Today, we’re thrilled to welcome back Dan Coxon, with news of an exciting project out this month!

Heartwood: A Mythago Anthology is a collection of short stories inspired by the seminal Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. Dan has brought together an incredible line-up to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Mythago Wood, and before we hand you over to hear from Dan about the process, let’s find out more about Heartwood:

As the pre-mythagos in each of our heads will naturally vary according to our experience, so the wood would manifest differently were new people to spend time among its trees. What then might we see?
Commemorating the 40th anniversary of Robert Holdstock’s seminal fantasy novel Mythago Wood (winner of the World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award), Heartwood for the first time opens Holdstock’s world to other writers. From new tales of Ryhope and Oak Lodge to strange encounters with mythagos further afield, this groundbreaking anthology revisits the old pathways and cuts new tracks through the undergrowth, drawing ever closer to the mysteries of Lavondyss—the Old Forbidden Place at the heart of the wood.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Matter of Albion – Michael Moorcock

Editor’s Note – Dan Coxon

Transient in Green – RJ Barker

Paved with Gold – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Here there be Monsters – Tim Waggoner

Raptor – Maura McHugh

Horsey Horsey – James Brogden

Et in Acadia – John Langan

The Crossing Place – Paul Kane

What Happened to the Green Boy? – Gary Budden

The Dog on the Hookland Road – Justina Robson

Voici les Neiges d’Antan – Chaz Brenchley

Old Coal – Mark Morris

The Myth of Grief – Steven Savile

Into the Heart – Allen Stroud

Lovely, Dark and Deep – Lisa Tuttle

Prey – Matthew Ward

Mad Pranks and Merry Jests – Jen Williams

Hearts of Ice – Peter Haynes

Calling the Tune – Lucy Holland

The Known Song – Aliya Whiteley

Knight of the Air – Gareth Hanrahan

A Mythago Wood Glossary

There are plenty of Hive favourites in there!

Heartwood: A Mythago Anthology  is due for release this month – you can pre-order your copy from PS Publishing

Rewilding Holdstock’s Mythago Wood

by Dan Coxon

I wasn’t going to edit another anthology.

That was the pledge I’d made, a decision born from exhaustion and frustration. My anthology for Titan Books, Isolation, had sold well, but a combination of naïve contracting (on my part) and Liz Truss crashing the economy had meant I only just broke even. At least I’d been able to pay the contributors pro rates for their stories. I just wasn’t sure that I wanted to do it again.

Like all resolutions, it only lasted until a new idea came along. In this instance, that’s a good thing – because Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology might just be the best thing I’ve done.

It’s worth rewinding for a moment. If you’re not already familiar with Robert Holdstock’s novel (first published in 1984), then you’ll want to set that right. Mythago Wood won both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award, and it’s fair to say that it’s possibly the one true classic to emerge from the fantasy genre in the last fifty years. In his introduction to Heartwood, Michael Moorcock calls it “the outstanding fantasy book of its time”. I wouldn’t argue with Mike.

Like many fans of the novel, I read it in my teens, probably five or six years after it was published (I don’t remember exactly when). I do remember loving it the first time I read it, with its weird combination of folklore and mythology, woodland fantasy and pseudo-scifi. There are elements of horror in there too, and adventure, and romance. It’s no exaggeration to say that it contains worlds.

I was in my thirties, however, when I rediscovered Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood. I had hopefully grown a little older and wiser, but the book seemed to have grown too. The protection of ancient woodlands was front page news, and projects were under way to rewild our green spaces with wildflowers and trees, beavers and boar. Its tales of myths woven into the very consciousness of the people felt as topical as ever. Fifteen years earlier, it had seemed to me a well-crafted diversion. Now, it was something more.

Naturally, my revived interest in Mythago Wood led me to its sequel, Lavondyss, and the books that came after (The Hollowing, Gate of Ivory, Avilion, and the novella The Bone Forest). It’s fair to say that Lavondyss blew me away. While Mythago Wood was a fantasy novel of the highest order, Lavondyss went deeper and weirder, its unconventional structure and startlingly dense mythology taking it beyond the familiar tropes and into a new realm entirely. I’ve said before that Lavondyss should have been shortlisted for at least one major literary award, and I’ll stand by that. Even today, its use of language and imagery is astonishing.

All of which brings us back to the moment the lightning struck. Re-reading Holdstock’s novels, the thought jumped into my head: what if we were to commission an anthology of brand-new Ryhope stories?

If you know anything about copyright law, you’ll know this was a dumb idea from the start. In the UK, copyright lasts until seventy years after the author’s death, and there was no way this could happen without the permission of his estate. The modern editions are also published by Gollancz in their Fantasy Masterworks series, and any anthology would need their co-operation at the very least. There were so many potential stumbling blocks and moving parts that it gave me a migraine just thinking about it.

But still – the thought would not go away. It was 2022, and in 2024 it would be the 40th anniversary of Mythago Wood’s publication. If any writer was overdue a resurgence, it was Robert Holdstock. 

I started thinking about who I could invite to write stories. This is often how an anthology begins to cement itself in my mind: not just as a concept, but as a table of contents. What if I asked RJ Barker? Might Adrian Tchaikovsky write a story? Or Mark Morris? Perhaps some of the younger writers it had clearly influenced, like Lucy Hounsom or Peter Haynes?

This is always the tipping point. I hadn’t yet asked any of those people, but the idea that they might write something, and the book might look something like this – it lodged itself in my thoughts and wouldn’t leave. If I could make it work, that book would be amazing. I felt my pulse quicken every time I thought of it. What if…

What if.

In May 2022, I took the first step and contacted Howard Morhaim at the Morhaim Literary Agency, who I knew handled Holdstock’s estate. I asked if they might be open to the idea. Then I waited.

Three weeks later, by this point almost out of the blue (I’d convinced myself that it wasn’t going to happen, it couldn’t happen, the idea was dead in the water), I received a response. Howard had been in touch with Sarah Biggs, Robert’s heir, and they were both happy for the project to go ahead. We had a green light. It was time to return to Ryhope Wood.

I won’t bore you with the minutiae of the commissioning process. With every anthology of commissioned stories or essays there’s a process of back and forth, in which you make a list of authors you’d like to invite and then firmly cross your fingers. Some say yes immediately. Some say no. Others never respond, even when you follow up politely. It’s exciting and heartbreaking in equal measure – but if you’re lucky, something like a book begins to take shape.

In the case of Heartwood, though, I noticed something different happening. There were still the emails declining the opportunity – but the vast majority came back with a resounding yes. Not only that, but several had personal reasons for re-entering Ryhope. Rob Holdstock was a popular and likeable figure within the UK fantasy community, and many of the contributors had fond memories of him, or anecdotes to share. For a lot of the people who were writing for the book, this wasn’t just another short story commission – this was personal.

And with that came a second realisation. I was dealing with something that was close to people’s hearts.

As an editor, every anthology comes with a degree of responsibility. After all, it’s not just your career that’s on the line. You’re also helping build the careers of others. I’ve always felt that it’s part of the anthology editor’s job to present each and every story in the best light possible, to find the perfect place for it, in which it can truly shine. It’s one of the reasons why I think story order is so important (and why I always prefer to read anthologies from beginning to end). Context is everything.

In this instance, however, I had another responsibility. Not only to the authors we were publishing, but also to the memory of Robert Holdstock. If we were going to bring Ryhope Wood back to life, then it had to live up to his high standards – and it had to fit into the timeline and world he had created. The closest comparison I could think of was fiction franchises, where authors would write within pre-existing worlds. More than just writers for hire, though, these authors loved the source material.

So, I went back to the roots. Re-reading Holdstock’s Mythago novels, I compiled a list of characters and terms, determined that we would get the language right. (This list is included in Heartwood as a glossary at the back of the book – just in case anyone needs such a thing.) I kept a timeline too, and made notes on the buildings – particularly Oak Lodge – and the characters as they developed through the series. I immersed myself in Ryhope Wood, and drew a map to help find my way out again. I may have been sat in my office, but my heart was in Lavondyss.

Then, having mapped out Holdstock’s world, I set it aside.

Along with a responsibility to present the contributors’ stories in the best possible light, I strongly believe that it’s also part of the anthology editor’s role to facilitate and encourage their creativity, to allow them the freedom to roam wherever their imagination takes them. Some editors prefer to take a more controlling role – but for me, you always see the best stories when writers are intellectually and emotionally engaged with what they’re writing, and that only comes when they’re allowed to pursue their own inspiration.

In this instance, that meant allowing differing interpretations of Holdstock’s world. Yes, our book had to be consistent with his; and yes, it had to be recognisable as the world of Ryhope Wood and Hogback Ridge and the Horse Shrine. More than that, though, these had to be new stories, different interpretations of that world, filtered through the imaginations and experiences of our writers.

I think we achieved that, and more. 

The finished stories in Heartwood come at Ryhope from as many different angles as there are contributors. Some are set at a distance, extrapolating the ‘scientific’ discoveries from Mythago Wood and applying them to new locations; others are deep within the wood, in a couple of cases within Lavondyss itself. There are those that skirt its fringes, too, revisiting Oak Lodge and uncovering what has happened there in the intervening years.

This meant the timeline had to grow. The notes that I’d made while re-reading the Mythago novels were extended, to bring the locations (and, in some cases, the characters) through to the present. I wanted our book to be a colourful patchwork of stories, but it still needed to be a coherent whole. An extension of the Mythago series rather than a side note.

That’s where the order of the stories came into play. I moved them around like pieces of a jigsaw, trying to make them fit together, finding the right home for each one. I strongly suggest that when you read Heartwood, you start at the beginning and work your way towards the end. They make sense that way: starting at a distance from Ryhope and circling it for a while, before plunging beneath its canopy and pressing onwards to the Old Forbidden Place. You’ll see Oak Lodge change and be redeveloped too, a subplot to our journey as we move towards the mystery at the heart of the wood.

I hope we’ve done Rob proud. I truly believe we have. And hopefully we can bring a new readership to his astonishing novels, a series that undoubtedly stands as one of the greatest achievements in modern fantasy literature. We had giant boots to fill.

Heartwood: A Mythago Anthology  is due for release this month – you can pre-order your copy from PS Publishing

Dan Coxon is an award-winning editor and writer based in London. He has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards and the British Fantasy Awards (six times), with Writing the Uncanny (co-edited with Richard V. Hirst) winning the British Fantasy Award for Best Non-Fiction 2022. His anthology Being Dad won a Saboteur Award in 2016.

His short stories have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Shakespeare Unleashed, Beyond the Veil, Fiends in the Furrows III and Great British Horror 7: Major Arcana. His latest fiction anthology – Isolation – was published by Titan Books in September 2022.

The second book in the Writing series, Writing the Future, was published in September 2023, and the third, Writing the Mystery, is forthcoming in 2024.

He runs a proofreading and editing service, working with both publishers and private clients.

Website