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Fairy Tales and Poetry: Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin

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Fairy Tales and Poetry: Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin

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Fairy Tales and Poetry: Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin

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Published on September 12, 2016

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We are the product of the books we read as children and young adults. They shape the vocabulary we use to shape the world we live in: they spark interests and ideas and ideals that we may never be consciously aware of harboring. Sometimes we’re lucky. Sometimes we can point to the exact moment where everything changed.

I was fourteen. I read like books were oxygen and I was in danger of suffocation if I stopped for more than a few minutes. I was as undiscriminating about books as a coyote is about food—I needed words more than I needed quality, and it was rare for me to hit something that would actually make me slow down. It was even rarer for me to hit something that would make me speed up, rushing toward the end so I could close the book, sigh, flip it over, and start again from the beginning.

I liked fairy tales. I liked folk music. When I found a book in a line of books about fairy tales, with a title taken from a ballad, I figured it would be good for a few hours.

I didn’t expect it to change my life.

Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean, is one of those books that defies description in the best way, because it both is and is not a fantasy. For most of the book, it’s the story of a girl named Janet starting her college life, with all the changes and chaos that entails. She sees weird things on campus. Okay. Everyone sees weird things on campus. I was already taking classes at the community college across the street from my high school, and I’d seen a man with six squirrels on a leash, a woman attending all her classes in a ball gown, and a person we all called “Troll” whose wardrobe consisted mostly of chain mail and rabbit skins. College campuses are alive with weird things.

Only her weird things are very real, and eventually they make it clear that the book is a fantasy, and more, that Janet is in some pretty deep shit. Fun for the whole family! It’s a solid, well-written, remarkable book that stands up well to the passage of time, and is in many ways one of the foundations of urban fantasy as we know it today (which is a whole different, much longer article). Even if there had been nothing to recommend it but what I’ve already said, I would have loved it deeply, and revisited it often.

But Janet—smart, sensible, bibliophile Janet, who was everything I wanted to be when I grew up—loved poetry. She wrote a sonnet every day, “just to keep her hand in,” and the book followed the process of her composing one of those sonnets, tying it deftly into the narrative as a whole. I’ll be honest: I didn’t realize just how deftly into the fifth or sixth time I read the book, because I was too busy staring, wild-eyed, into space. I had found one of the pieces I needed to build the woman I wanted to be.

I had found poetry.

Everyone I knew wrote poetry: it was a class assignment handed out with remarkable frequency in the Gifted and Talented classes, it was a pass to the literary magazine and its vaunted extra credit points, it was a quick and easy way to impress teachers. And I already knew how to write sonnets, having been taught at a young age by an aunt who was trying to prove a point about child development and expectations. But I had never considered that I could just … write it. I could sit down and write a sonnet for no reason other than I wanted to write a sonnet.

As I write this, I have an old black binder covered in the sort of embarrassing bumper stickers that seemed utterly brilliant to me when I was fourteen. It’s so thick that it’s on the verge of bursting. I don’t think the rings would ever close again if I opened them now. It contains a high school education’s-worth of sonnets, one per day from the time I first read Tam Lin to the end of my school career. They’re all technically perfect, even if most of them are self-indulgent and derivative enough that they’ll never see the light of day. And toward the end of the four-year, 1,500+ (because sometimes I would get excited and write two) project, they got good. I may not be the next Shakespeare or the queen of the sonnet in the modern world, but I got good. That still amazes me.

Poetry is an incredibly important part of my life, and I don’t know if I would have that—the passion or the practice—if I hadn’t read Tam Lin when I did, when I was feeling receptive. It changed my world forever. (It also saved my life, thanks to introducing the idea of the conversational code word for “I need help, drop everything and come,” in the form of “pink curtains.” Without it, I don’t think I would be here today.)

Tam Lin is a book about choices and consequences, friendships and relationships, and the way our adult selves are built on the bones of the children we once were. It’s also about poetry. If Pamela Dean had never written another word, she would still deserve to be remembered as one of the greats, for this book alone.

Read it.

OnceBrokenFaithSeanan McGuire is a California-based author with a strong penchant for travel and can regularly be found just about anyplace capable of supporting human life (as well as a few places that probably aren’t). Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; Rosemary and Rue, was named one of the Top 20 Paranormal Fantasy Novels of the Past Decade; and her novel Feed, written under the name Mira Grant, was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. She also won a Hugo for her podcast, and is the first person to be nominated for five Hugo Awards in a single year. Once Broken Faith is her latest novel.

About the Author

Seanan McGuire

Author

Seanan McGuire is the author of several bestselling contemporary fantasy novels, including the October Daye series beginning with 2009’s Rosemary and Rue, and (as Mira Grant) Feed, Deadline, and Blackout. In 2010 she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She lives in California.

Learn More About Seanan
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8 years ago

Speaking of books it’s been entirely too long since I last reread …

And I love, love, LOVE the cover art.  Tom Canty can do no wrong.

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Christine
8 years ago

I also read this at about 14 or 15, and have just recently re-read the book. I didn’t notice the first time just how smoothly the book was written, how plausible all the characters are (it’s nice to have a realistic main character, but she needs realistic supporting characters to really be valuable), and a realistic course load (no characters who seem to have picked all their courses based on how easy they are). I know that “realistic” is unusual praise for a (ostensibly) fantasy novel, but this is a book where the first 2/3 are just someone going through undergrad, and it feels real enough to bother reading, and to catch your interest. (Despite spending all the time wondering when we’re going to start getting into the part of the story that everyone knows.)

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8 years ago

This was one of the defining books of my college experience.  If you said “pink curtains” to any of my friends we would all still know what you meant.  My wife and I have owned six or more copies over the years attritted to loans to friends that never made it back to us or wear and tear  This book alone (even absent all of her other amazing work) continues to put Dean on my list of favorite authors.

Probably time to reread it yet again.

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8 years ago

This book also changed my life when I read it at 14 or 15. It’s the reason I did a double major in English Lit and Classics. I still re-read it every year and it always makes me wish I were going back to school. Though, for the record, Janet doesn’t write a sonnet a day, that’s Nick. 

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8 years ago

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but it changed my life, too: I read it after I’d had a year of university and hadn’t been able to go back for a second year due to messing up my financial aid paperwork. I might not have gone back to college, but Tam Lin made me so homesick for it that I went back as soon as I could.

 

I write this sitting sideways on my couch. I just turned my head to look at my bookshelves across the room, and saw my two copies (so I can lend it out safely) sitting there between Susan Cooper’s Seaward and Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country. (You can tell I didn’t sort by title within author! I decided to keep series in order, instead.)

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Entwild
8 years ago

I also love the cover art to this book. I’ve actually never read it, but came across a copy in a used book store several years back and took a photo for reference, because it looked so lovely. I’m still not entirely sure if I would like the story, but it’s cool to see mention and enthusiastic discussion of it.

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8 years ago

Tam Lin is the closest thing I have to a favourite book. It RUINED university for me in some ways, but also helped me embrace the idea of an academic life for the first time. (I was, btw, a Classics student) My relationship with Shakespeare is inextricably tied to my relationship with this novel; I’m pretty sure it’s Janet’s fault that I was reading random Shakespeare plays for fun at 15.

Love, so much love for this book and this essay.

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8 years ago

This book was also (along with Ellen Kushner’s stunningly good Thomas the Rhymer) an impetus for me to go seek out recordings of the Child ballads, and hence to discover Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention and more good music than I can even begin to list.

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Rina Weisman
8 years ago

I cannot tell you how happy I am that you love this book too!  It’s been a favourite of mine since it was published, and I re-read it every year.  It’s a truly magical book – the poetry, the loves, and loves lost, the quotes, the sincerity and honesty of the characters – it’s just a masterpiece.  Pamela Dean is one of the greats.

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Terri Windling
8 years ago

Thank you, Seanan, for this lovely essay, which I hope will bring new readers to Tam Lin. Pamela Dean is one of the quiet masters of fantasy, in my opinion, and I’d love to see her work discussed more often.

Mayhem
8 years ago

This is a book I’ve picked up a half dozen times and just never been in the right mood for.

Can anyone shed any light on what the pink curtains reference is about?

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8 years ago

Mayhem @@@@@ 11, it’s a code among roommates for “this is an emergency and I need your help.” Since I have the ebook, it will obligingly let me copy in a bit of the scene where they set it up, after they hear that there had been a suicide at the school a few years earlier. (The ebook copy function even throws in the citation, cool!

“I want you guys to promise me something,” said Molly, sliding herself, again alarmingly, into a sitting position on the floor with her back against the bed.

“What?” said Janet, obligingly.

“If any of us is thinking of doing something like that, we have to tell the other two first. I mean it. Even if we don’t room together all four years; even if we haven’t seen one another for months; even if we think we hate each other. And the other ones have to promise to listen, no matter what, if one of us calls and says it’s important.”

“You’d better assign us a password,” said Janet. She caught Christina’s eye, trying to gauge her reaction. Christina shrugged; Janet recognized, already, her you-guys-are-weird-but-I-guess-this-is-harmless gesture.

Dean, Pamela (2006-08-03). Tam Lin (p. 34). Penguin Young Readers Group. Kindle Edition.

Mayhem
8 years ago

Thanks.  That makes a lot more sense.  

As a fairly emotionally crippled reserved male, it seems odd that you would need to make such a vow, but I can see the advantages from a mental health point of view.  Is that really a thing these days?

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Kate
8 years ago

The first time I read this I was a teen, and never realized how much fantasy was woven into the fabric of the novel. You can say that the first part is just about college, but the heroine is moving in and out of Faery the whole time she’s there. I just never caught it, as she didn’t at first, until I read it when I was older.  It’s magnificently written.

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8 years ago

Mayhem @@@@@ 13: I don’t know that it has ever been a thing, and as far as “these days,” the book was first published in 1990! But it works for Janet, Molly, and Christina; and it seems that some readers have recognized that it would be useful in their own lives and adopted it.

stevenhalter
8 years ago

For those who are interested in what Pamela is doing recently (and possibly helping her ability to revise and rewrite), she has a Patreon page at:

Pamela Dean Patreon

 

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8 years ago

Jo Walton also likes Tam Lin

http://www.tor.com/2008/10/08/tamlin/

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SL
8 years ago

Great post, Seanan!

I read Tam Lin in my early twenties.  I recall liking it a lot, but–25 yrs later–I don’t remember much about it.  Seanan, you’ve now convinced me I read it too late!  

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8 years ago

I also may have read this too late, when I was already in grad school. I remember not liking it as much as some of the others in the Fairy Tales series. This post and comment thread has about convinced me to read it again and see if I can see what I was missing back then.

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Hilary Silvert Newell
8 years ago

I am so thrillef to see that an author I follow adores a book thatI adore. 

Its so rare to see any kind of critical analysis or responses to fantasy fiction, especially that written before the internet.  This essay is a like drop of ink in the clear, content free water of so much web content. 

I wish Terri Windling would otganize an anthology of literary critism of fantasy classics. I would so love to see a conparison of the work of Pamela Dean and Margaret Mahy, who are both fantastic prose stylists dealing with young women’s emotional development.

Meanwhile, thank you for bringing attention to a great novel.

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TK
8 years ago

I love Pamela Dean’s writing generally and “Tam Lin” most of all.  I am not sure why her novels aren’t on Audible (get on that, someone!!) but I would buy them all over again in that format if I could.  Love love LOVE them.

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Sue Bursztynski
8 years ago

I read it when it first came out and now can’t find my copy. And if it’s in ebook, it isn’t on the Australian pages. :-( Which is weird, because the Charles De Lint book from that series is readily available on iBooks. It must be a copyright issue. 

I loved the whole idea of setting the ballad on a 1970s university campus. It worked for me, anyway. A wonderful book

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Michael M. Jones
8 years ago

I love this book more than the ocean loves salt. It’s quite literally one of my very favorite books of all time–one of the few where I can open it to any page and sink into the writing, time and time again. It’s a fundamental influence upon my own writing, one where I wish I could capture the language and flow and style, if just for a moment.

Several years ago, during a class on Magical Realism I was taking towards my MFA in Childrens’ Literature, I chose this book to discuss, and I think I made a few converts that day. I’ve sung its praises a hundred times in a hundred different ways over the years.

What’s funny is that it came out just as I was in college, so it both set me up for some highly unrealistic expectations of the experience, and echoed certain moments and happenings, enough to resonate within me. 

I will champion Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin forever.

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Ella
8 years ago

Hands down one of my favourite books of all time. I just glanced over to my copy and noted that it is so tattered from repeated re-readings that it is on the verge of disintegration. I must get a backup copy!

CJ
CJ
8 years ago

Finally got my hands on a copy (an older copy) and it’s definitely on my TBR list. After reading this, I may bump it up. I love fairy tales, Celtic mythology and a little romance, so this one is most decidedly up my alley.