Basket of Apples : the story behind the story

One summer at Flight of the Mind, the ultra fabulous women's writing workshop in Oregon, I was fortunate enough to work with Ursula Le Guin. (See "Legend and Legerdemain in Lheoti" for other details.) The facility was a Benedictine retreat camp on the shores of the McKenzie river. The river came to provide such a backdrop for our writing that closing your window to shut out the sound of the waters became almost unthinkable.

Our assignment that week was to write a story about walking along the river and meeting someone or something. Everything I was trying was NOT working, so in desperation the morning before I was scheduled to read, I wrote this pretty straightforward telling of an English ballad called "House Carpenter, or the Daemon Lover." The challenge was to not have it too sing-song-y, while remaining true to the musicality of the original. It's a story that's always intrigued me because of its moral ambiguity, almost unique in traditional ballads. Usually, it's really clear -- either it's bad to wait for people who aren't coming back and impedes their progress to the other world and you'll be punished, or it's bad to be faithless to your first love and you'll be punished. It's not at all obvious whether the woman here is right to search for love, though she eventually becomes a hapless victim of dark forces, or if she's getting her just desserts for abandoning the life she made commitments to. I wanted to portray both the appeal and the dangerousness of the sailor/demon, and to make it clear they were going to Hell without actually saying so.