Photos by Ileah Lutz of Propel the Moon Photography

I love many things about fantasy films—the dazzling costumes, otherworldly beauty, and pristine nature. Tall trees and mountains that disappear above ocean mist. There’s a stark contrast between fairy-tale forests and the dusty arroyos and grassy plains of my eastern New Mexico hometown. However, one state further west looks the very picture of fantasy fiction. When I think of Oregon and its verdigris trails of moss, it overtakes every stone and rooted path in my mind. Just the very thought of its rainy days gives me a sense of melancholic longing. Then recently, I received an invitation to meet with creatures who dance in moonbeams and run with wolves. It was a chance to join a heavenly host of adventurers whose odyssey began in the pages of tomes.

Novel Escapes is an event-production company in Portland that creates bookish escapes for curious daydreamers and draws vivacious readers to their productions like a moth to a flame. This fall, I will be an honored guest.

Anastasia P. founded Novel Escapes in 2024 to create high-quality, whimsical events that reflected her love for books as well as her community. She partnered with author A.B. Daniels-Annachi, who shared her passion for literature and offered his experience with publishing and organizing. The team also includes newcomers Ashley B. and Bri H., who create community engagement opportunities like Discord role-playing and social media activations.

The beckoning light that Novel Escapes cultivates is reflected in the faces of the people who attend each event. “I really think that there’s something about making space for diverse voices, for hiring a diverse cast,” Daniels-Annachi says when discussing what makes their work so special. Safe spaces are defined as environments that protect against harassment, discrimination, criticism, and other emotional harm. It is this very promise of comfort and security that draws in guests from all walks of life. Like delicate threads woven together, each storytelling guest becomes part of a rich tapestry and binds their unique experiences. When somebody attends one of the events, “they’re going to see that we’re really putting effort into making sure everyone feels represented,” Anastasia emphasizes. As a plus-size woman myself, I was delighted to see a variety of body sizes, skin colors, and talents included in their cast of goddesses and gods for their Pomegranates and Styx event last winter.

Because there truly is immense wonder in the rain-soaked forests of Oregon, there are animal familiars who contribute to the delicate fibers that Novel Escapes creates. Saaya and Echo are two wolfdogs known as Of Wolf and Shadow on Instagram. Their handler and photographer Jade found an opportunity to introduce fantasy lovers to wolfdogs and the challenges their wolf ancestors currently face. Anastasia recalls Jade saying, “I see so many people who would take a photo with a wolf or read a story about a wolf but have no clue about any of the environmental stuff or know that wolves need saving.” Through each photo, the subjects and curious observers become just a little more informed about the conservation of wolf territory and the forest sentinels themselves.

It’s safe to say I accepted Anastasia and Daniels-Annachi’s invitation and was honored to experience their work firsthand through our collaboration last spring for Black Fae Day, a celebration of Black fantasy enthusiasts and culture. The craft of bringing fantasy to this mundane life sometimes requires balancing advocacy with respite. And no doubt, much sacrifice is required. But as delicate as the result may be, the experience Novel Escapes creates leaves an indelible mark on the hearts of all their patrons.

If you’d like to experience the magic for yourself, their next seasonal event is Faerie Revelry—A Bookish Retreat. Experience a cozy weekend getaway with role-playing, meals prepared by an award-winning chef, book talks with vending fantasy authors, and the wilderness of Brasada Ranch, August 22 to 24. Visit their website for more information: novelescapesllc.com/faerie-revelry.

Visit Jasmine La Fleur online at blackfaeday.com. You can hear more about Novel Escapes and other magical guests on her podcast, Faebies and Friends, available on Apple Music, Amazon Music, iHeart, and Spotify.

My husband and I live in a 125-year-old farmhouse where the land has been producing one major crop these days: Fungus. It is thriving. We have trails of wide- capped parasols, shingled colonies of turkey tails and frilly oyster mushrooms, and high up in one tree, a shaggy, slow-growing lion’s mane that we occasionally harvest because eating it is good for the brain. When we first experienced this bounty, I was dismayed to think that these gorgeous, spongy, odd little (or big) miracles are growing from places where our beloved trees are decaying. I’m just glad that they’re there.

Truth is, this hasn’t been a great couple of years for the trees in our neighborhood, as wind or human so-called developers have knocked them down. But it has been a rich and beautiful time for fungus. Some of the magnolias are said to have stood for more than 250 years, and they’re fine, but the line of elms and maples planted along the drive when the house was new have mostly lived out their natural lives, and individual trees have been dying out too. But the underground fungal web that fruits into mushrooms has been here for … who knows how long? And it is having a grand time helping the trees (and itself).

One particular reason to celebrate fungi is their ability to cooperate with other organisms, most especially Kingdom Plantae. Fungus enables a marvelous system of communication within the plant world, and scientists are only just starting to understand how it all works together. The truth is about as bizarre as an episode in one of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, in which what seems to be completely fantastical breaks down into a logic that not only makes sense but also inspires joy and hope—and reveals an even greater, even more surprising web of sentience, the ability to feel and to make certain connections.

In fact, that’s a good place to start—with Alice. She knows the underground world pretty well.

“Who Are You?”: On Charismatic Species

Without fungus, life on Earth would be unrecognizable. It is all around us (and on us and in us); we just don’t always know how to see it.

That’s why every kingdom needs a poster child, a charismatic citizen that lures others in and makes them care. The fungus kingdom is not short on that kind of rock star, because mushrooms are glamorous. We take their pictures; we tell their stories. We want to be around them, and we beg them to reveal themselves. We revere them as a symbol of spiritual growth.

So let’s talk for a moment about the most famous mushroom in the history of mushrooms, one of the stars of every version of Alice in Wonderland that has manifested since the book was first published in 1865: that strange fungus upon which a blue Caterpillar sits smoking a hookah. (Rather scandalous, I’ve always thought: Shouldn’t we know what’s in that hookah?) Alice stands up on tiptoes to get a good look, and Chapter 5, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” begins:

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.

Maybe not for Alice, but “Who are you?” (emphasis on both words) had been quite the catchphrase in London around 1841 and after—a way of saying hello in a tavern or, I would guess, a hookah lounge.

Who—or what—is Alice, and how does she fit into this strange world? The plot of Wonderland keeps asking how to classify Alice, physically as well as figuratively. The underground world varies confusingly in scale, and she is constantly caught between returning to her old self and adapting to fit each new setting. Along the way, mistakes are made. Her head might

shoot suddenly through a treetop, or she might nearly drown in a sea of her own tears. This is the adolescent condition; it’s also the human condition: looking for your place amid a messy set of deceptive signals and slippery language, growing, shrinking, “saying what you mean” vs. “meaning what you say,” to borrow from a famous conversation between Alice and the March Hare.

There’s a parallel question in Wonderland for all of us: How do we define the objects and creatures we encounter? Or rather, how do we recognize them for what they are, beyond our own preconceived ideas? That mushroom, for example … It might not be what you’ve always thought it was.

Scientists are only starting to untangle the fungus puzzle—how it lives, where it lives, and even what it is. Our word mushroom seems to derive from the medieval French mousseron, which refers to moss. For most of scientific history, fungus was part of the plant kingdom. But then researchers started to scratch their heads: Fungus does not photosynthesize and turn light into nutrients, as plants do. Its cells are made of chitin, like insects’ and crustaceans’ exoskeletons (which are very close to human hair). It is a heterotroph, meaning it cannot produce its own food; to absorb nutrients, it takes in molecules of other organisms—a fancy way of saying it eats basically the way animals do. Some species (like the turkey tails on our fallen logs) secrete digestive enzymes to hurry the process along.

So since 1968, we have recognized Kingdom Fungi. Long may it flourish!

And keep in mind that as we study it, it might be studying us. In The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, author Zoë Schlanger proves that the animal brain is only one form of “mind,” only one way to think of intelligence, memory, decision-making, and sentience. We need to expand our idea of intelligence to embrace other kingdoms.

Because mushrooms might be smart.

Featured Image:
From the British Library archive / Bridgeman Images
The Night-Blowing Cereus (1807), by Robert Dunkarton

 

When we saw that New York Times best-selling writer Leigh Ann Henion had a new book coming out this fall about nighttime and all its hidden, glorious enchantments—enchantments fit for an autumn faerie queen, no less, who might even reign in our own backyards—we knew we had to ask her more about it. Night Magic is a celebration of the dark and what goes on in it, “from blooming moon gardens to nocturnal salamanders, from glowing foxfire [to] synchronous fireflies that blink in unison like an orchestra of light.” She forgot long-haired autumnal faerie queens consorting in the deep wood with bats and moths and the occasional deep-forest cake made from black velvet, mushrooms, and moss … but yes, please! We had the following exchange by email and the occasional carrier bat and hawk moth.

Enchanted Living: Can you tell us why you wrote a book called Night Magic? What did you hope to make people see about the night specifically that’s magical?

Leigh Ann Henion: The idea for this book was delivered on firefly wings. After I wrote a magazine article about synchronous fireflies, many readers reached out to let me know that they’d started turning off their porch lights more often. I was amazed that my story had inspired real-world action that led to reduced light pollution, which is a threat to fireflies and a lot of other beings. I was inspired to spend the next few years in the company of owls, moths, salamanders, and other nocturnal creatures to explore natural darkness in an age of increasing artificial light. As I say in the book, I think a loss of habitat leads to a loss of magic—and night is a habitat that’s often underappreciated.

We’ve somehow come to think of it as less important than periods of daylight. But darkness is crucial for life on Earth, and I’ve tried to help recenter darkness— not only as important for the survival of wildlife and ecosystems but also as a valuable part of the human experience.

EL: How might you advise our readers to approach the natural world at night? How should they start to look differently at what inhabits it?

LAH: Experiencing night can sometimes simply mean turning off your own porch lights to sit quietly in observation. It’s increasingly rare to be without some light source—a phone screen or a flashlight, for example. Even when you set out to pointedly experience darkness, it can be hard to find pockets of it. But even in areas of high light pollution, we can often find ways to create tiny pockets of darkness in our own yards, neighborhoods, and communities.

Regionally, there are often unique ways to engage with night. On the West Coast, there are social media groups for people to report bioluminescent waves in the Pacific so that others might catch sight of them. In other regions, there are festivals that celebrate bats and moths to give people a chance to appreciate oft-elusive nocturnal animals. For people nervous about exploring darkness, it can be helpful to find parks and outdoor centers that offer guided night walks to become more comfortable with wandering at night.

EL: Once we create and become accustomed to pockets of dark, what might we look for then?

LAH: I think at first it’s best not to look for anything! Just allow yourself to rest in a space of reduced energy. We tend to catch motion out of the corner of our eyes at night. So it’s helpful to be mindful of that. And to see the glow of foxfire, it’s best to move slowly if you’re taking a night hike. If you find a rich pocket of darkness, you can even just sit still. If you engage with all your senses, unexpected things will likely be revealed.

EL: What are some of the more enchanted creatures and special flora you’ve encountered that flourish in the night?

LAH: If I had to choose one species in Night Magic that seems particularly enchanted, I’d probably settle on blue ghost fireflies. They’re found in various parts of Appalachia, where I live, and I know some extremely stoic people who have been brought to tears by their first sighting of the species. They’re like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Blue ghosts appear neon blue, and they don’t blink like many common species. They stay lit for a long time, so you can track their blue-streaking movements through the forests where they reside. They’re as close to fairies as anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve heard people say that they evoke stories of will-o’-the-wisps, the atmospheric ghost lights of folklore. I think it’s almost impossible to witness a large group of them without being moved by the sheer wonder of the experience.

EL: The theme of this issue is Autumn Queens, and a central idea is an image of a faerie queen, perhaps a bit older than Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’s in an autumn forest at night, surrounded by moths and bats and all that autumnal abundance, under a full hunter’s moon … I wonder if you might fill out that image with what you know of nighttime and autumn and magic.

LAH: In autumn, trees pull nutrients from leaves back into their cores to fortify for winter. Animals burrow. I start yearning for tea and blankets and hearth fires. It’s all part of a natural cycle. And longer nights are key in the shift. I’ve always understood that the gorgeous reds and yellows of autumnal leaves had something to do with cooling temperatures, but until researching Night Magic, I had never realized that longer nights play a role in telling photosensitive trees that it’s time to start their process of retreat. Now that I do, it’s hard not to think of the shortening days as a precursor to that arboreal magic. The varied colors of fall are made possible by gathering darkness. It’s fantastic!

And even though fireflies are associated with summer, one of the most amazing things I learned about fireflies early in my research is that they live underground for years before they rise with their own light. We see them only toward the very end of their lives. But in the stages when they’re underground, they continue to glow. So even when I can’t see them in the depths of fall and winter, I now know that I’m still surrounded by their living light. And bioluminescent foxfire—the glow of mushrooms that makes fallen branches look like magic wands—often peaks when cooler temperatures arrive.

Fall eases us into the periods of darkness that are required for us to thrive, just like fireflies. When I started to think of darkness as a place that fosters abundant life, it became easier to loosen my grip on summer and welcome fall as a place of respite.

EL: In your section on autumn, you talk about night-blooming flowers (including the night-blooming cereus), and the bird-size hawk moths that pollinate (some of) them. Can you talk more about these blooms and their seductive powers?

LAH: Before I started contemplating Night Magic, I’d never considered that just as butterflies have whole landscapes of flowers, moths have entire nocturnal ones. Once I realized this, it seemed ridiculously obvious. Still, I’d always overlooked it! There are plenty of books about tending butterfly gardens, yet not all that many talk about moth gardens. Where I live, common primrose is a favorite of hawk moths, which are the size of hummingbirds. And a lot of moth species have favorite plants they depend on as caterpillars.

Persimmon trees, for example, are favorites of luna moths. In certain regions, when you plant native persimmon trees, you’re basically summoning luna moths, clear as a siren call! A lot of night bloomers are nondescript in daylight, but they come alive at night, often blooming rapidly enough that watching is like observing a flower bloom over time-lapse, only you can see them unfurl in real time within minutes. It’s glorious! Night bloomers tend to have strong scents, calling to the giant, gorgeous moths they’ve co-evolved with. Realizing that planting certain species or letting wildflowers grow feral plays a role in where moths congregate—that is a powerful reminder that we’re often in conversation with nocturnal wildlife without realizing it.

EL: The way you describe in your book the giant moths that congregate around moonflowers sounds almost terrifying. When I first saw a luna moth and didn’t know what it was, I admit to being equal parts scared and awestruck. Did you have a response like that to the moths or any of the other creatures you’ve encountered?

LAH: I was in awe of those moths, but I suppose awe can be a mingling of wonder and terror! Of all the creatures I encountered, I think bats made me the most nervous, especially in the beginning. Spending time with biologists and finding ways to have responsible interactions with bats ultimately helped me appreciate them in new ways. Bats, like moths, can be disrupted by the presence of artificial light, which is where humans often encounter them. But in darkness, when they are given the space to do their own thing, encountering them can be marvelous.

EL: How do you feel now when you take a nighttime walk in the wood? What do you see that you didn’t before?

LAH: Before I wrote Night Magic, I had never really walked around at night without light sources for sustained periods of time. When I started exploring after dark, I was surprisingly nervous. Now that I’ve acclimated to some degree, I feel a sense of serenity in the dark. I have had experiences that have helped me understand that sometimes darkness can be an avenue of escape. That’s been very empowering. Now that I am more comfortable with darkness, I can seek shelter in shadows. They aren’t just the domain of potentially frightening things; they’re part of my own natural habitat. And I’m alert to wonders now, whereas before, when I sequestered myself indoors after dusk, I didn’t see or hear or feel much about the night world at all.

EL: Has researching and writing this book changed your life?

LAH: Absolutely. I have come to understand that before exploring night, I only half-knew my own yard and neighborhood. Embracing darkness has literally expanded my world.

EL: Do the moon and stars tie into the magic of the night flora and fauna you’ve encountered?

LAH: When people talk about the wonders of night, they often focus on the moon and stars. But there are living marvels all around us after sunset—and those creatures have their own fantastic relationships to the cosmos. Birds use celestial clues to navigate. It’s thought that carnivorous glowworms—which look like stars scattered on the ground—might be mimicking stars to lure other insects into their silken webs. Large mammals are often more mobile during nights of high illumination. Artificial light tends to be monotone—a complete nocturnal washout—but natural darkness ebbs and flows with reflective moonlight, and those tides have a beauty all their own.

EL: Is there anything more that you hope to share with readers about your book?

LAH: In the process of working on this book, I was often so wowed by discoveries that I had the impulse to reach out to friends immediately because I couldn’t wait to share. As readers ramble through night seasons with me, I hope that at least once they’ll come across something that makes them think, What? I’ve got to tell someone about this!

EL: What natural wonders will you be turning to next?

LAH: A few days ago, I was making breakfast when I saw a giant white bird in a tree downhill from my house. I mean, it was big. I’d just woken up, so it was almost as if I’d dreamed it. When I got a closer look, I couldn’t believe it. They’re not usually spotted on the mountain where I live, but it was a great egret. I’m used to seeing blue herons—and great egrets look very similar in stature—but there was no doubt that this was a bird I’d never seen before. I was in awe even before it took off, with a wingspan that seemed as wide as my arms outstretched. All this to say, I’m not sure what I’ll be turning to next, but I’m trying to stay alert to the natural wonders that turn up unexpectedly!

EL: Can you talk about how you stay enchanted in your everyday life?

LAH: I stay enchanted by trying as much as I can to follow my curiosity. I think enchantment requires an openness to mystery. Years ago, I thought that learning too much about something might erase some of its charm, but the older I get, the more I believe that learning about the nuances of starlight or glowworms or night-blooming flowers leads only to more magic, because when you find answers, they generate more questions. And the more you learn about what humans have discovered, the more you realize how much we still don’t know. To me, staying enchanted means continually chasing and embracing the unknown.

EL: Finally, how often did you think of fairies and other magical creatures as you explored the world at night?

LAH: There has been some limited research that indicates that spending time in natural darkness—with limited point- source illumination—has the capacity to expand humans’ imaginations. One study found that people were more likely to turn to supernatural explanations when answering questions in low-light situations. I think that’s fascinating. When the barrage of the modern world is lessened, it might give us the capacity to think more figuratively, as our ancestors did, pre-electricity. It’s amazing to think that exploring the night world might make us more open to imagining beyond the mundane, and I was often reminded of mythology and folklore and fairy tales in the field. I’ve spent years wandering around with blue ghost fireflies, among flowers that bloom at dusk, and forests full of fungi that glows on the ground like the star stickers that once covered the ceiling of my childhood bedroom. At this point, it’s hard to think of the entire night world as it exists just beyond my backdoor as anything short of magical.

This autumn, find Night Magic, published by Algonquin Books, wherever books are sold. Learn more about Leigh Ann Henion at leighannhenion.com.

If any Pre-Raphaelite woman ever became the image that she portrayed, it was Jane Burden Morris. Although she was a stable hand’s daughter from the (relatively) mean streets of Oxford, Jane made such a remarkable transformation into art royalty that it allegedly inspired the OG Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Other models appeared as fallen women in Pre- Raphaelite art; Jane almost immediately ascended to her throne and never fell. She truly was the Pre-Raphaelite Queen.

When novelist Henry James met Jane in the late 1860s, he wrote a vivid account of her for his sister: “a tall lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff … an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity. It’s hard to say … whether she’s an original or a copy. In either case she is a wonder.” It’s not hard to see that the young Henry was in awe of this stately and, more to the point, silent woman (silent because, as he later admits, she had a toothache), and he imbues her with everything he knows of the Pre-Raphaelite vision of her. George Bernard Shaw, onetime suitor of Jane’s daughter May, likewise projected a persona onto Jane, concluding that she was “the silentest woman I have ever met. She did not take much notice of anyone.” Jane’s ability to remain silent in company drew people to fill in blanks, and they used the only evidence of her they felt they could: paintings of her.

The Pre-Raphaelites’ discovery of Jane was intimately tied to her future role as a queen in their work. When Dante Gabriel Rossetti came across her at a theater in Oxford in 1857, he begged her to pose for him and his friends, who were painting murals around the ceiling of the Oxford Union rooms in the colleges (now a library). Jane, with her towering height and halo of black crimped hair, was unlike the small, neat ideal of Victorian feminine beauty, but her imposing presence made her a striking choice for the female lead in their Arthurian vision. In Rossetti’s contribution to one mural, Jane, as a vision of Queen Guinevere, appears in the dreams of Lancelot as a symbol of his sins, preventing him from finding the Holy Grail. Despite the couple’s apparent romance, Rossetti was already avoiding two other women whom he had been romancing and left Jane high and dry as well. This was when Rossetti’s best friend, the shy, retiring, and very rich William Morris, asked to paint Jane, again as a queen.

I’m not saying the girl got typecast—but for her second modeling job, not only was Jane a queen, she was again a queen with fidelity problems. Morris, in a rather shy attempt to romance this stately lass, chose to portray her as the cheating wife of King Mark, La Belle Iseult. Such was his bashfulness, he apparently wrote on the back of the canvas, “I cannot paint you, but I love you.” The inscription renders the subject matter even more puzzling, as he cements his lady love’s persona as the beautiful cheater, the ruination of men. Jane’s repeated portrayal as a queen crowned with infidelity was an unsettling portent of what was to follow.

What is surprising is that Jane either hadn’t noticed the meaning of the roles she was playing for these men or opted to lean into them. After all, had she not risen from being a stable hand’s daughter to leading an enviable lifestyle among the painting elite? In 1860, the year after her marriage to William Morris, the couple collaborated on a wool-thread- on-linen embroidery of the figure of Guinevere, again based on Jane, and worked by them both. Why the Morrises wished to court disaster in a tragic-romantic manner is anyone’s guess, but possibly the answer lies in Morris’s 1858 poem The Defence of Guenevere. Morris imagines a time when Guinevere is charged with adultery, punishable by burning, and she tells her story, her life and loves, her dreary marriage and the rebirth through love for Lancelot. I can see why he would idolize Jane as his perfect woman, his Guinevere, but in marrying her the next year (1859), he became her Arthur—hardly the recipe for a happy marriage.

As a celebration of the marriage of William Morris to Jane, Rossetti painted the pair as Saint George and Princess Sabra in a beautiful 1862 watercolor. As Saint George, William washes the dragon off his hands while watching the villagers carry bits of the slain monster around outside. The grateful, freshly rescued princess kneels, holding up a water bowl and kissing his hands, which is both touching and unhygienic. This is Jane’s brief respite from the series of cheating queens and was one of the few instances where Jane and William appeared together in a painting. Despite being one of the most authentic images of affection, neither George nor Sabra look at each other, and the marked difference in their positions hints at an imbalance in the power dynamic between the pair. Viewing this painting in that light is interesting, particularly in contrast to sketches Rossetti made; in those, William often trails behind his stately bride, trying to make her happy in a bumbling, humorous manner while she remains stoic and unreachable.

If Jane as Sabra can be written off as Rossetti’s brief moment of generosity toward his friends, his projected series Twelve Coins for One Queen can be seen as a more brutally honest expression of how he came to think of his best friend’s wife. By the late 1860s, Rossetti had developed a morbid fixation on Jane. She became a regal, threatening figure looming out of darkness, haunting his vision in works such as Proserpine (1874), Astarte Syriaca (1876-77), and Mnemosyne (1881). Rossetti’s queen was his wife’s best friend, and an emotional affair between them became a keynote in both their lives. Due to Rossetti’s physical and mental illnesses, the Twelve Coins project—intended to comprise twelve portraits, each with an accompanying poem—was never realized. Only one of the portraits exists, Perlascura (1871), and it is one of the most beautiful and delicate portraits ever done of Jane. The medium is pastels, the composition featuring her shoulders bare and her hair shining. All that is missing is a crown.

The deaths of Rossetti in 1882 and William Morris in 1896 might have meant that Jane’s royal days were over. Yet one more artist came to crown this Pre-Raphaelite queen, but with an interpretation far different from that of the men who had loved her. In Evelyn De Morgan’s 1904-7 painting The Hourglass, Jane is once more enthroned, but she is watching her time coming to an end. Now older, gaunt, and seemingly exhausted, she sits in her finery, watching the sands of an hourglass trickle away. Behind her are medieval tapestries not unlike those she worked on with her husband, and outside she is serenaded by a trumpeting figure of Life. But the rose at her feet has seen better days, and so has she. As her fingers rest on the eponymous hourglass, you wonder if she’s trying to summon the strength to turn it back over and relive those glory days once more—but it is pointless. We all get only one turn of time, and her sand is running out.

Following the death of her husband, Jane lived on in solitude at Kelmscott in Oxfordshire. Although she lived in near obscurity, it was still considered a great honor for undergraduates at Oxford to be brought to meet her in her old age, as if they were being presented at some mythical court.

When Jane died in 1914, her obituaries remembered her as a distinguished beauty and discussed how, with her death, the last link to Pre-Raphaelitism had been broken. The latter claim is indicative of how entirely Jane and her image ruled the idea of Pre-Raphaelitism; models and artists like Annie Miller and Marie Spartali Stillman lived on until the 1920s, but it was Jane’s death that was seen as the official end of the era.

The role of queen bookended Jane’s life, from a tempted, remorseless Guinevere to De Morgan’s mournful, lonely woman watching her time trickle away—a reflection of how women are often seen still. When we’re young and beautiful, we’re accused of inspiring desire in others, but if we age, we’re decried for allowing that lust to die. In many ways, De Morgan’s painting typifies that struggle for women and the way our power rises and then counts down, from our birth to our last desirable day, when we might as well cease to exist. The riches that surround De Morgan’s queen mean nothing, as they’re not where a woman’s power resides.

Jane’s face had raised her from humbleness to wealth, from obscurity to worship. In Shaw’s Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle’s transformation from flower seller to lady is so complete that Professor Higgins’s former pupil Nepommuck suspects she’s of “the blood royal.” Likewise, in the art she inspired, as well as in the many accounts from admirers and her obituaries, Jane’s humble origins have been overlooked and even concealed. “Queen Jane” reigned from her throne, seeking love from unreliable men with the blessing of her king until the last grain of golden sand fell.

But before we feel too sorry for her, remember that of all her peers raised from working-class origins, she had the most comfortable life. She has also likely had the most books and exhibitions dedicated to her and her work. Her homes are preserved for pilgrims to pay homage. There is no doubt that even in death, Jane still reigns.

Medb, the queen of Ireland’s western province of Connacht, and her husband,

Ailill, are in bed, having a bit of pillow talk. Perhaps a long day has ended, and the stars are the only light in their Iron Age chambers. Perhaps she and her consort have been consorting, and the mood is convivial at first. Long married, they have a history of shared joys and unresolved grudges.

The conversation takes a turn early on when the king muses about how much better off Medb became on the day she married such a wealthy man as himself. “I was well enough without you,” she replies. And the temperature in the bedroom begins to rise. Back

and forth they go, tallying up the goods each brought to the marriage, counting their coins and jewels, their wardrobes, the men who work for each, and all the land and livestock, every pig and sheep.

They finally inventory their cattle. The best of the herd is a prized white-horned bull, Finnbennach, who was born of one of Medb’s cows but refused to be led by a woman and wandered over into Ailill’s pasture.

The queen sends for her herald and asks if there’s a better bull to be had in all of Ireland. “I know where to find such a bull and better,” he says. “In the province of Ulster, in the territory of Cuailnge. Donn Cuailnge is the bull’s name, the Brown Bull of Cooley.” And so Medb sends a message to Ulster, asking for the loan of this brown bull to sire a new calf from her herd, thus one-upping her husband.

The Ulsterman refuses her request outright, so she resolves on the spot to steal the prize stud. She raises a great army, as set down in the 12th century Irish saga The Cattle Raid on Cooley, which pits Medb’s forces against the larger-than-life warrior hero Cúchullain, the Hound of Ulster.

Who can resist such a bold and determined queen?

Not I. What a woman. I have four sisters, a mother, a wife, and three daughters. Each more fierce and strong-willed than the next. Queens they are, not to be trifled with.

Medb’s story, as told in the Táin Bó Cuailigne (to give the Irish title), was the inspiration for my novel The Girl in the Bog. What if, I asked myself, a pair of clueless farmers are digging for turf and uncover a body preserved by the peat and that body turns out to be one of the women from the Táin?

One woman had stood up to the queen: a poet, gifted with the light of foresight, who tried to warn Medb and her army of thousands not to do battle with the Hound of Ulster. This seer, Fedelm, had a vision of defeat and annihilation colored “crimson and red.”What if, freed from the bog two thousand years later, Fedelm sets the conflict awhirl again? What if her resurrection also releases Medb and Cúchullain from the ancient myth? And in addition to seeking the bull, they’re both looking for the poet?

Of course, these heroes find themselves in a whole new modern Ireland. Oh, the fairies are still hiding in their fairy circles and a banshee still keens and foretells death (when she isn’t watching old cowboy movies on TV). But … befriending Fedelm are three red-headed teenagers who long to become witches and an American archaeologist who gets tied up in the plot—which now includes an episode in which she herself is convinced to play the queen. Cúchullain and his charioteer get sidetracked playing games of chance with the farmers, and Medb and Ailill bring a certain screwball comedy as they try to understand how to work a smartphone or discover the magic in a pair of eyeglasses. Another character is language itself, the interplay of Irish and English, the aimless ways we stray from a subject, and how poetry sometimes glistens atop waves of blather.

A lifelong love of Irish myth and folklore prompted the telling of this tale, but the key to its construction is the triskelion, the triad of interlocking spirals, or the Celtic knot, circling and weaving back on itself. As Fedelm might put it, “Three is a lucky number, although three times three can be better, and three times three times three the best of all. Even these so-called Christians knew as much. Wasn’t it St. Patrick himself who explained the concept of the Trinity, father, son, and holy ghost, three gods in one, by the simile of a three-leafed shamrock?

Three is also the best way out of a yes-and-no situation. The alternative between this and that. The third color between green and blue. Third man between you and the other fella. A charm, the third time.”

Three stories for the price of one.

Spring has its freshness and promise, summer gets all that lush light, and winter brings cozy idle hours—but autumn is really the most creative season. As the natural world’s showy stars (roses, larkspur, la-di-da) shed their blossoms, the air becomes crisp and brisk, driving out summertime languor. Trees flame with color; new mushrooms pop up among the roots. So we shed our old ideas and let new ones, long percolating, leap to the forefront. We’re filled with ideas for poems, plays, paintings, and recipes. We dive into our projects with renewed purpose.

Our minds can’t help but turn to longtime Romantic crushes Emily Brontë and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who embraced the season with all they had. In her poem “Fall, Leaves, Fall,” an atypically joyful Brontë gushes that “Every leaf speaks bliss to me.” Percy B. felt the same way, and his “Ode to the West Wind” of 1819 is an anthem for the season of creativity:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing […] Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

What if, indeed? Has anyone ever loved our Percy less for thinning a little? We honor him for daring to be the wind, for commanding it: “Be thou me, impetuous one!” That cleansing wind blows away old thoughts and habits; a purer poet sings the season. Who has not recited these lines while walking through a stiff breeze?

Well, now you will. Because this is the season for embracing the creative spirit with a full heart, for venturing with it into the wind and the rain and especially the woods. Most especially the woods at night, when we join bats and moths and other creatures that rustle and flit through dark corners of the mind. This is the season for daring a little or a lot, adding our own music to the symphony that is always playing around us.

The night and the forest are beckoning. Step inside.

The Darkness

And turn off your flashlight, because tonight is going to change how you see.

The forest crepitates in an almost perfect darkness. Drop a city dweller into it and she’s completely disoriented. Eyes used to the bright lights see nothing but black—which is terrifying at first, for how can you tell what’s lying in wait to come rushing toward you? The fragments of moon and stars that shine through the branches don’t help. So you dip into the old magic and adapt an Irish cairn, or protection incantation, to your favorite guiding spirit:

Be thou a bright flame before me, Be to me a guiding star above,
Be to me a smooth path below, Today, tonight, and forever.

But just wait; the forest is working its magic, and your senses are already sharper. First breathe in that earthy, peat-scented darkness and its notes of blackberry, gooseberry, and spruce. Perhaps you’re near some lingering summer flowers that release their aromas in darkness rather than sunlight: giant angel trumpets blaring the headiest scent on the planet, full of longing; tiny white phlox that smell of vanilla and almond; or a rainbow of night-scented stock whispering a delicate sweetness to charm as your skirt brushes past.

Let those layers wind around you. You’ll hear more too, from the rustle of voles and beetles among the leaves to the feathery whisper of a sphinx moth’s wings in flight or the crisp susurration of a great horned owl. October is owls’ hooting month, as they stake claims to territory before mating season; that low, pure note sometimes drowns out the high screech of a big-eared bat as it uses sound waves to navigate among bare branches rattling in that wild westerly wind. Bats have very good eyesight, by the way, as long as they are in low light; the phrase “blind as a bat” is an injustice.

When you open your eyes, you’ll find your vision has begun to adjust too. Your perception of absolute darkness is shifting. You see nuances of color, shades of gray and varied blacks. At night our eyes perceive colors in shades tending toward blue … except red. What’s red in the sunlight becomes deepest black to us in the darkness, so your favorite rosebush has just gone goth. Smelling as sweet as by any other name, of course.

You watch that bat flying jerkily overhead and think of D.H. Lawrence, who described a bat in flight as

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop …
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight …
Its sinewy wings stitch the night together.

Everything will become even clearer in the next twenty to forty-five minutes. That’s how long it takes to achieve full night vision, when your eyes are ten thousand to a million times more sensitive than they are in daylight. Details emerge as the grays continue to refine: the rough puzzle pieces of spruce and pine bark, the molting sycamore turning white for the winter.

Darkness moves against darkness when a fox lopes by (red by day, black by night vision) or that bat flits down to snap its jaws on the flies that have maddened you all day.

A gray-white opossum lumbering along seems shockingly bright, as she opens her absurdly pointy jaw and shows every one of her fifty sharp teeth. She does that by reflex; she would never wish you ill. She is only foraging for beetles and any last fruits of the season. Her sole defense from a potential predator is to hiss a little, then fall into a faint. She might even exude the odor of a dead animal for a few hours. She will respond well to kindness, so leave her a grape (opossums love grapes!) and walk on. Later, you may write a poem or paint a portrait for her.

Of Moth and Metaphor

The night air is alive with creatures in flight—autumn’s winged muses.

You can take a page from the book of another genius, Sylvia Plath—whose first name, in fact, means “of the forest.” One of the dearest moments in all her work, a moment that makes me love the girl that she was as much as the artist she’d become, appears in her college diaries. On November 14, 1953, in the wake of heartbreak, she planned her next creative work: She would write about “a weak, tense, nervous girl” preyed on by a spoiled man. “There will be an analogy,” she mused, “a symbol, perhaps, of a moth being consumed in the fire.”

O Sylvia: Thank you for showing us that the well-worn metaphors on which we cut our teeth—dare we call them clichés?—can open a gateway to all the brilliance, the crackling anger and dazzling bliss, in breath-of-being poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Ariel.” You were, of course, not the first literary great to write of moths and flames; even the Bard made use of the trope in The Merchant of Venice, when the formidable female lawyer, proverb-happy Portia, decried, “Thus hath the candle singed the moth,” with an appended comment: “O, these deliberate fools!”

Those light-hungry, fluttery, tiny-feathered white and brown moths—the less glamorous cousins of the fancy butterflies who rule the daylight—are an important part of the ecosystem. They pollinate flowers and trees, and they are food for predators such as bats and birds. (Everybody is food for somebody else.) They do good work.

But why are moths so self-destructively drawn to flames? You ponder it as you pause on a welcoming boulder for a sip of water. If you use a flashlight to check the rock for critters and picnicking elves, you’ll find a dozen moths fluttering around the beam. Scientists say that even these nocturnal insects are drawn to daylight and the sun, and any light will stand in for it. But some people (O, deliberate poets!) write that what the moths want is not the light but the deeper, more absolute darkness behind it—the infinite, the mystery.

As Walter de la Mare described it in his 1919 poem “The Moth,” the attraction is seductive and special—Isled in the midnight air, Musked with the dark’s faint bloom, Out into glooming and secret haunts The flame cries, “Come!”

How is a moth to resist a come-hither like that? She Stares from her glamorous eyes; Wafts her on plumes like mist; In ecstasy swirls and sways To her strange tryst.

Alas, a flame never brought anything good to a moth. So switch the flashlight off. Your eyes don’t need it now anyway.

The Web Underground

Eventually the trees give way to a glen, a grassy clearing.

If you’re lucky, tonight you’ll step into a mysterious circle of mushrooms, otherwise known as a fairy ring. It can be a good thing or a bad one, depending on how you feel about fairies (and indeed about mushrooms).

Some people believe that these rings are made by witches, and that stepping inside means you must do a witch’s bidding. Even if the fairies claim authorship, when you disturb a Scottish ring in any way, you’re doomed to bad luck and hardship, as an old rhyme will tell you:

He wha tills the fairies’ green Nae luck again shall hae:
And he wha spills the fairies’ ring Betide him want and wae.

Particularly harsh fairies might even bring about your early demise. So tread lightly.

But take heart! In Scandinavia (yay, Scandinavia!), the mushrooms grow where elves dance. If the nisser are dancing when you arrive, prepare to be caught up in the circle—literally caught, as the magical beings grab your hands and pull you in to spin and spin until daybreak. But if your ring is in Ireland

or Wales, you might see the fairies more quietly pulling up one mushroom to sit on while eating a light supper off another. Or perhaps they pluck a wide cap to use as an umbrella when it rains (as will inevitably happen in autumn).

In a rare mischievous mood, Emily Dickinson decided that “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants”:

’Tis Vegetation’s Juggler— The Germ of Alibi—Doth like a Bubble antedate And like a Bubble, hie—

It’s sneaky, in other words. It lives to trick people, to start green things growing … and then vanish.

Now I must thank Ms. Plath again (O, sylvan Sylvia!) for the work of her early twenties. One memorable night in my own early youth, I drove down a saguaro-lined byway—Arizona’s version of a forest—in the midst of a drenching thunderstorm, headlights on high beam to spot cactus, coyotes, mule deer, and Gila monsters. I was listening to an audiobook of her flat, rather nasal voice (sounding to me like a shy Katharine Hepburn) reading from early poems about mushrooms and the like. It was an Experience, all that emotion pouring into the night of the season’s biggest storm. As she described mushrooms subsisting

on water, biding their time and then taking over the world in one busy night, I felt that old symbolic moth grow into a horde of quiet but fierce creatures.

“Mushrooms” is a strong feminist allegory, even stronger than Plath could have known. We now know more about mushrooms’ place in the natural world: They are astonishing super-organisms, crucial to the forest’s survival … but they in turn are just part of a much larger being. They and their fungal kin belong to a hitherto mysterious web that lies beneath the forest. When you walk among trees, you’re stepping on tendrils of fungus spun around their roots and woven together for yards and miles. The dome-capped nubbins that the fairies use as umbrellas are simply the aboveground outshoots of a symbiotic system known as the mycorrhizal network. Mushrooms are the fruit that spreads the spores.

“I lost my heart to the heart of the woods,” Canadian poet Ethelwyn Wetherald (how one does love a good Victorian name!) announced in 1895. She could have entrusted it to no better network:

Through the wild night, tempest-tossed and drear, My heart slept peacefully.

I found my heart in the heart of the woods, I looked on it and smiled;

And over it still the woodland broods, As a mother over her child.

The heart of the forest is its hub trees, sometimes called mothers, and this is where the web clusters: their ancient, deep roots. We’ve long known that fungus breaks down dead matter and produces phosphorus; it has recently been discovered that trees use the web for much more. They share water, plus sugar made through photosynthesis and other nutrients; they even send messages to each other through the web. A tree in trouble can signal for help—a jagged wound from a fallen branch, a sapling that doesn’t get enough light or water to thrive—and the mothers send it a sort of care package of water and sugar. The fungus receives plenty of rewards in return, siphoning off about 30 percent of the sugar that reaches it.

So we step with care, harvest our mushrooms with gratitude, embrace the power of connection. We honor this mystery.

Feature Image:
Photography by Bridget Beth Collins @flora.forager

Golden trees, gray skies. Autumn is the season of mystery. Eerie nights, liminal days. A time when the veil is thin. A time when ghost stories feel true. Flannel bedding goes on. Sweaters come out. September’s harvest moon casually suggests, Why not drink our wine outside together while we still can?

This year, vow to notice and share magical things. The more we start noticing and sharing these experiences, the more magical our shared reality becomes. To romance autumn is to appreciate the season and all its sensory pleasures. Practicing this artful way of living connects us to the beauty in our own lives.

Let’s take late afternoon walks and admire the colors. Sip a London Fog. Link arms with someone we love.

Let’s dig our hands deep inside carved pumpkins. Make tomato soup with brown lentils and Manzanilla olives, chili seasoned with smoked paprika and ground cinnamon. Let’s drink hot cider at apple orchard picnic tables.

Let’s invest in soft flannel nightgowns. Light candles that smell of forests. Ask our ancestors to visit us in dreams. Buy prayer cards to bring true love.

Let’s rent cozy cottages in quaint storybook villages, places that once only seemed real in library books and folklore.

Invite our sisters over. Tell each other stories about when we were wild.

Let’s adorn ourselves in black lace dresses, cameo chokers, pearl-buttoned cardigans. Slip our feet into lace-up ankle booties. Paint our nails the colors of blood oranges, cold cherries, pomegranates.

Let’s gather colored leaves and pine cones for our altars. Wake up in the ambrosial hours and read poetry by Lorca and Neruda.

Let’s fall in love with someone new. Share sugary doughnuts and hot chocolate on the roof. Watch Dracula (the Bela Lugosi one) by the fire.

This autumn, let’s keep a diary of the beauty we see. These glimmers are a doorway back into enchantment, into a true romance with the world.

Let’s keep putting ourselves out there in little ways, each and every day. We won’t wait for permission or worry about acceptance. Let’s show up and allow the world to align itself in serendipitous ways. Magic is always with us. It’s up to us to notice.

Despite everything, let’s keep dreaming with our hearts wide open.

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.”—Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 2, Scene 1

Shakespeare’s plays are full of magic: the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, the spirit-summoning in Henry VI Part 2. Although his work doesn’t necessarily illustrate a belief in the supernatural, Shakespeare often made use of common beliefs about magic as plot devices, turning folklore and written magical tradition into stories his audience would find entertaining.

The magic in Shakespeare’s plays becomes more fascinating when examined alongside the folklore and manuscripts of learned magic that were circulating in early modern England. Historians agree that belief in magic during this period was widespread. It wasn’t only famous occultists and alchemists like the queen’s astrologer, John Dee, who collected these texts, but also other learned people, such as nobles and physicians. Secret grimoires like The Sworn Book of Honorius were rare, but practical magical manuscripts were more common. With the rise of literacy, the charms and healing spells cast by cunning folk and village wisewomen began to be written down too, although elitism and male privilege caused those practices to be viewed by some as lesser.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s most fanciful plays, owes much to astrology, folk wisdom, and mythology. The title and setting of the play derive from the legend that the magical powers of flora and fauna were at their highest on Midsummer Night, when the fairies who haunted bluebell forests came out to dance. To a modern reader, Oberon’s reference to “a bank where wild thyme grows” might seem like a throwaway sylvan detail, but thyme, like bluebells, was associated with fairies. According to Richard Folkard’s Plant Lore, Legends and Lyrics, a bank of thyme was a common location for fairy revels. An oil derived from the herb, when rubbed on the eyes, was said to grant second sight. Emily Carding notes

that period herbals and grimoires categorized most of the other flowers in Oberon’s speech—oxlips, violets, woodbine, and musk roses—as being ruled by the planet Venus, evoking the play’s focus on love.

Of course, the most famous magical aspect of the play is the love potion Oberon uses to make Titania fall in love with the next person she looks upon, who happens to be Bottom. The potion is made from a flower Oberon calls “love-in-idleness.” Period herbals list this as a folk name for wild pansy, which was commonly used in love potions of the day. Oberon asks Puck to fetch the flower because he is angry with Titania and wants to play a trick on her. He explains the power of “love-in-idleness” as follows:

The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laidWill make or man or woman madly doteUpon the next live creature that it sees. (Act 2, Scene 1)

After they apply the potion, Titania awakes and falls in love with Bottom, a man temporarily cursed with the head of an ass. It’s worth noting that this “trick” has two male characters give a woman a drug to make her love a man, and that this is played as comedy. The gender politics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are by far the least charming aspect of the play.

The character of Oberon seems to have been inspired at least in part by a sinister spirit named Oberyon, who is described in several grimoires, most notably a 1583 magical manuscript entitled Book of magic, with instructions for invoking spirits. In this manuscript, Oberyon is described in terms that Shakespeare fans will find familiar:

He teacheth a man knowledge in phisicke and he sheweth the nature of stones herbes and trees and of all mettall. He is a great and mighty kinge and he is kinge of the fayries. (Folger MS Vb26, p. 80)

The manuscript also includes descriptions of a fairy queen and court. The invocation for Oberyon, similar to many spells in medieval and Elizabethan grimoires, reads like a prayer, with repeated references to “God’s most holy name.” It also contains a Catholic profession of faith. This is not uncommon; medieval and Renaissance magical texts are quite religious. Shakespeare scholar Barbara Mowat notes that Oberyon also appears in historical records: A 1444 court case calls him a “wycked spyryte,” a 1510 register “a certain demon.” It may even be possible that Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar with the name.

Elizabethan England was home to a complex brew of faiths: legally mandated Anglicanism, suppressed Catholicism, and ancient magical beliefs that were being syncretized with both. In Shakespeare’s plays, as in period herbals and grimoires, herbal folklore intermingles with ancient mythology, astrology, and written magical tradition. Suppressed Catholicism admixes with fairy folklore. These traditions, which may seem unrelated today, were not seen as separate. The flower magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows the early modern English belief that everything had a spiritual essence, which was swayed by the celestial circumstances. Physicians consulted an ephemeris (a kind of astrological almanac) before recommending treatment. Alchemists, apothecaries, and village cunning folk believed that the occult properties of herbs, stones, and metals came from the planets.

Everything, everything was ruled by the stars.

Feature Image:
The White Stag by Annie Stegg @anniestegg

You’re walking through the woods one day, just as twilight stars begin to shimmer through the leaves.

Everything seems quiet, still. Ahead, you hear the soft snap of a twig against a delicate hoof and look up into the gentle eyes of a doe. She is alone, as you are, but her stance betrays no fear. She gifts you with a steady, knowing gaze, then suddenly bounds away into the trees, vanishing as if she had never been there at all.

There’s something deeply magical about an unexpected encounter with a deer—they’re so much bigger than most of the other animals we tend to encounter on a regular basis, and yet they’re also elegant, careful, solemn, and graceful in their movements. It’s no wonder that these enchanting creatures appear so frequently in fairy tales, particularly stories of transformation.

In “Brother and Sister,” a fairy tale told by Giambattista Basile, Alexander Afanasyev, and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, among others, a young girl pleads with her thirsty brother not to drink from the enchanted springs they pass. The first spring murmurs that those who drink from it will transform into tigers and lions; the second promises that those who drink will become wolves. By the time they encounter a third spring, the brother cannot bear his thirst any longer. He drinks from the spring—and transforms into a deer. This fairy tale is a wild ride, involving a vengeful witch, a royal marriage, a ghost princess, a magical doppelganger, and an eventual restoration of human form to both the brother and sister (who is murdered and becomes a watchful spirit until her husband catches on). Read it, and you’ll find that the boy’s transformation offers many possible interpretations. Is it a punishment for his failure to listen to his sister, meted out by the evil witch that dogs their steps? Or is it a reprieve from responsibility or adulthood? His altered status could be a burden for his sister and freedom for himself. Or does it represent the children’s connection to the wood that becomes their home and sanctuary?

We find another brother transformed into a deer in “The Glass Coffin,” a story popularized by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and, later, Andrew Lang. Here, a tailor lost in the woods witnesses an epic fight between a great stag and a wild boar. After the stag wins, he scoops up the tailor with his antlers and brings him to a stone building that contains a glass coffin, inside of which lies a beautiful, very awake girl. The girl asks the tailor to please open the coffin and then reveals that the stag is actually her brother and the boar the wicked magician that enchanted them both. When the tailor and the girl emerge from the building, they find that the stag has been disenchanted, and they live happily ever after. Here the stag represents both power and dispossession. Once more, the form isn’t chosen freely, but the brother is able to defeat the magician and recruit help while in that shape.

We see many young girls, even princesses, transformed into deer as well. In Madame d’Aulnoy’s French story “The White Doe,” a princess is under a curse that forbids her from being touched by light for the first fifteen years of her life. When someone inevitably cuts open the coach that hides her away, she immediately transforms into a white deer and runs off. Her betrothed does not recognize her in her new form but becomes obsessed with chasing the new white deer in the forest. When he wounds her, he regrets his actions and brings her home, only to discover that she is his love—and she can transform back into her human self at night. He declares his love for her, the curse is broken, and they live happily ever after. Here, the transformation represents a barrier between the princess, her prince, and true love, one they must overcome together.

We see another beautiful girl transformed into a deer in the Scottish tale “The Enchanted Deer,” which Andrew Lang included in his Lilac Fairy Book. In this story, a young man agrees to shoot a deer that has been eating the corn belonging to a poor farmer and his wife. Every time he goes to shoot, the deer appears before him as a woman with long, dark hair. Eventually he gives chase, and the deer leads him to the home of a band of robbers. When they find and kill the hunter, she is able to bring him back to life. The leader of the robbers is so mad that when they find the hunter alive again, he orders his men to slay not only the hunter but also the men who were originally ordered to kill him … This continues until all the robbers are furious with each other, they get into an enormous fight, and all of them wind up dead. The hunter then comes back to life a final time through the help of the deer, and she takes him to the home of an old woman. Her curse is then broken, but the hunter falls into a magical sleep every time she tries to come to him in her human form, and she is forced to leave him after her third try. A great deal happens after the hunter and the deer-woman are separated, but the curse is eventually broken, they find each other again, and this story too ends happily. In a fascinating twist, the hunter must go on a long quest to recover his beloved, a plot usually reserved for women in Search for the Lost Husband tales.

Most of us long, on some level at least, to run free through the forest, to sip cool water from flowing streams, and to slip through the trees as silently as a shadow. Deer contain contradictions and possibilities. They’re prey animals, but they’re also strong and fast, delicate yet still powerful. Stories of deer transformation, even when they’re stories of curses, allow us to indulge a fantasy of fluid forms; we imagine that we’ve suddenly sprouted antlers and long legs for springing through the forest.

Many of these tales mention specifically that once the human characters transform, they cannot overcome their new urges to run with other wild creatures, to become part of the natural world in a way they never could have done before. In that spirit, we encourage you to go explore the woods yourself, perhaps even run a bit… you never know what you might become.

I am often the last person to leave the library in the evening. Just before I turn out the lights, I always pause. At the front of the building, a seven-foot statue of Athena Lemnia towers, her sage countenance promising holy mystery. Even if she is only plaster, as the patron goddess of this place she is owed the final words uttered here every evening.

“Good night, library. Good night, Athena.”

I may be a librarian by trade, but I often joke that I have fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming a temple priestess. That’s because the Providence Athenæum in Providence, Rhode Island, is not only a working library but also a temple to wisdom, to history, and to the enchantment one finds tucked between pages. Founded in 1836 and residing in its Greek Revival home since 1838, the Athenæum has led a remarkable life. It has seen many illustrious visitors come and go in its nearly 200 years; it has appeared in books and films, had its artworks stolen and recovered, witnessed tragic romance and heartbreak, and become a fixture of local legends.

Visitors to the Athenæum can feel the library’s secrets the minute they walk in the door. Despite its classical edifice, the library is cozy inside, full of dust and homey old armchairs that squeak when you plop down into them. The library ladders are meant for climbing, and the mezzanine floors creak comfortably. The reading room is lit up with fairy lights. We welcome canine visitors in the library, and you can often find a patron’s pup snoozing on one of the wool rugs while their human reads the newspaper. Upstairs, the desks in the alcoves are full of little poems and love notes written and left there by decades’ worth of visitors. I love to catch our visitors leafing through them and, occasionally, adding their own scraps to the collection.

Then there’s the books. On the shelves of the Athenæum, along with all the latest mystery novels (charmingly labeled “Detectives” in the stacks), one will find flaking red leather tomes dating back to the mid-19th century. There are beautiful green books on botany with gold embossing on their spines, and dusty tomes by travelers to distant lands. In the card catalog, handwritten cards prompt wild goose chases in the stacks. The musty, sweet scent of old books is so thick in the library that my spouse can smell it in my hair when I come home each night.

I’m often asked by visitors to the Athenæum whether the library is haunted, and I have no simple answer for them. I may never have seen a ghost in this place, but the library is full of echoes. Every day I hear the spectral steps of Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, all of whom spent time in the Athenæum. (According to her journal, Gilman often ate crackers in the library. Tsk tsk!) I hear the echoes of two centuries of bibliophiles, poets, seekers, and romantics who have leafed through these books.

Edgar Allan Poe was one such visitor who left a particularly poignant mark on the Athenæum. Visiting Rhode Island in 1848, he conducted a tragic love affair in the stacks with a local poetess named Sarah Helen Whitman. (Whitman, like Poe, was an ur-goth icon; she wore a tiny wooden coffin charm around her neck on a black silk ribbon.) She called off their engagement at the library, three days before their planned Christmas Day wedding—after Poe broke his promise of sobriety to her. We still have a book in our Special Collections in which Poe dramatically signed his name to impress Whitman on one of their dates in the library. Some say Poe’s ghost can still be seen beating a path along Benefit Street between Whitman’s home and the Athenæum, caught in a loop of doomed courtship forever.

But Poe’s ghost is not the only feature of interest on brick-lined Benefit Street. In front of the library is a Gothic Revival fountain that burbles with cool water, framed with the adage “Come Hither Every One That Thirsteth.” Installed as a public drinking fountain in the 1870s (likely one of the first in the country), this fixture inspires local folklore and botanical offerings alike. A single bloom or autumn leaf often floats poetically in the basin, an anonymous gift of devotion to Athena’s wisdom. I like to think that these votaries have sipped—or at least anointed themselves with—a splash of water from the fountain, ensuring, according to local legend, that they will return to Providence some day. Other variants of the legend hold that imbibers may be cursed by the ghosts of Poe or even H.P. Lovecraft, another local specter, but we’ve seen no evidence for this … yet.

But to speak of curses in such a place seems heretical. The Providence Athenæum is too magical for that. After I say good night to Athena and turn out the lights, I sometimes stop at the fountain and dip my fingers in the cool elixir that burbles forth there. I need no reassurance that I will return to this place again; after all, someone needs to turn the lights back on tomorrow. But these waters—like the stories this building holds, like the perfume of antique books, like the wisdom of Athena herself—soothe a weary temple priestess and inspire her for another day.