Charles is someone who is doing what he loves.

He is an optimist, in the broadest sense of the word. Charles lives in a good world.

He’s not an unrealistic optimist, though. He’s sensible. When we won the World Fantasy Award for best short story, in Tucson in 1991, Charles missed it. He was playing table tennis. This is because he knew that we wouldn’t win (well, it was about as likely as our being elected joint deputy Pope), so he went off to do something sensible instead. (That we won is beside the point in this anecdote.)

This summer Charles’s wife, Karen, was very seriously injured in a car accident. She’s spent the last several months undergoing surgery, and in rehab learning how to walk and operate her body once more.

The last time I saw Charles I asked him how he was doing.

“Mostly I’m grateful,” he said, like one of those guys in those heartwarming articles in Reader’s Digest. Only this was for real. “There are people in her rehab who had the same injuries as Karen who are going to spend the rest of their lives in wheelchairs. She’s going to be able to walk again. We’re really lucky.”

And he meant it. He is a remarkable man, in many ways.

Charles Vess lives in rural Virginia. Also he lives in Faerie. He draws what he sees.

This was originally written for the program book for TropiCon XVII, 1998. Charles, I am glad to say, continues to twinkle. Karen Vess, I am even happier to say, made an almost complete recovery.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany

It has on occasion been a source of puzzlement to me that there are a number of otherwise sensible people, many of them old enough to know better, who maintain, perhaps from some kind of strange cultural snobbery, that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name, and that these plays must, obviously, have been written by a member of the British aristocracy, written by some lord or earl, some grandee or other, forced to hide his literary light under a bushel.

And this is chiefly a source of puzzlement to me because the British aristocracy, while it has produced more than its share of hunters, eccentrics, farmers, warriors, diplomats, con men, heroes, robbers, politicians and monsters, has never been noted in any century or era for the production of great writers.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878–1957) was a hunter, and a warrior, and a chess champion, and a playwright, a teacher and many another thing besides, and he was a member of a family that could trace its lineage back to before the Norman Conquest; he was eighteenth Baron Dunsany, and he is one of the rare exceptions.

Lord Dunsany wrote small tales of imaginary gods and thieves and heroes in distant kingdoms; he wrote tall stories based in the here and now and retold, by Mr. Joseph Jorkens, for whisky in London clubs; he wrote autobiographies; he wrote fine poems and more than forty plays (at one point, reputedly, he had five plays being staged on Broadway at one time); he wrote novels of a vanished and magical Spain that never was; and he wrote The King of Elfland’s Daughter, a fine, strange, almost forgotten novel, as too much of Dunsany’s unique work is forgotten, and if this book alone were all he had written, it would have been enough.