A Mer’s Best Friend - Mer expert, author blogger Carolyn Turgeon

by Matthew Morse

A few years ago, it started to become clear to my Facebook friends and family, some of whom I had not seen on a regular basis for years, that I liked mermaids. This started to draw some questions as to my motivation, given that I am a single man in my forties and have no children.

“I have to ask Matt, what is up with the mermaids?”

“What is with you and these Mermaids? I think you may have a fetish? Just saying.”

There are some good arguments for these questions, if one believes that I am the sort of man who objectifies women: the vast majority of the mermaids I follow are significantly younger than I am and they often present themselves in clamshell bikini tops. Perhaps I am nothing more than a “mervert,” a term that one of my dearest friends in the community defines as “someone who ogles and says gross things.”

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. I learned of a community of people and gradually found myself becoming part of it. Why on earth would I want to alienate myself from these fascinating people by objectifying them?

Although my initial attraction was to the grace and the style with which mermaids glide through the water, it soon became clear to me that there is a great deal more to them than meets the eye. Their passions include a wide range of subjects, including conservation and environmental awareness, the amazing wonders of animal and plant life under the sea, the humane treatment of those creatures, incredible athleticism and fitness, art of every manner (tailmaking, painting, singing, et cetera), self-esteem, and the incredible possibilities that come when one follows a dream – and how sometimes, that dream can be met with mockery from longtime friends and family. My new friends also raised my awareness of Asperger’s Syndrome, dyslexia, and type II diabetes.

When playwright William Congreve wrote "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned" in the 1697 play The Mourning Bride, he must have had no idea how much of an understatement his words would become when applied to mermaids and their supporters. The fury of a mermaid who has been wronged has little equal. There are people in this world who have little regard for crediting artists for their work, preserving the gifts of nature, or honoring the sentience of cetaceans. Knowing mermaids is not always a day at the beach, but often about how human behavior has put that beach into jeopardy – and what we can do to reverse that impact.

Both the water and the fire – the passion and the fury – have been passed along to me. I feel myself so fortunate to have been embraced within the mer-community and to have learned from its members. I now find myself helping to carry the banner in their marches on some issues, as well as delighting in the successes in their personal and professional lives, both above and below the waterline. Through a combination of admiration and mutual respect, it is my great honor to share that many of us have gone from strangers to friends.

And that, dear reader, is what is up with me and mermaids. If there is something wrong with showing respect and developing community, I don’t want to be right.

Fire by tobiee aka Tobias Kwan

[photo by Joi Brokek]

A Mer's Best Friend

Author Carolyn Turgeon, creator of I Am a Mermaid— 'a delicate ladylike blog for mermaids and the humans who love them'

Author, and widely recognized mermaid expert, Carolyn Turgeon, runs a hugely popular blog called I Am a Mermaid. There, she routinely seeks out and interviews interesting individuals who lurk in and around the mer waters, selflessly promoting others and even putting some on the map! We get to know these mer denizens through Carolyn's incisive questioning. We get to know her rich characters through her books. Now here's your chance to get to know her!

Her bio reads like that of a fantasy character, or at least one of those really captivating kids we always regret not getting to know better in school. In her own words she describes the channels she swam to become the mermaid she is today:

I was born in Michigan and grew up in Illinois, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. I wrote my first novel at age eight called The Mystery at the Dallas Zoo, about a group of kid sleuths called in to find a stolen tapir. I submitted my first story at age 15, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, about a doll whose eyes popped open when you left the room. I went on to write many poems about my soul, and in college wrote a handful of short stories, including one about a strange, magical place called Rain Village. Which would, many moons later, become my first novel.

In the mean time, I graduated from Penn State and went on to graduate school at UCLA, where I studied medieval Italian poetry. After getting a Master’s degree I left graduate school to write novels, and moved to New York, where I worked as a writer for a large engineering firm and then a think tank and did various freelance work, once writing a love letter for a heartbroken Japanese woman. I also spent a lot of time taking photographs, making collages, and drinking pink cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel.

Rain Village was published in 2006 and since then I’ve become a full-time writer and published three more novels, all of them based on classic fairytales: Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story, Mermaid(which might be a movie, click here for more info), and my first and only (so far) middle-grade novel The Next Full Moon. I love the combination of beauty and darkness you find in these old stories, and love taking a traditional tale and illuminating it in some new way. I also love the combination of gritty reality with gorgeous, lush fantasy. My newest book, The Fairest of Them All, will be out in August from Simon & Schuster, and is about Rapunzel growing up to be Snow White’s stepmother.

While I was writing Mermaid, people started sending me mermaid photos and bits of mermaid news and then mermaids started appearing everywhere in my travels. At one point I was staying in Berlin, Germany, where I had a friend who did a mermaid burlesque act, and then I went to see Leonard Cohen in Warsaw and was shocked to find myself in a city whose symbol has been the mermaid since the middle ages. I gave into fate and created my mermaid blog I Am a Mermaid, and started interviewing everyone from Tim Gunn to Alice Hoffman to the Magnetic Fields about these mythical creatures. I talked to so many mermaid lovers and real-life mermaids, in fact, that I found myself giving into their allure. I went to mermaid camp at Weeki Wachee Springs (and wore a tail and swam with a wild manatee) and even got myself scuba certified some months later in Nicaragua.

I’m now based in central Pennsylvania, teach in Alaska at the University of Alaska at Anchorage’s LowResidency MFA program, and am

As a diligent blogger, she is constantly interviewing and promoting others. I was delighted to get to turn the tables and shine the spotlight on her!

(Kindly pay no attention to the gushing, fawning nature of my questions. Being a fan will cause that.)

You're incredibly bright, articulate, witty, and interesting as all get out. So why mermaids? What first intrigued you and propelled you into your unique career?

Why thank you, Joy! I’m a novelist (my fifth comes out in August) and my third novel was a retelling of the original Hans Christian Andersen little mermaid story. As I was writing the book, people started sending me mermaid stuff all the time—photos of mermaid statues or paintings they’d come across, mermaid articles, all kinds of stuff. I was also travelling a lot at that time, and started encountering mermaids everywhere on my travels. They really are everywhere, once you start looking for them. I was in Berlin, Germany, where my friend did a mermaid burlesque/singing act, and so I interviewed her, and I went to Warsaw to see Leonard Cohen and realized that the mermaid has been the symbol of Warsaw since the middle ages, so I took a lot of photos and video there… I deliberately went to Denmark to pay homage to Hans Christian Andersen, and basically just started gathering mermaid stuff in my regular life. I even planned a trip to Weeki Wachee when I was in Florida visiting my grandmother, and by pure coincidence received an email from Weeki’s artist-in-residence Julie Komenda the week before. I ended up meeting up with Julie and, through her, tons of the Weeki mermaids. At a certain point, I decided I ought to start a blog to capture this stuff, and then I thought I ought to do some interviews. I emailed anyone I could think of and in early 2011 started to post interviews with people like Tim Gunn, novelists like Alice Hoffman, mermaids like Hannah Fraser… What I love about mermaids is how flexible they are, how they inspire people in so many unique ways, and so I tried to represent that a bit.

You are considered an expert in the field of mermaids. Do you find it a joy? A responsibility?

Oh, well I’ve become fascinated by mermaids and mermaid culture. I have to resist doing too much because there’s so much out there and I could spend countless hours writing about only that. And I’m a novelist! I earn a living through my books, not through my mermaid blog or the writing I’ve done about mermaids for places like The Hairpin.

What sort of doors and opportunities have opened up as a result?

Well I didn’t start out with any kind of real mermaid obsession or anything. I just wrote a novel with a mermaid in it, the same way I’ve written novels with fairies and trapeze stars and witches and swan maidens. But once I started the blog and started meeting and interviewing so many mermaids out there, I found