© Берестова А. И., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2023

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2023

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JUST THIS SIDE OF BYZANTIUM[1] An introduction

I must say that this book was a surprise. The nature of such surprises is that you begin your work around any word, or series of words that happens along in your head instead of trying to develop a made up idea. I call it a word-association process.

Thank God, I found this method quite early in my writing career. I would simply get out of bed each morning, walk to my desk, and put down some word. Then associations with that word would show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my surprise, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely.

So, first I searched my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night from my childhood, and made stories from these.

Then I looked back at the green apple trees and the old house of my parents, and the house next door where my grandparents lived, and all the lawns of my childhood summers, and I began to try words for all that.

So in this book you have a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully appropriate. I was gathering images and impressions all of my life, and forgetting them. Words (like, for instance, dandelion wine) were catalysts that sent me back and opened the memories out, and helped me see what those memories had to offer.

From the age of twenty-four to thirty-six, it was my nearly every day game: to walk myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass in order to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves or about picking wild grapes with my father and brother, and, perhaps, remember a fragment of a letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his sorrows.

I also wanted to see the ravine, especially on those nights when walking home late after seeing The Phantom of the Opera, my brother Skip would run ahead and hide under the ravine-creek bridge like the Lonely One and jump out and seize me, yelling, so that I ran, fell, and ran again, babbling all the way home. That was great stuff.