fantasy

L Is for Literature

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 1 Comment

I was already thinking that L was for Literature or maybe Literary. My thought was to riff on the ways these words are used to exclude, marginalize, and intimidate. I’ve done this before. I could do it again.

Then I came across something I’d posted to this blog in 2014, after Ursula K. Le Guin was honored at the 65th National Book Awards for her distinguished contribution to American letters. Her acceptance speech is wonderful. As I wrote at the time: “In barely five minutes she proved that her distinguished contribution continues. Her speech seems to be going viral. Good. It’s a challenge to writers, publishers, and readers. Let’s live up to it.”

2014 is pretty much the Pleistoscene at this point. Did we even imagine that Donald Trump could become president, or what havoc he would unleash in the country? Le Guin, like other fantasy and science fiction adepts, knew what mayhem and destruction can be unleashed on the world by an arrogant and ignorant conjurer. Whatever went viral then is long since forgotten now. But this is worth remembering. Le Guin reminds us that “literature” is so much more than what the gatekeepers and the bean-counters want us to believe, and so much more important.

So here again is the video of her speech, and the text as transcribed by Parker Higgins and posted on his blog. He notes that the bits in parentheses were ad-libbed to the audience.

RIP Ursula (1929–2018). May your words never die.

Thank you, Neil [Gaiman, presenter], and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

Subversive Cookbookery

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 4 Comments

A cookbook I’ve got a recipe in was reprinted last year.

To realize how improbable this statement is, you have to know that I am so not a cook. My mother wasn’t a cook. Neither of my grandmothers were cooks. Somehow I managed to get by on fast food; easy stuff like hamburgers, scrambled eggs, and canned soup; and the kindness of roommates until I moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985.

On Martha’s Vineyard there were (and are) no fast-food joints, I lived alone, and the disconnect between restaurant prices and my income made even takeout a non-option except on special occasions (or when someone else was paying). So I taught myself to cook stuff that I like to eat, in quantities such that I can reheat meal-size portions and call it fast food.

I am, however, and have been since the winter of 1975–76, a baker, primarily of bread. So my inclusion in The Bakery Men Don’t See maybe isn’t so surprising? Thing is, my inclusion has less to do with the excellence of my breads (which are pretty good) than with my luck at being, for once in my life, in the right place at the right time.

The time was March 1991; the place was on the fringes of Madison, Wisconsin, specifically WisCon 15, the feminist science fiction convention. I discovered WisCon, and f/sf cons in general while promoting my three women’s f/sf anthologies, which came out from Crossing Press in 1989 (Memories & Visions), 1990 (The Women Who Walk Through Fire), and 1991 (Tales of Magic Realism by Women: Dreams in a Minor Key). Pat Murphy and Pamela Sargent were the guests of honor at WisCon 15.

At the end of her GoH speech, Pat announced the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award.

And so I would like to announce the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, to be presented annually to a fictional work that explores and expands the roles of women and men. We’re still in the planning stages, but we plan to appoint a panel of five judges and we plan to finance the award — and this is another stroke of genius on Karen’s [co-conspirator Karen Joy Fowler] part — through bake sakes. (If you want to volunteer to run a bake sale, talk to me after the speech.)

Now I know that people are going to say that science fiction has enough awards. I know people are going to say, “Pat, why do we need another award?” And all I can say is — if you ask me why we need this award, then you haven’t been listening.

My copy of the first edition, liberally grease-stained from 25+ years of use.

No sooner had Pat finished speaking than the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award began to take shape, thanks to the astonishing creative energy of the WisCon crew. It was indeed financed by bake sales — and eventually also by uproariously funny auctions, T-shirt sales, two cookbooks, and other means. Within a few months The Bakery Men Don’t See had been compiled and published. (Its title riffs on Tiptree’s probably best-known story, “The Women Men Don’t See.”) It was even nominated for a Hugo!

The Tiptree Award survived and thrived. So did WisCon, which before long had moved into the Concourse in downtown Madison on Memorial Day weekend, which is where and when you will find it today. And so did feminist f/sf — the work being published these days is daunting in its quality and quantity, but if you’re looking for a place to start, you can’t do better than the winners and honor lists for previous Tiptree Awards.

The spiffy design and production values of the new edition of The Bakery Men Don’t See reflect this growth and vitality. It includes the original introductions by co-editors Diane Martin and Jeanne Gomoll (if you know WisCon, you’ll recognize both names) and the GoH speeches by Pamela Sargent and Pat Murphy. It all holds up well, and none of it feels as dated as one might wish.

I’m not about to retire my first edition, however. Its grease stains testify to how well-used it is, plus it contains the contributors’ signatures I collected, high-school-yearbook style, at WisCon 16 in 1992.

On the other hand — flipping through the pristine new edition, I keep noticing recipes I’ve never tried and had almost forgotten, and rereading the stories that go with them. My family has no culinary tradition worth writing about, but other contributors have wonderful stories to tell about where their recipes came from.

The Bakery Men Don’t See is available for $12 from Lulu.com, as is other cool Tiptree-related stuff. Bakery‘s equally wonderful sequel, Her Smoke Rose Up from Supper, covers — you guessed it — entrées and other kinds of food you’re likely to eat before dessert. Unless, of course, you observe one of the Tiptree Award’s mottos: “Life is uncertain — eat dessert first.” I’m in that one too. It’s available in its original edition for $10 from the Tiptree Award store.

Slender Trends In Modern American Horror: How Original Are We Really?

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 1 Comment

I don’t write or read horror (so I tell myself), but horror or dark fantasy elements are working their way to the surface of my mainstream novel, and this blog post (essay, really) has given me valuable insight into what I’m dealing with and how to develop it further. If you deal with myth and archetypes in your work (don’t we all??), do yourself a big favor and follow the Zombie Salmon.

Zombie Salmon (the Horror Continues)

For most of us older Horror writers and readers, the whole Slenderman takeover of youthful Horror audiences has remained slightly under the radar. Were it not for the heinous attempted murder trial of two unbalanced young girls which keeps resurfacing, it probably would have remained so…For many it is shocking, alarming…coming from nowhere – which makes it even more terrifying to contemplate.

Except for one thing: this whole scare-the-kids business with men in suits has been done before.

It might come as a shock – if not a disappointment – that the whole mythology of Slenderman is as old as, well, dirt. The fact that it tends to resurface in each generation or so is of mild interest, and often fanned by spinners of paranormal legend-making, offered often as proof that there are some paranormal “things” which have some basis in reality…thereby escalating the level of fear with which we…

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J Is for Journey

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 11 Comments

“A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.”

That’s Ursula K. Le Guin in “Talking About Writing” which you can find in her Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979). I don’t write fantasy, but I’ve read a lot of it, which may explain why fantasy elements keep sneaking into my real-time fiction.

It may also explain why for me writing is a journey, especially writing fiction, and everything Le Guin says about fantasy applies. The journey I’ve been on for three years now started with a dog running through the woods and a girl sitting on a playground swing. As I wrote my way toward them, I began to understand who they were and how they were connected.

I also ventured deep and deeper into my own subconscious, or memory, or imagination, whatever it is, and found images and questions that preoccupied me in the past but that I’d set aside. Rescue — both rescuing and being rescued — was a big one. In my novel in progress, the rescue of the dog turned out to be pretty easy. The rescue of the girl is still working itself out. I’m still not 100% sure of what she needs to be rescued from, but it’s a lot clearer — and more unsettling — than it was when I started. So are the stories and motivations of the would-be rescuers.

One of my mantras is “Your writing will teach you what you need to know.” It will, but the catch is that you have to keep doing it. My hunch is that a fair amount of what’s called “writer’s block” stems from the cautious mind’s fear of those subconscious places where reason has to relinquish control. The fear is totally justified because, as Le Guin wrote, the journey will change you.

It may change you in ways you don’t expect and can’t control, that may sharpen or blur your vision enough to unsettle your view of the world. It’s a wild magic, writing.

As the letter J drew closer in my passage through the alphabet, I couldn’t decide between “journey” and “journal.” The two words had to be closely related, I thought, and so they are: both stem from the Latin word for “day,” diurnis, by way of the Anglo-French. If you know any French, or even if you don’t, the “jour-” in “journey” and “journal” probably suggests jour, the French word for “day.”

“Journey,” it seems, originally suggested a day’s travel. Now a journey can take much longer, especially if you’re working on a book-length work, but breaking it down into days isn’t a bad idea. The journey may indeed lead into dangerous places, but the closer you get, the less scary they seem — because you’re getting braver with every step you take, every word you write.

The journey continues.

 

Heroes & Villains

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 4 Comments

I can’t plot my way out of a paper bag.

plot book

By the late Ansen Dibell (aka Nancy Ann Dibble)

Actually this may not be true, since I managed to write a novel that more than one reviewer called “tightly plotted.” Let’s just say that plotting doesn’t come easy. One of the few how-to books I consult from time to time is called, simply, Plot.

My internal editor is forever nixing the kind of scene that makes for an exciting plot. She thinks they’re melodramatic or unbelievable. This is probably because my life has a meandering plot that would be deadly dull in fiction, though it leads through some interesting scenes and encounters some very interesting characters.

Evidently other writers are plot-challenged too. There are at least a gazillion websites out there to teach us how to plot.

Many of them start with protagonist(s) and antagonist(s). The main characters (i.e., the ones you like and want your readers to identify with and care about) want to get somewhere. The antagonist(s) get in their way and have to be overcome or neutralized somehow.

Call them heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys.

I get it, but there’s nothing that turns me off faster than a character whose sole purpose is to mess with the hero’s head and/or life. Why are these characters messing with the hero’s life? Because they’re villains, that’s why. Because they’re evil. Because the author needs a bad guy or two to give the good guys a hard time because otherwise there would be no plot.

Um, no.

“Everyone’s the hero of their own story.” I can’t remember where I picked up this brilliant insight, but it applies both to real life and to writing. It’s especially important when you’re creating (or giving birth to) characters you don’t like who are going to mess with the characters you do like. Nearly all of them have their own stories. Some of their stories are muddled or inchoate or otherwise incomprehensible to a rational person. Some are crystal clear: If you interrupt them in mid-stride, they can tell you exactly where they’re going and what they plan to do when they get there. Sometimes the story is driving the bus and the character is along for the ride, maybe willingly, maybe not.

devil“We are each other’s angels” goes the song. My teeth start itching at any reference to angels. There’s something about the concept that makes smart people start babbling in clichés. But OK, point taken: we are each other’s guides, teachers, helpers, and so on. But if we’re each other’s angels, we’re also each other’s devils, roadblocks, obstacles. When a character is the hero of her own story but the villain in someone else’s — that’s where things get interesting.

And more than a little scary.

When we call someone “evil,” it’s often because we can’t imagine what story they’re the hero of. We don’t want to. The story is probably icky. Maybe we’re so sure we’re on the side of the angels (oops) that we just don’t care why the other guy does what he does.

Writing well means grappling with the icky, in other people and in ourselves. So far all my less-than-heroic or downright nasty characters have been facets of my own self: I understand their impulses, I’ve often thought their thoughts; I just haven’t acted on them either because I haven’t had the opportunity or I didn’t have the nerve. There but for fortune . . .

In Wolfie, my novel in progress, I seem to be walking toward my first real villain, a man I’m sorely tempted to call evil. He’s a successful lawyer, and he sexually abused his stepdaughter over a period of time when she was seven years old. She’s now eleven, and it looks to me as if he’s going to try it again.

At the moment I can’t imagine what story he’s the hero of. Well, no: I know a good chunk of the story. What I don’t know is how sexually molesting a seven-year-old fits into it. What does he see when he looks in the mirror? When he looks at his wife, who is the girl’s biological mother? When he looks at the girl herself? Statistics suggest that he may have been abused himself growing up. Was he? By whom? A family member, a neighbor, a teacher, a priest?

So far I can’t see out of this man’s eyes, but when I’m doing dishes or walking in the woods glimpses of him appear in my peripheral vision. He’s taking shape.

Part of me wants to stuff him back into my imagination, turn the lock, and pile heavy stones on the lid.

In her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” (1973; reprinted in The Language of the Night) Ursula K. Le Guin was writing about fantasy, but much of what she says applies to other writing as well, both fiction and nonfiction. This is how the essay ends:

“A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.”

What she said.