Patricia McKillip  

 

Patricia McKillip’s novels are something of an acquired taste, and they certainly aren’t for everyone! Filled with strong women, complex plots and rich details, novels like “The Heir of Sea and Fire”, “Winter Rose”, and “The Cygnet and the Firebird” are also filled with riddles and a dream-like quality that makes the plots difficult to explain. Patricia’s writing is rich and deep with unexpected moments of terror and beauty, like a medieval tapestry seen by candlelight where the monsters and maidens flicker between shadow and substance with the shifting of the flame.

Patricia’s novels gather together threads of European and Native American myth, old American folk songs, and ancient Scandinavian riddle games played between gods, and weave them into a seamless whole. The grrls that inhabit these novels struggle to overcome their fears and to find the right path, they fight for what they believe in, and they love honestly and with passion. They have mothers, sisters, children, lovers, fathers, friends, pets, phobias, and enemies. They laugh and they love and they fight and the cry and above all, they are real. These are grrls who are willing to put themselves out there and try, no matter what.

While her characters might feel like your best friend, the worlds they live in may take some getting used to. Easily as complex as the world that waits outside your own door, Patricia’s worlds challenge you to explore less familiar paths. Her plots twist and weave and the threads of character, reader, author, and universe occasionally tangle into a confusing new whole. Since she draws from a wide variety of mythic and musical sources, you might find a plot to be strangely familiar, realizing only at the end that “The Tower at Stony Wood” is really a retelling of the poem “The Lady of Shallot” for example (a poem set to music by Loreena McKennit, if you’re interested).

In a quote from Faces of Fantasy by Patti Perret, Patricia had this to say about her own writing;

“I write fantasy because it's there...Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored. Making it tell the same tale over and over again makes it thin and whining; its scales begin to fall off; its fiery breath becomes a trickle of smoke. It is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent; there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't be transformed into food for the imagination. It must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier. Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art. Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.”

Dreaming awake is as good a description as any I’ve heard. Patricia’s novels steal away with reality, leaving a trail of autumn leaves and half remembered riddles, a shadow of candlelight and the scent of roses, a memory of tomorrows to come. You might not like what you find at the center of the labyrinth, and you might not come back for seconds, but you should give Patricia McKillip’s golden-eyed monster a chance to seduce you.

 

Leslie Clay grrl-e-grrl.com contributor