On 7th July this year I was having a quiet browse of twitter with a cup of tea when I saw Magda Knight had posted this -
I first met Magda in 2017, in a beautiful community garden called Phytology in Bethnal Green. I was organising a live literature event with a friend from my MA and Magda read one of her stories. Since then we’ve followed each other on twitter, a place where I often see what she’s up to and think it generally excellent.
So when I saw her post, I replied -
She then said this -
and then I took the convo into the DMs, as maybe the kids say.
Through different technologies available to us in the twenty-first century, Magda and I talked about what kind of collaboration we might work on together. Magda said she’d been mulling over the idea of mutated folklore, fiction that twisted old stories for new times and that struck such a chime with me that I knew I wanted to be a part of it. Then we talked what the concept of mutated folklore might mean to us. We talked about how we might go about creating such an anthology. We talked about our favourite creatures and stories, what folkloric traditions we knew and wanted to know more about, how we hoped the speculative fiction communities might receive such a collection.
We decided to solicit writing from people we knew were working in the kinds of realms we were looking for. So we ended up punching up (and up and up and up) and we (somehow) persuaded really amazing writers to come on board.
It’s important now that I emphasise that I have very little idea what we’re doing. Magda is more expert than me, having published anthologies as editor in chief of Mookychick, but together on this project we’ve been mostly feeling our way by instinct, hoping that the stories would be like potions in an alchemist’s laboratory and their meeting would create us a shining container of gold. Now, as we’ve collated these stories, we know we were right.
Throughout 2020 I was working on something that I wanted to turn into a novel. I worked on it haphazardly, baby in my lap or baby fitfully asleep in the other room and although I had a very strong guiding image for the novel- a creature who was half woman and half bird, stumbling from a marsh with brackish water dripping from her wings - I could not make it work. The story and the form and the tone kept slipping as I typed, shifting behind my back when I closed my laptop.
At the end of the year I decided to put the loose collection of words I had gathered away. I put them in the place on my computer where I put stories that are not working, in the hope that if I turn my back on them they will turn into something I can use while I’m not looking. I turned my attention to something else (which, I am pleased to report, is working, whatever that means. So far.)
When I was thinking about what I might contribute to this anthology, I browsed that folder on my laptop, looking through the discarded remnants of old writing, trying to find something that would spark into something new. I tried out a few things and most of what I got was frustration at not being able to make them work, again. Then I came to the document called The Crane Wife and I thought, hmm.
The name of the anthology was a stroke of genius from Magda. We had a working title which was a lovely word but I wasn’t entirely sure if it spoke precisely enough to the tone we were trying to catch. I am entirely useless with naming things, so it was Magda - writing a long brain-dump list of possible titles - who threw Lore and Disorder out there for me to pick up and say yes, this is it, this is what we should call this thing, even though we don’t know exactly what its shape will be. Something mutated, yes; a pun in more ways than one, a riff on the peculiarities of this creole language all our writers are wrestling with.
We’re donating all the money from the sales of Lore and Disorder to the charity Fareshare who are redistributing food to vulnerable people all over the country. Although we might agree the existence of this wonderful charity shouldn’t be necessary, it is; it’s vital, and we want to support that in any way we can.
Creatures from dreams and myths don’t vote; they have no known political affiliation and no manifestos. But they come from the people who live with the land and sea, as all 7 billion and more of us do, and so their stories are deeply entwined with what is is to be a moral being. They speak of justice and injustice, love and hate, birth and death and the passages between. Their stories belong to us all - just as a decent meal should - and it is our pleasure to offer these gifts as we hope your offerings will be gifted on to those so much in need of them.
Find out more at the anthology page HERE
AND on #LoreDisorder on Twitter