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Have Pen, Will Travel: The Fiction of Kevin Brockmeier and Kelly Link Written by: Terri Windling (continued) Kelly Link Kelly Link's has been published in McSweeney's, Conjunctions, Asimovs, Century, Realms of Fantasy, The Vintage Book of Amnesia, and The Dark, among other publications, and eleven of her tales have been collected in Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press, 2001). The offerings in this debut collection include two award–winners, The Specialist's Hat and Travels With the Snow Queen. The first is a dark, mesmerizing tale about twin sisters obsessed by death. Link writes: "When she has time to think about it (and now she has all the time in the world to think) Samantha realizes with a small pang that she is now stuck indefinitely between ten and eleven years old....The number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in all, it hasn't been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would have been like. Sharper, like needles maybe. She has chosen to be Dead, instead. She hopes that she's made the right decision. She wonders if her mother would have decided to be Dead, instead of dead, if she could have." Travels With the Snow Queen is a skillful feminist deconstruction of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, and several other fairy tales besides. "At the top of the staircase is a wooden door with a silver keyhole. The dreams pour steadily through the keyhole, and under the bottom of the door, and when you open it, the sweet stink and cloud of dreams are so thick in the Princess's bedroom that you can barely breathe. Some people might mistake the scent of the Princess's dreams for the scent of sex; then again, some people mistake sex for love." Louise's Ghost is the story of the friendship between two women, and of the ghost who appears to one of them. At one point, the ghost goes missing, and Louise scours the house looking for him. "She finds the ghost curled up in her underwear drawer. He lies face down, hands open and loose. He's naked and downy all over like a baby monkey. Louise spits on the floor, feeling relieved. 'In God's name,' she says, 'what do you want?' The ghost doesn't say anything. He lies there, small and hairy and forlorn, face down in her underwear. Maybe he doesn't know what he wants any more than she does." Link's specialty is to take genre expectations and turn them upside–down and inside–out. She does this with the tropes of supernatural fiction in Louise's Ghost, with those of romance fiction in Travels With the Snow Queen, and with those of Nancy–Drew style mysteries in The Girl Detective — a story that ranks as one of the best examples of interstitial fiction I've yet read. "I myself was the girl detective's lover for three happy months. We met every Thursday in a friend's summer cottage beside a small lake. She introduced herself as Pomegranate Buhm. I was besotted with her, her long legs so pale they looked like two slices of moonlight. I loved her size 11 feet, her black hair that always smelled like grapefruit. When we made love, she stuck her chewing gum on the headboard. Her underwear was embroidered with the day of the week. We always met on Thursdays, as I have said, but according to her underwear, we also met on Saturdays, on Wednesdays, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and once, memorably, on a Friday. That Friday, or rather that Thursday, she had a tattoo of a grandfather clock beneath her right breast. I licked it, surreptitiously, but it didn't come off. The previous Thursday (Monday according to her underwear) it had been under her left breast. I think I began to suspect then, although I said nothing and neither did she." Link's themes, like Brockmeier's, center on love and loss, on people who have vanished, and on the various kinds of ghosts that haunt our daily lives. "I like the idea of taking things that are alien and making them seem really very cozy and familiar," she says. "That's something that science fiction can do. It's the way that people can look at pictures of flying saucers and say that looks like a saucer, from under a teacup, something small and domestic. On the other hand, what I like about more realistic fiction, writers like Lorrie Moore, for example, is the way it looks at familiar things and makes them seem so strange. What I hope to do is to mix those up, so that you're constantly feeling comfortable and unsettled at the same time." Link's fiction for children is also worth seeking out, for it is equally unique and utterly charming. Swans, published in A Wolf at the Door (Simon & Schuster, 2000) is a heady reworking of the Wild Swans fairy tale, and The Faery Handbag, published in The Faery Reel (Viking 2004), is the hilarious story of a teenage girl, her grandmother, and an enchanted furry purse from Baldeziwurlekistan. "Baldeziwurlekistan is where Zofia was born, over two hundred years ago. (My grandmother claimed to be over two hundred years old. Or maybe even older. Sometimes she claimed that she'd even met Genghis Khan. He was much shorter than her. I probably don't have time to tell that story.) Baldeziwurlekistan is also an incredibly valuable word in Scrabble points, even though it doesn't exactly fit on the board." Kelly Link is also an anthology editor, and co–publisher of Small Beer Press with her husband Gavin J. Grant. In these roles, she champions the work of other border–crossing writers from a variety of fields. Her recent anthology Trampoline (Small Beer Press, 2003) contains "twenty–four astounding stories" by a mix of genre, mainstream, and interstitial writers, and the Small Beer Press 'zine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, regularly showcases works of cutting–edge, hard–to–categorize fiction by both established and emerging writers. In addition, Link and Grant have recently been named as co–editors, with Ellen Datlow, of the annual Year's Best Fantasy & Horror volumes from St. Martin Press. Link has won the Tiptree Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Stoker Award. Stranger Things Happen was listed as a Best of 2001 title by The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon magazine; and Link's story The Girl Detective inspired a play of the same title, staged by the Invisible Cities theater group in Philadelphia. You can read Laura Miller's interview with Link on the Salon magazine web site, and more information on the author is available at www.kellylink.net. You can read the following stories by Kelly Link on line: Most of My Friends are Two–Thirds Water, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, and Survivor's Ball, (or, the Donner Party). You can hear an audio file of Link reading Catskin on the WNYC web site. Contributor's notes: Terri Windling, is an author, artist, and editor of the online journal Endicott Studio For Mythic Arts |
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