You should read R. B. Lemberg’s THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES from Tachyon Publications.
You should also read their prequel novellette ‘Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds’ in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
It would not be a bad thing to read their charming ‘The Desert Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Berevyar’ in Uncanny Magazine.
Or their…wait. Stop. Just go read anything you can find by R. B. Lemberg. It will be worth the quest. The sheer beauty and power of their writing shows equally well in their prose and poetry.
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But about *this book*, THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES. I won’t recap the blurb. Read the blurb!
Yes, you should read ‘Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds’ story first, because it shows the middle of this tale about loves lost, loves avenged, and loves rebuilt or found. Or what happens when some people just can’t reach a happy-ever-after.
This is a story about older people reclaiming their lives, hopes, skills, and worth.
It’s about how language and gender identities intersect, or not.
It’s about how people fixate, to their peril, on the wrong goal or the wrong way to reach it.
It is definitely a parable of our times and the #Resistance movement.
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I felt more reading this as a woman in her mid-fifties, than I would have, reading it in my twenties or thirties. That’s just on me.
Maybe I would have responded to it as deeply as a younger person.
In 1978, my junior high school library had a paperback copy of Patricia McKillip’s THE RIDDLEMASTER OF HED and its sequel THE HEIR OF SEA AND FIRE. I read those in one weekend and my life changed. I saw stars. I saw deep, resonant poetry-as-prose in a fantasy novel, approachable REAL characters, and writing lovely as (but less archaic than)Tolkien’s. Mind you, about that time, my mom and I were deep in the SFF paperback Renaissance of the late 70’s. I was reading a lot of books, many of them way out of my age category. It was good for me. Junior high and high school kind of sucked, otherwise.
McKillip sparked in me the realization that I could maybe write, someday, when I had the words and skill. McKillip’s prose formed one part of the framework of my developing writerly ‘voice’. Decades later, I no longer sound like her when I write. I found my own voice, but the echoes of her stories ring out strongest in my Lonhra Sequence novel THE PURIST.
The McKillip novels that most ‘click’ with Lemberg’s WEAVES are THE SORCERESS AND THE CYGNET and THE CYGNET AND THE FIREBIRD. WEAVES and FIREBIRD are set in kindred deserts (I am a desert child and appreciate that.) Both books have deep and dangerous magic at their cores, both have luminous writing and vivid characters. I think McKillip tends in these older books to skew to binary genders (man/woman), but that’s probably because most of SFF publishing was stuck there until recently.
Back to THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES. This compact novella struck the same resonant recognition in me now that RIDDLEMASTER did in 1978.
This story might very well change my writing again, in a good way. The tale itself is both sweet and fierce, devastating and gentle in its truths. It’s making me look more fearlessly at how and what I write, how I frame ideas, how I look at old characters that have been ambling around in my mind since 1983 or so.
It has taught me once more to honor my instinct toward deep worldbuilding, when many agents, editors, and readers counseled against it in favor of one-off fast writes that capitalized on trendy themes.
R.B. Lemberg’s ‘Birdverse’ stories and poems take place in an all-too-real and gloriously mythic universe that is a brilliant mirror on our world (as good fantasy should do.) It is not trendy, with the exception that publishing’s ‘new look at diversity’ has now overlapped what Lemberg (and many other diverse writers) have been talking about for years.
It’s inspiring me to write more of my own stuff, and trust that I can write it and get it published. (In reality, I’ve accepted that ‘getting’ long fiction published through a major commercial publisher is probably not in my future. I’ve embraced self-publishing as my own best route forward.)
It’s warning me off what happens when diverse writers meet agents seeking the same, only to discover the agents may have some confusing ideas about how diverse writers should write. (Also, I’ve accepted that in six manuscripts, I’ve had *one* marginally effective query letter.)
It’s also inspiring me to make art based off someone else’s writing, which doesn’t happen to me much anymore.
Remember that Cygnet book from McKillip? It led to this needlepoint piece in 1995, which is getting reworked sometime this year.
I’ve had twelve of these woven napkins for years, intending to do something with the Central or South American bird motifs. Now I think they might work into a Birdverse tapestry or piece of non-text book art. I have amber chips and clear glass beads with colors threaded into spirals, carved bone beads, and madder-and-indigo Ikat woven cloth. I have ideas…
