The Making of This Epic Story
by Elysia Gallo
I’m a senior acquisitions editor at Llewellyn Worldwide, and when I first took on this project, I didn’t really know what I was getting into! I had met Oberon at PantheaCon, and he was eager to share his life story—and what a life story it has been. John Sulak offered to do the painstaking work of stitching together all these threads, interviewing folks who knew Oberon and Morning Glory over the years, and sitting down for long, long tales told by Oberon and Morning Glory themselves.
In one of Oberon’s first emails to me, sent in 2006, he told me, “You might find it of interest to know that ‘Elysia’ was the name I’d chosen for my first child, had it been a daughter. Instead, a son was born to my first wife and me, on September 15, 1963. We named him Bryan. But I’ve always loved the name Elysia, and if I’d ever had a girl . . .” So I guess in some way I was meant to become part of this story, and here it is.
In 2009 John Sulak sent me the first draft of this manuscript. It was 370,000 words long. For those of you who don’t deal with word counts every day, that’s more than twice the length of the book you hold in your hands. That’s 1,155 typed pages. Not counting the six appendices that were sent separately!
Publishing is a funny industry. For reasons that could take up a book of their own, here at Llewellyn it was agreed that we needed to have John and Oberon trim the book to 150,000 words or less; otherwise it would have become a prohibitively expensive, gargantuan doorstop that readers could neither afford nor lift. I advised Oberon to save that manuscript for his children and his grandchildren because it truly was a treasure trove, but that we needed to seriously narrow our focus.
There was an entire chapter on Gwydion Pendderwen, for example, which perhaps one day Oberon can publish as an article. There was an entire chapter on Leonard Lake, a bit player in the story you’ve just read. There were complete genealogies of Oberon’s and Morning Glory’s families and a recounting of every summer job either of them had had. There was a reincarnated cat, a cat who liked to ride on the roof of the car, and at least three sad cat burials. There were cars broken down at the side of the road (and the names of complete strangers who towed them), dead skunks, storage lockers, dirt bikes, a World’s Fair, and snakes in the snow. There were three stories that had to do with people being naked and getting poison ivy. There were pages and pages of drug trips.
But more than anything—there were names. Names of every friend and lover, every dearly loved CAW member, every helping hand in the course of their lives, every enemy. As a publisher with a healthy dose of caution, Llewellyn needs to be very careful about what it prints because of privacy concerns. We aimed to secure the permission of every named or identifiable person in this book if they weren’t a contributor or a “public figure.” And that led to a lot of people having their names changed or left out of this book. This was not Oberon’s wish, and he fought me every step of the way—after all, his desire to be inclusive in the telling of his life, not excluding anyone who meant anything to him, is basically the theme of his life.
So, if you saw yourself anywhere in this book and we changed your name or masked your identity in some way, but you’d like to stand on the record, as it were, please write to Llewellyn’s reprint committee (our address can be found at the back of this book or on the Internet) and let us know, and perhaps we will be able to change it in the next printing with your permission. Likewise, if you’re wondering why you aren’t in this story at all, disguised or otherwise, and are now wondering whether you were important to Oberon and Morning Glory after all, I’m here to reassure you that you are. You were in the book, I can guarantee that, but your contribution to this great story was somehow left on the cutting-room floor. We take full responsibility for that; we just couldn’t get it all in there and still get this important story published.
This book has been a fun challenge, through four years of rewrites, meetings, and long conversations. I hope you enjoyed the ride.