I have been obsessed with Arthuriana since I was a child and my father, who had some peculiar ideas about baby’s first King Arthur, gave me Steinbeck’s Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. I loved Morgan le Fay—she was described in Malory as a “clerk of necromancy” which I took to mean she worked at some kind of magical grocery store, packing bags of spells and potions. Later, I found out clerk meant cleric, and my image of her changed to a magical secretary. Morgan was the hero of my childhood. When I grew to be a teenager, my circle of friends and I not only obsessed together, but wrote an Arthurian play and, when it was performed, we played the parts we had always assigned to ourselves in our fey afternoons in the California woods It’s not hard to guess who I was. It is to that circle that the book was eventually dedicated.
And yet when I came to write about King Arthur, it was in the 2000s, when Morgan and her sisters had been done to death in the fantasy of Arthuriana market. And really, no one writes about Arthur himself—it’s always his friends that steal the show. I felt I could say little more about her, other than my grocery-girl or my secretary. I was moved instead to the minor knights, and the idea of the Otherworld all Arthurian knights must eventually travel into as California. California, where I moved when I was thirteen, has always seemed to me a kind of Fairyland, a desert of illusion, full of the fey and the cruel as well as the kind. I couldn’t let go of that connection, and this book, which took as long to write as books of mine three times the size, came out of that. Each chapter is a connection between the modern and the ancient, and the knight is the path between them, with it’s Kay as a Turing machine or drunken Galahad. It is a work full of both my youthful not even knowing what rules to break, just rushing pel-mel at literature like Chung Li in the old Streetfighter game, her legs on fire, and my graduate study in medievalism. If you are a medievalist, well, you’re welcome—this is a book full of the tiny and irrelevant and beautiful and mad things we know. If not, I hope it will lead you to our little fortress.
It was also my first work to deal primarily with masculinity and masculine POVs, something that excited and worried me—would I get it right, so many do not, when dealing with the opposite gender. I hope I have done well by that, and most especially by the stories that have possessed me since I was a girl.
I sit by my long window in Maine and a storm slowly clears outside. Blue sky peeks through the deep forest just outside my house, the old hoary New England forest that might be full of anything, maidens or monsters or knights. Spatters of rain start to dry on the glass, and my chickens crow for the sunshine.
There is a kind of map that connects these four novels, a ley line connecting Rhode Island to Japan to Ohio to California and finally to Maine. A map with strange place names and stranger roads, perhaps the kind of map a kid draws when they don’t know how to stay in the lines, perhaps the kind men drew a thousand years ago, when the difference between the real and the unreal seemed less important. It is a map of my heart, a heart in four chambers.