Clovermead: Inspirations

My first image of Clovermead as a yellow-haired girl came from the poem "For Anne Gregory" by William Butler Yeats. When I began writing Clovermead, Clovermead was the daughter of Tam Lin, stolen away to fairy-land; I had gotten interested in writing about Tam Lin after reading Pamela Dean's novel Tam Lin. After the Tam Lin plot-line disappeared, along with the setting in fairy-land, Clovermead started to chatter in a fashion remarkably like that of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables--and she was adventurous like Lloyd Alexander's Princess Eilonwy.

The Lands of Lady Moon are modeled after various parts of America; Timothy Vale is something like Vermont, the Chaffen Hills resemble West Virginia, the Salt Heath is like the Arizona desert, and the Tansy Steppes are like the Great Plains. There are also echoes of parts of Europe, but the land is ultimately meant to be American.

It wasn't deliberate, but I realized after I finished writing Clovermead that Lord Ursus has a passing resemblance to another bear in a comic book I read two decades ago.

Everything about Clovermead owes a great deal to J. R. R. Tolkien.