More Andrea Hairston!

Two new things to check out:

Rick Kleffel reviews Redwood and Wildfire.

And Jen Gunnels serves up an hour-and-a-half talk with Andrea in the June issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction (which arrived in my mailbox this afternoon). This is the most extensive interview of Andrea that I've seen, full of fascinating stuff, including the little tidbit about how Andrea

got into Harvard Law School, and I told them thy weren't giving me enough money. I'm not going. Thinking, okay, that will work. They wrote back and said, okay, we'll give you more money. Then I decided I didn't really want to be a lawyer--I had even sent them a play as an example of my writing. Obviously, I wanted to do something else.

So, I worked for a year as a math textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin using the skills I had. That was a very bizarre experience. It was 1974, and while I was there, I started a theater company...

Another bit that I especially loved is this part:

You know, my mother's project, I think, were her two children, and she did us really well. I don't have children, but I really want to be able to be in the world the way I learned from my family, and she encouraged that. She used to take us to the museum and to the theater. She didn't have a lot of money, but she wanted us to have this raw view to encourage everything. You couldn't just read the encyclopedia. My brother used to read the encyclopedia, and he kind of memorized it. He could tell you about everything he had read. My mother said that's no good unless you go outside and see if what was written in the book is actually correct, or true, or you agree with it. I remember her talking to him and watching. He was completely stunned. I thought he knew everything, because he was my big brother. So we would have to go and check on everything that he had read in the encyclopedia. He became a newspaper editor so you can see where that came from.

If you don't subscribe, do try to get hold of a copy. The interview is well worth the trouble of doing so.

ETA Mind you, though, the interviewer never mentions Andrea's novels or that she's a professor at Smith, which I found a bit odd.