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It all started with a song. When I was twelve, I heard for the first time
the folksong called "The Great Silkie." In the lore
of Scotland, Ireland, and Norway, "silkies," or "selchies,"
are a mysterious tribe of seals that come out of the sea, take
off their skins, and are human.
Like Kat, I listened to that song over and over, "like a box that had the whole world in it, but no key." It told of an ordinary, land-bound girl, and a magic man who came to her out of the sea. Who was that girl? I wondered. What would a seal man look like? How would he behave? I was learning to draw, so I painted pictures of girls in Scottish clothing, and men who were green like the sea.
 Early art: seal man with spear Painted at age 14 I found I could write stories that were for myself, not just for school. They were always about a seal man, and a girl who finds him. I hid them in a locked tin box under my bed. Every so often I went through the box and tore up the ones that didn't seem good enough. I wrote story after story. I tore up story after story. By the time I graduated from high school I had torn them all up, without ever showing them to anyone. When I went away to college, I stopped writing stories. I stopped painting, too. There just wasn't time, and anyway, so I told myself, I had to be a responsible adult, learn about real life, and stop making up fantasies. It didn't take me long to figure out that if I wasn't painting and writing fantasy, I was miserable. I changed schools and became a professional illustrator. To see the kind of art I do as an illustrator -- my portfolio -- click here. As I thought, and felt, and read more, especially in Ursula K. Le Guin's book on fantasy, The Language of the Night, I began to understand that well-written fantasy is not an escape from real life. It is a way of exploring it. Many things in life are so strange, painful, unimaginable, or new to us that we don't know how, or can't bear, to think about them. Those half-seen things may take form as characters and situations in our dreams, or in our art and writing. A fantasy writer practices a kind of semi-controlled, wide-awake dreaming. The psychologist Carl Jung called it active imagination; Nall, the seal man of Long Night Dance and Listening at the Gate, calls it listening. As I learned more about writing fantasy I began to listen for the seal man and the land-bound girl. Once again I began to wonder who they were. I realized that as a teen I had been painting and writing only the beginning of a story. Over and over, in many versions, I had described how the seal man came out of the sea, how the girl found him on the beach. But there the story stopped. I had never wondered, And then? What happens to them next? I decided I'd ask the story to continue. I'd let it play itself out and see what happened. In those days I still thought of myself as an illustrator, so I decided to tell the story in paintings. The result was 315 watercolors that I called The Morning Series because the time I could find to paint them was in the morning before work. To learn more about The Morning Series, click here. I painted The Morning Series just for myself, the way I had written stories just for myself as a teenager. But of course I was working on other projects, too, and by the time I finished all those paintings I had become the author-illustrator of several books for very young children. One day my editor said, "Have you ever thought of writing for older kids?" All the pictures, all the stories -- hidden and torn up long ago, painted as The Morning Series, still swimming in my imagination -- rose up together. "Yes," I said. I hung up the phone, got a sheet of paper, and started to write. For more about writing and fantasy, click here.
 The Artist at Her Desk From the Morning Series |
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Betsy's
early art: seal man and girl
