Long ago it was, yet not so long ago that I can not remember…

 

   This was how Marie, our family housekeeper and unofficial nanny, always began her stories. Growing up in New Orleans, I was exposed early to a world of magic and mysterious creatures, but Marie’s stories evoked something more ancient and more universal. They always included a race of people she referred to only as “They” and, in her telling, she did not seem to be inventing or passing down the gumbo of cultural history that is New Orleans Creole, but rather remembering something that happened to her, to all of us, as denizens of planet Earth. And she passed down this love of storytelling itself and the magic inherent in it to me.  In later years, I would describe listening to her stories as hearing a new song for the first time, yet knowing all the words by heart.

 

 Shannon Avery, editor and translator of The Queen’s Rune and Other Tales of the Sidhe

Anthropologist and translator Shannon Avery has spent her life travelling the world to collect poems, stories, and sayings of the Sidhe. The results of her research appear alongside the fantasy illustrations of artist Danae Bentley in The Queen’s Rune and Other Tales of the Sidhe.