The Very Best of Kate Elliott (2 page)
Read The Very Best of Kate Elliott Online
Authors: Kate Elliott
Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Collections & Anthologies
Jaran
(1992)
An Earthly Crown
(1993)
His Conquering Sword
(1993)
The Law of Becoming
(1994)
Standalone
The Golden Key
(1996, with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson)
Originally published as Alis A. Rasmussen
The Labyrinth Gate
(1988)
The Highroad Trilogy
A Passage of Stars
(1990)
Revolution’s Shore
(1990)
The Price of Ransom
(1990)
tachyon | san francisco
C
ONTENTS
Introduction: The Landscape That Surrounds Us
Riding the Shore of the River of Death
Leaf and Branch and Grass and Vine
On the Dying Winds of the Old Year and the Birthing Winds of the New
The Omniscient Breasts: The Male Gaze through Female Eyes
The Narrative of Women in Fear and Pain
The Status Quo Does Not Need World Building
T
O THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED FATHER,
G
ERALD
R
ASMUSSEN
(1926–2013)
I
NTRODUCTION:
T
HE
L
ANDSCAPES
T
HAT
S
URROUND
U
S
AS A TEEN GROWING up in quiet rural Oregon I fell in love with the vivid and worlds-shaking landscapes of epic fantasy and science fiction. Yet seen through the filters of the world as I was taught to know it then, I understood without needing to be told that the grand stories were almost exclusively about men. More than that, they were necessarily about men. Men were the actors on the great stage of history. Men were the adventurers. Men were the warriors.
The story I fell in love with did not include me, not really. It was a landscape meant for someone else. The story I wanted to be part of was a landscape of “you don’t belong here” and “this can’t be your tale” and “you are at best a minor player, a spectator, a helpmeet, or a reward.”
Think for a moment about how we see and understand the landscapes that surround us.
The physical landscape of my childhood happened to be a river valley with rich soil, plenty of rain, and foothills in the distance with a glimpse of mountain peaks on very clear days. Before the Willamette River was engineered with revetments, dams, and reservoirs into its current banks, the river had many channels that shifted with the spring floodwaters. It sprawled along multiple branches and spilled down backwaters that had once been the main current.
I grew up on farmland bisected by a long narrow lake that is a remnant of one of the river’s ancient beds. The field directly behind the house boasts a solitary old oak right out in the middle, seeming out of place until you realize it reveals the existence of an old river bank. On this slight ridge my spouse found an arrowhead and evidence of an encampment of Native people.
In 1856, as more settlers of European ancestry arrived in the valley, the remaining Kalapuya were forcibly removed to a reservation. The land was divided up and parceled out according to an alien view of ownership. In the mid-twentieth century the plot I grew up on was bought by my grandparents. Who the people were who set up a camp on what was then a river bank is unknown to me. I can only see the barest traces of a life that the life I grew up living had overrun.
All through the many fields you can see the ebb and flow of a topography marking higher ground and lower ground, the banks and shallows and depths of what came before. If you don’t look for it, if you don’t know it’s there, all you will see are crops: wheat, mint, grass-seed, strawberries, cherry and filbert orchards.
Narrative gets engineered until we start to believe it has always run that way.
Grim stories are bowdlerized and their watered-down versions accepted as if they were the originals. Academic histories elide the existence of noblewomen who signed charters next to their brothers and women who ran businesses and negotiated contracts. Received wisdom leads people to make such absurd claims as that there were no women composers or artists in pre-twentieth-century Europe (I was told this in college as if it were a well-known fact). Some claim that epic fantasy based in a “medieval Europe-style setting” can’t realistically include people of color because there weren’t any in medieval and early modern Europe, which simply isn’t true.
Eventually people believe the river is bounded by these artificially created banks.
My first series attempt at a fantasy story, written when I was fourteen, followed the adventures of two men, partners in rollicking adventure that unfolded across a narrative landscape of men. The fantasy I read at that time followed only a few sorts of (almost exclusively male) characters: the thief, the rogue, the prince (corrupt or good), the wizard, the scheming merchant, and so forth. Men were the only people who could “realistically” be major characters with the exception of a few women who usually existed in the story solely in relationship to the men. This is why Éowyn, for all the problems people may justly see with her depiction today, was such a revelatory character for a teenaged girl back in the day.
Even as I was writing my first “ambitious” fantasy tale I felt something missing.
I
was missing.
Not me personally, as if I had to be the hero of every story I wrote, although it was certainly at this time that I decided to start writing adventure stories in which girls and/or women were the main characters. What was really missing was the topography of how I experienced and saw the world.
A local farming family rented out the arable acreage of our land and planted various crops over the years. On the other side of the lake (the former river channel) was a pasture where we kept a few head of cattle. This place contained plenty of trees and space for an outdoorsy child to invent adventurous games and stories in her head. My society wasn’t kind to strong-willed girls in the ’60s and ’70s (it is often still unkind to them and indeed to anyone who doesn’t adhere to a binary gender essentialism). In those days I was labeled a tomboy, a word used to describe a girl who liked to do things which at that time were explicitly and demandingly associated with boys. Climbing trees, playing outside, running, being active and liking to explore, playing sports as I did because athletics for girls was just then opening up due to Title IX: All these were claimed as peculiarly masculine traits for some definition of what “masculine” needed to mean to fulfill cultural expectations of a “male role.”
At this time I couldn’t get the best paying summer jobs working in the fields moving irrigation pipe or driving tractor because I was a girl, a strong, active, physical girl perfectly capable of the work but a girl nonetheless. In that day girls didn’t do that work, just like they didn’t have those adventures. You see how this trickles down.
I felt like an impostor trying to walk in shoes not meant for me, wearing my desires for adventure and physical activity like stolen garments that I could only provisionally possess. At the same time I carefully refused to learn the skills and engage in most “typical girl” activities. I thought that by rejecting what my culture labeled “girl things” I could prove I was “not-girl” and therefore be allowed to provisionally identify with the preferred and superior “boy” status. Only later did I come to understand that my rejection of “girl things” was a form of negating myself. It was just another way of partaking in the diminishment of women.
One of the peculiarities of the actual space in which I lived was that the forty-five acres, although mostly farmland, had four domiciles: The home—formerly a barn—in which I, my parents, and three siblings lived, always with a dog and usually one or more barn cats. A small apartment attached our house which had once been the milk shed, which was lived in by different people over the years. My father’s parents’ home (always called “the other house”) next door. For a stretch of many years a temporary trailer sat between our house and the other house in which lived a nurse about the same age as my grandparents. When I knew her she was a widow with a grown-up child. This older single woman who had a job, practical wisdom, and a wicked sense of humor was a fixture in my landscape, yet such women weren’t mentioned in the histories or fantasies I read. But there she was. She existed. She was real.
She happened to be friends with my doctor’s nurse, a woman I never knew well but whom I always liked in that distant way a child may like a grown-up whose life seems so removed from her own. Only as an adult did I learn that the nurse I saw for my regular checkups had been a nurse in the European theater during World War II. I never knew this woman had participated in the war in a profound way even though I was always acquainted with the stories of the many male veterans of my parents’ generation. The participation and experience of women in war, in whatever capacity, was not just ignored but set away, papered over; it was another channel lost to view.
My childhood landscapes stretched into the past and also across the ocean. My father grew up in an enclave of Danish-Americans. As a child he went to “Dane School” where he learned the language of his immigrant grandparents. It happened that he was raised as much by his grandmother as by his own parents; his connection to the nineteenth-century struggles they came out of was part of his childhood and so it connected to me. I assumed everyone was surrounded by a net of older relatives whose memories reached into a past they could briefly illuminate. My great-uncle remembered the first time he saw a car. I heard first-hand stories of how people made their way who had very little money and no expectation of more. Their memories made the world they had been part of not so distant from my own because it was part of the story of how mine had come to be. The Depression and World War II were my touchstones as a child not because I was alive then but because these events were central to the lives of my elders.