Terri Windling
I like Celtic folk music, Native American music, and any kind of early music. There isn't a lot of music that I don't like... .except for Show Tunes.
I hope that at least a handful of the writers working today with the old material will still be read 200 years from no.
I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.
I don't like to trash anyone's fiction, really, unless it's written cynically. Then I wish it would just slink away with its tail between its legs.
I do think that we have writers today who are of the caliber of the great folklore writers of the past, like Hans Christian Andersen.
I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place.
I came to New York, straight out of college, wanting one thing in life: to work on Jim Henson's film The Dark Crystal.
Filmmaking can be a fine art.
Editing an anthology, even though the stories in them are the work and creative children of the authors involved, you have more of an influence on the whole shape of the book. Your name is on it, you're providing the theme for it, whereas it's a whole different skill being a novel editor.
But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.
As I worked with writers and artists, it became clear that I was too envious of them; I wanted to be writing and doing art myself. And so I was editing throughout the '80s, but by the end of the'80s, I was leading a dual life. I was editing in New York and being an artist in Boston.
All of my paintings are about stories and language. Storytelling always comes first. And in particular, I'm a storyteller working with folkloric and mythic materials.
A lot of the old folklore and fairy tales and myths are intensely dark, particularly once you get away from Victorian watered-down versions.
A good novel editor is invisible.
A field needs to keep growing and changing if it's going to maintain its vitality, and I was worried by the dearth of younger writers and editors with any real vision. In the last few years, however, I've been astonished by the number of new people who have been published who are really good.