Working with ace designer Rowan Moore Seifred on this website has been remarkable. One of the many brilliant suggestions she made during the process was for me to make collages as part of the overall design. For me, collage-making is wonderful in its ability to surprise – you take a sky from here and a limb from there and sometimes things coalesce in unexpected ways. I’ve made a number of them over many years, but had recently fallen out of practice. The X-Acto knife has been a crucial tool for me, from my youth doing layout for the Milwaukee underground newspaper Kaleidoscope (we also used Letraset then), to making backgrounds and characters for animated shorts, to making mattes and other old-school techniques on movies before CGI took over, to cutting bits of thisses and thats to combine into something else. The X-Acto requires respect, as its edge can cut deep. It was good to put in a fresh blade and sift through my wicker suitcase of paper.

On the Home page, here I am at around four years old, standing on the wings of the brothers of the princess who were cursed by their jealous stepmother and turned to swans. The sister breaks the spell after long years of sacrifice. One brother’s wing is taken from one of the many glorious Adrienne Segur’s illustrations in The Fairy Tale Book, published in 1958. I took pictures of the Blue Heron from a rented swan boat one day as she was patiently fishing in Echo Park Lake. She caught a fish that was too big for her to swallow and had to let it go!

I can’t remember where the coyote on the Fiction page came from. The background is a painting by my multitalented mother, now with the ancestors.

The Notes from Within image is made up of photos taken in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains with a bit of a Garth Williams illustration of a forgotten pot of gold for the Alison Uttley story “The Pixies’ Scarf” in The Golden Book of Elves and Fairies, published in 1951.

On the About page, the coyotes are by Alexander Lee Landerman (alexanderlanderman.com), used with permission. The Locations image is a collage I made forever ago – the bits in it came from my ancient motley collection of pages torn from magazines and elsewhere. The What Nourishes Me piece is a photo of a Blue Heron who stood in the pond in my back yard for at least an hour, sipping away at tiny mosquitofish and seeing me watch her. The black-and-white illustration is by Arthur Hughes in George MacDonald’s classic The Princess and the Goblin, first published in 1871. I am in the foreground, about two years old, pretending to read from Little Verses by Miriam Clark Potter, illustrated by Mary Blair (magicofmaryblair.com/about-mary/), published in 1953. The James Baldwin candle was given to me by my daughter Miranda, who knows me so well.

The Natural Magic grandmothers are Grandmother Irene from The Princess and the Goblin; Mary Poppins from the first book in the series by P.L. Travers, illustrated by Mary Shepard, from the copy inscribed to my mother from her father, Christmas 1938; and Nokomis from The Birchbark House, written and illustrated by Louise Erdrich. My father took the picture of me at about seven years old, situated at my little red table with my books and papers neatly stacked and Butter Boy the cat overseeing operations.

The image on Contact page is Diana, the huntress goddess of wildlife, childbirth, and the moon. This graceful statue, Diana of the Chase, was created by Anna Hyatt Huntington in 1922 and is installed outside the Library and Art Gallery in Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, California. Diana is accompanied by a Coyote fetish made by an artist from Zuni Pueblo, whose name I am sorry to say I don’t know. The Coyote stands on a brick that I found at the former homesite of my slaveholding ancestors.

I am grateful to my mother and to her mother, my Granny, for giving me so many wonderful books from the time I was old enough to hold them without trying to eat the pages. I still have many of them, and wow do they hold up.