Margaret Mahy - Librarian of Babel

[steepholm]

I don't think I've ever had an article with such a long gestation time as this. I gave the paper it's based on in Cambridge, one very snowy day in January 2013, and it's only just appeared - even though the journal issue is officially dated April.

I'm particularly pleased to see it, because I think I had more fun with this than with any other article I've written. Mostly this was due to Margaret Mahy herself, whose work is always such a pleasure and a provocation. In fact, I was so into it while writing that I started (rather obviously) channelling her habits of thought and style, which could be a dangerous strategy, but in this case I think worked. And I also got to talk about Borges and John Wilkins - whose Selected Works I was once ambitious to edit.

Like the man said: "I thought it all out twenty years ago."

Comments

[sovay]

Margaret Mahy - Librarian of Babel

This is wonderful. I wish my copy of The Changeover were not in a box!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The Changeover changed my life! It finally unblocked me in the early nineties and allowed me to write my first ((eventually) published) book.

[sovay]

It finally unblocked me in the early nineties and allowed me to write my first ((eventually) published) book.

I didn't know that! I'm very glad it did. Did you get a chance to tell Mahy?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

No. At least, I think I may have blathered something when I friended her on Facebook a couple of years before she died, but not in the way I would like to have done.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Oh! Excellent! I need to read this!