Catherynne M. Valente

These days, I'm reasonably certain that I'm Catherynne M. Valente—author, poet, sometime critic who is known to read as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Like Errour a-dripping in her cave, I vomit books—but don't let that put you off. The publishers make sure they're soaped up shined to a high gloss before they go out. I'm just a little old lady curled up in my house on chicken legs on an island in Maine, settin' a spell on my porch, drinking whiskey out of the bottle and scrawling poems on the birch trees. Except for the part where I'm a 31-year-old black-haired siren (you know, half-bird, half-woman, one hell of a baritone) re-patriated from Japan, scribing it godridden down I–95.

I wrote a few little books, and then I wrote some more, and I won a few beautiful statues for them, and then a mouse tried to get them to write themselves, and they ended up flooding my basement. I'm boiling up more by the day in my big iron pot, and mouse stew besides. I'm an awfully quick young crone, so pull up your paisley socks and try to keep up. I never stay in one place long, and I leave a wasteland when I go, with wounded thighs and ironclad alibis to keep me safe from harm.

All speculations on my undoubtedly nefarious character should be directed to others; the Goddess Rumor is, after all, a dear associate, indebted to me as she is for the purchase of those fabulous winged shoes.