Terri Windling
Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.
It's not just the zeitgeist-or rather, it's partly the zeitgeist, partly that folklore and mythic themes tend to resurface. Someone this weekend was describing it like the ocean, where themes come into culture, like the waves, and then out again, in cycles.
In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.
Imagine collaborating with Burne-Jones! I would have loved to have been in Mexico during the time of World War II and to have known and worked with Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. They seem to have been amazing women, combining art, storytelling, surrealism... I would have loved to have been part of that circle.
If there really was such as thing as reincarnation, and I could come back as anyone, it would be as a Marina-Warner-type scholar. But there's a role for popularizers, too.
If it were brand-new, with no roots in the old material, would it still be folklore? I don't know.
I've worked with a number of the people I admire most, like Brian and Wendy Froud, Thomas Canty, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, Ellen Steiber.
I've only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don't count my student years.
I've been doing this for 20 years.
I've always been a bit nomadic. Even when I was an editor in New York, I maintained a place in Boston, and when I moved up to Boston after that, I maintained a place in New York. I've often lived in two places at once, so it comes naturally to me.
I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore.
I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.
I'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed.
I'll always regret that I never met Angela Carter. She was one of my two major inspirations in life, the other being Adrienne Segur, a French illustrator in the 1950s-1960s.
I'd like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.
I'd had no particular interest in the Southwest at all as a young girl, and I was completely surprised that the desert stole my heart to the extent it did.
I was a great fan of Jim Henson.
I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.
I think that it's the nature of folklore to be rooted in old tradition, and what's new is what we add to the old material.
I tend to work on about 10 different things at once. I'm not a very linear person.