, there is a high rate of skin cancer
because of the hole in the ozone layer directly above.
“We broke the sky,” states Valente solemnly. “And we’re
probably not going to be able to do anything to fix it. We
humans have a very fairy mindset in many ways, that everything
is for our use and our amusement. And I think that we access
that Unseelie side more than we access the Seelie side, the goodmagic
part of ourselves. And I think that is very sad.”
Valente’s fairies are fundamentally alien creatures, who started
out as frogs yet evolved by stealing the best parts of other species:
If you have something and they want it and can take it, why
not? So they help themselves to physical attributes, to talents, to
magic from other worlds. When put like that, the notorious fairy
amorality does not seem so alien after all.
“I wanted them to be just human enough that I could say
something about our world with them. I wanted to address
colonialism through fairies—I wanted to use fairies to access
that relationship,” says Valente. With changelings and otherwise,
“they seem to enjoy messing with human hierarchies and
replacing them with something entirely their own”—not too
unlike a colonial Mainer claiming the sea from a native merman.
Just like the ecology of Fairyland needs both light and shadow,
in Valente’s writing, a sense of purpose is inextricable from
beauty, play, optimism, and joy. “There is a huge responsibility
in writing for children,” she says, “because you are shaping the
psyches of actual people. If you think about the books you read
as a kid, they had a tremendous effect, from what you went on
to do for a living to what you sought to fill your life with. And if
I can say something about the way we treat the earth, in a way
that’s just cloaked enough … Fairy stories have always given us a
way to talk about those things.”
Follow Catherynne Valente’s Twitter doings @catvalente. Her blog writings
can be found at catherynnemvalente.com and the Peaks Island ferry schedule
at cascobaylines.com.
Laura Marjorie Miller writes about travel, magic, myth, ocean conservation,
the arts, and other soulful subjects. Her work has appeared in such places
as Parabola, Utne Reader, Yankee Magazine, and The Boston
Globe. Find her on Twitter @bluecowboyyoga.
Find out more about Brittany Rae Photography at
brittanyraephotography.com.
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