The Orange & Bee are delighted to be the publishers of Gregory Feeley’s story ‘A quickening of stones’ (Issue ten).
Gregory Feeley's short fiction has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and has appeared in about a dozen Year's Best anthologies. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
Where did your ideas for ‘A quickening of stones’ come from?
The story began with a moment’s curiosity: whether gargoyles were the subject to a body of folklore such as European countries possess about fairies and other supernatural creatures. It turns out that no, the origin of gargoyles seems to be a medieval legend about Saint Romanus slaying a water-spewing dragon and mounting its head on a cathedral wall. So the statue (or statues) came first and a name and backstory followed. (The Old French ‘gargouille’ suggests the sound of gurgling water, so the original statue may have served as a water spout, or at least had rainwater running off it.)
But the idea of gargoyles as one of the magical creatures of folklore—that is, the notion that the cathedral statues represented actual imagined beings—was intriguing, and I found myself wondering about medieval folk tales of gargoyles. Would be like. One of the most widespread tales of magical creatures involves the changeling, a fairy or troll infant swapped for a human one, who is then taken for human and raised as one. My first sentence, which declares that human and gargoyle newborns look sufficiently similar for such an exchange to take place, started the story going. Then I had to decide what a gargoyle raised as a human would be like. The story proceeded from there.
If you could have just one magical talent, what would you choose (and why)?
I wrote a long novel, not yet published, called Hamlet the Magician, which contains a lot of medieval magic. (Two novella-length stories adapted from it appear in my recent collection Cumberworld & Farther.) I read a lot of grimoires, which contained spells for an astonishing number of things, including (my favorite) a spell to make a young woman walking along the road think that she is about to cross a brook, so that she will hoist her skirt up to her waist. People yearn for remarkable things.
The ability to protect loved ones from harm sounds more like a ‘power’ than a ‘talent’, so let me suggest a seemingly modest one: the ability to read other languages easily. I worked hard to read Latin (and am now laboring over ancient Greek), and even French and Spanish requires effort, especially if I am reading great literature or old books. I may never have time to learn Italian, and will always wonder what the originals of works like The Tale of Genji or A Dream of Red Mansions are like. How marvelous it would be actually to know!
Using just six words, can you describe your writing process?
Labor over each sentence. Revise constantly.
If you were not yourself, who would you be?
I often wonder whether I should have spent my life as an activist rather than someone who sat in a room and wrote. A health worker, union organizer, relief worker of almost any kind—all of them seem more useful to mankind than making up stuff or writing about stuff others wrote.
I did spend years teaching, which counts for something.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been offered?
I don’t remember who first said that it is better to be kind than to be smart (it may have been in a book), and I would not have ‘taken’ that advice had I not sensed its truth already, but it was heartening to see that so many wise people said (or wrote) it.
Read Gregory Feeley’s fiction published by The Orange & Bee: