Looking Up
One of Charles de Lint’s books—perhaps Trader, or Someplace to Be Flying, or maybe in multiple stories or novels—taught me that few people look up: to treetops, to rooftops, to what is moving overhead. The moment I read that, I was determined to be one of the people who looked up. I was convinced that something wonderful might appear high above me at any moment: peeping at me between oak leaves, or, like Anne of Green Gables, walking the ridgepole of a roof.
For years, I have found such friends in Charles de Lint’s books. As a high schooler, I’d make a beeline for two spots on the library’s fiction shelves: the Mc’s—for McCaffrey, McKinley, and McKillip, and the D’s—for de Lint.
Was I not, after all, as an avid reader, an honorary citizen of Newford? I, too, talk to trees. I, too, befriend harpists and their ilk, and fall under music’s spell. I, too, look for the archetypes striding among us. Like many a de Lint character, I dress like that Leonard Cohen song: “she is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters.” I would blend right in, surely.
And I would follow the instructions laid out for us by gentle cartographers Charles de Lint and MaryAnn Harris—for if ever there was a guide to navigating Faerie in the modern world, they have given it to us in fictional form. Here are just a few of the lessons that four decades of de Lint/Harris collaboration taught me: how to be an agent for good change in the world; how to fail forward like a Trickster; how to uplift a community of artists; how to manifest invisible wonders with the stroke of a pen or paintbrush; how to live a mythic life.
MaryAnn Harris is everywhere in Charles de Lint’s work—or so it always seemed to me, a reader and a fan. Through his books walk women like the women I know: flawed and magical, wounded, hilarious, awesome, and whole. Could anything be further from a toxic male gaze than Jacky Rowan? Jilly Coppercorn? Bettina San Miguel? Surely, I thought, surely de Lint must be in daily contact with enchanted exiles, heroes in inside-out jackets, and artists who can see through the veil. How else could he write them so well?
The few interactions I had with MaryAnn in public or on social media were so imbued with her sweetness and encouragement, her indelible artist-in-the-worldness, that in my heart, she was always a friend. We may not have known each other except peripherally, but I was so happy to know that she existed and was doing her own work, somewhere in the north. I grieve her. I will always look up and think of her, crouched with the crow girls in the trees.
And I will return, time and again, to de Lint’s work, for I know that in it, I will always find a friend.
© C. S. E. Cooney
C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author: first, for Bone Swans: Stories, and most recently for Saint Death’s Daughter (on Kirkus Review’s list of Year’s Science Fiction and Best Fantasy 2022). Other work includes The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, Desdemona and the Deep, and poetry collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which includes her Rhysling Award-winning poem “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Forthcoming in April 2025 is Saint Death’s Herald, second in the Saint Death series.
Celebrating CdL 