Loren McDougal, he was my grandfather. You may not know the name, but the stories? Everyone knows the stories. You grew up with his lyrical, metrical, fanciful tales of faeries – he insisted on the old spelling – in the garden. Everyone younger than sixty read them as a child. Twenty-three books he crafted, lovingly detailed masterpieces with lavish illustrations of proper little faeries going about their proper little faerie business in the fictional front garden of a fictional hedge-row cottage on a fictional lane in some nonsense town in Scotland.