Five smart people talk about writing

I've just listened to a podcast made at IFCA, in which Eileen Gunn, Cecilia Holland, Paul Park, and Theodora Goss, moderated by Karen Burnham, discuss writing workshops as well as the pedagogy of writing generally. Their conversation includes fascinating insights about the writing process. I especially love their insistence in blurring the lines between writing critical essays and writing fiction. You can listen to it here. 

Oh, and there's a bonus: Eileen reveals what Bill Gibson told her was the "secret of writing."

Interesting conversations

I ran across a couple of accounts of interesting conversations today, both involving Aqueductistas.

io9 offers an account of a conversation between Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood-- before a Portland audience of 2000 people. Claire L. Evans writes:

Pairing Margaret Atwood with Ursula K. Le Guin was smart: they come from similar backgrounds, both attended Radcliffe in the pre-Second Wave years, both are very prolific writers of indefinable genre fiction, and they've evidently been friends for years. Seated on little divans in front of over 2,000 people (yes, "only in Portland," I know), they seemed like two old school chums swapping gossip even when they were deconstructing modern realism and debating whether or not the human race is doomed. The effect was intimate, convivial — Le Guin giggling uncontrollably, for example, when Atwood discussed how writing is like building a boudoir for the reader. Atwood making endless Twitter jokes.

But apparently one of their topics of discussion was the shortcomings of realism and-- you guessed it-- how to characterize the kind of (non-realist) fiction they write.

The second conversation is one reported by Tibor Moricz for From Bar to Bar, with Gwyneth Jones, whom he characterizes as "The White Queen." (Not the Red Queen, though that might be more appropriate, given the Lewis Carrollian vision he conjures up.    

Book Talk

Here are some interesting conversations about books by women, going on elsewhere:

*Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, Nic Clarke, Jo Coleman, and Abigail Nussbaum discuss Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia; their conversation has been divided into four parts: Part 1, at Torque Control, Part 2 at Punkadiddle, Part 3 at Asking the Wrong Questions, and Part 4 at Eve's Alexandria.

*Another discussion, this one in five parts, all to be found on the same blog, takes on Sarah Hall's How to Paint a Dead Man; it's currentl in progress at Ed Champion's Reluctant Habits. The participants, here, are Jenny Davidson, Brian Francis Slattery, Michael Schaub, Amy Riley, Traver Kauffman, and Abigail Nussbaum.

*And finally, the Women in SF reading club talk about Marge Piercy's feminist sf classic, Woman on the Edge of Time.

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Conversation with Wendy Walker

When Aqueduct author Wendy Walker (KNOTS) told me she'd been reading Lyndall Gordon's Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft and some of Wollstonecraft's work as well, I asked her if she'd be willing to undertake an email conversation with me about her reading. She said she would. And so questions and answers flew between us for about the next week.


Timmi: Wendy, Mary Wollstonecraft is known both as a writer and a passionate, early feminist. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women was important to the first-wave feminists who took up the cause of feminism decades after her death. She was also an educator and traveler and a woman whose fierce independence made her scandalous.

A lot of different stories could (and have been) told about Mary Wollstonecraft. What story or stories does Lyndall Gordon tell in her new biography of her?

Wendy: There are many revelations in Lyndall Gordon's Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps the most momentous one consists of the reasons for Wollstonecraft's trip to Sweden, an unlikely tourist spot in the 1790's, especially for a woman travelling alone with a small child. The child was Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's daughter by Gilbert Imlay, a shadowy figure who protected Mary during her residence in Paris at the height of the Terror. Imlay was an American, and had international business dealings. One of them involved buying up the silver that had been looted from the houses of aristocrats who had gone to the guillotine, and shipping it out of the country to sell so that the Revolutionary government could buy arms. Mary went to Sweden on the trail of the "silver ship" as Imlay's business representative. How much she knew about the scope of the deal is unclear, but it seems likely she did not know how dirty it was. Her motives in acting as Imlay's agent make absorbing reading. She despised commerce, and was madly in love. He was usually absent, always going to arrive, and evasive with explanations. Gordon makes a persuasive case that his evasiveness may have been part of the mode of conduct required from one of the first of the young United States intelligence operatives. Gordon's scholarship rests on letters by Mary in the Swedish national archive that have been unknown and unread till now. The book Mary wrote about her trip, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, does not discuss her secret mission, but it is written in a fictionalized form of letters to her lover.

Timmi: I can just imagine how excited Gordon must have been to unearth those letters in the first place and then discover what she had found. (I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see novels and even films come out of this new part of her story.) Emma Goldman, who was a great admirer of Mary and obviously didn't have as much information as Gordon now does, wrote this about Mary's relationship with Imlay:

While in Paris, Mary met in the house of Thomas Paine where she had been welcomed as a friend, the vivacious, handsome, and elemental American, Imlay. If not for Mary's love for him the World might never have known of this Gentleman. Not that he was ordinary, Mary could not have loved him with that mad passion which nearly wrecked her life. He had distinguished himself in the American War and had written a thing or two, but on the whole he would never have set the World on fire. But he set Mary on fire and held her in a trance for a considerable time.

The very force of her infatuation for him excluded harmony, but is it a matter of blame as far as Imlay was concerned? He gave her all he could, but her insatiable hunger for love could never been content with little, hence the tragedy. Then too, he was a roamer, an adventurer, an explorer into the territory of female hearts. He was possessed by the Wanderlust, could not yet rest at peace long anywhere. Mary needed peace, she also needed what she had never had in her family, the quiet and warmth of a home. But more than anything else she needed love, unreserved, passionate love. Imlay could give her nothing and the struggle began shortly after the mad dream had passed. Imlay was much away from Mary at first under the pretext of business. He would not be an American to neglect his love for business. His travels brought him, as the Germans say, to other cities and other loves....

Reading the above passage, I can only think how astonished Goldman would have been to have this new angle.

There are a couple of things I'd like to ask you about, but first, the biographical. I'd been vaguely aware that Mary was among the few English intellectuals who supported the idea of the French Revolution, but I'd had no idea that she actually
supported it in the material sense that you mention here-- acting as Imlay's agent. Though I agree that it does seem unlikely that she knew how dirty a business it was, I'm wondering if she knew Imlay was working toward the Revolutionary government's purchase of arms. I think I'd always assumed that most English and Continental intellectuals moved by the French revolution were eventually disillusioned in the actual outcome if not by the time the Directory was established, then shortly thereafter, when Napoleon began crushing dissidents both right and left (rather in the way that many Western supporters of the Soviet Revolution became disillusioned when the horrors of Stalin's repression came out). Did Mary become disillusioned with the Revolution before her death in 1797? (My guess is that if she wasn't disillusioned by living in Paris during the Terror, that the answer is no, but I've got nothing to base my guess on.)

Wendy: It was actually not Lyndall Gordon who discovered the heretofore unread Wollstonecraft correspondence regarding her mission to Sweden. That was done by a Norwegian historian named Gunnar Molden, who has published on the subject. Lyndall Gordon was using and interpreting his research....

Emma Goldman's view of the the love affair is pretty romantic, but not entirely wrong, just oversimplified, and of course dated by seeming to accept a double standard for sexual need and fidelity. Mary did get something out of their relationship which Goldman doesn't mention, that is, that Imlay probably saved her life by convincing the American ambassador in Paris to accept Mary as his wife, and issuing her a certificate that made her an American citizen. In a city where the English as "enemy aliens" were being rounded up and imprisoned, she was quite unsafe without his protection. Even Paine, who was a naturalized citizen of France and resident many years in America, did not escape imprisonment, and only just missed being guillotined because the mark that indicated he should be taken away by the guards was put on the wrong side of his cell door. It seems that Mary and Imlay entered into some sort of contract, though its legality later proved dubious. At any rate, during the height of the Terror, Mary was probably the only English person who was able to go everywhere. This in itself suggests that Imlay had secret dealings with the French government.... and he did. Even before the silver ship, he was engaged, at the behest of both Washington and Paris to wrest Louisiana away from Spain, whose possession it then was. This was to be done was through very underhanded land speculation, settling Americans on Spanish soil and then effecting a coup with French troops. The plan eventually fell apart, but Mary knew nothing of it. It was typical of their relationship, although later she did learn more, when she consented to act as his agent. Why did she do it? She had gone to France to write about the Revolution for her publisher Joseph Johnson (the publisher of Blake, Paine and Godwin). She went to see for herself what the new republic, which had passed many laws favorable to women, was like. But after the Terror began, she lost faith in the ideal revolution she had hoped for. She repeatedly writes of her horror and disappointment, so it seems out of character for her to support a deal which would promote the government she condemned. Nevertheless, she saw the silver with the Bourbon crests in a secret warehouse and knew the cargo of the silver ship for what it was. (I was wrong about trading for arms-- it was actually grain, gunpowder and alum --used to light gunpowder--for the French troops. Not a big difference, perhaps, but.....)

Imlay was a buccaneer capitalist, with many shady deals behind him of which Mary knew nothing, but he wasn't that different from many other "respectable" Americans (then and now) who were sympathetic to Republican government on both sides of the Atlantic, but didn't mind making a great deal of money with their sympathies. Mary was not at home with the war profiteering side of Imlay's business, but he had made their life together-- the future plan-- dependent upon the success of this business venture. He needed more luxury than she did, which she found a bit odd in the frontiersman he pretended to be. He had spent a great deal of time exploring America's lesser known regions, but he was the son of a rich New Jersey family who were dedicated merchants and owned plantations and slaves. Mary would have been very surprised-- not to say appalled-- had she been told about the slaves.

So it seems that she went to Sweden as Imlay's agent in the hope that that would secure their future together, even though she loathed the transactions she engaged in. Imlay for his part took up with an actress while she was away, and when she found out, she was distraught. One can't help feeling he used her and had no intention of keeping his promise. He never did provide child support for his daughter Fanny although he promised to do so repeatedly.

Timmi: Imlay must have been quite a piece of work. Certainly Goldman's romanticization of him is, in retrospect, deeply, deeply ironic.

The other aspect of Mary's affair with him that particularly struck me was the contradiction it represented, one that evoked opposite reactions in first- and second-wave feminists respectively. William Godwin's memoirs of Mary, written
and published shortly after her death, publicized her affair with Imlay, the child she had by him, and her subsequent suicide attempts. As Miriam Brody writes, "In fighting for limited reforms, the vote, admission to university, reform of marriage laws, [nineteenth-century] feminists abandoned Wollstonecraft so as not to bring down upon their own heads the opprobrium of being thought sexually wanton." But "there are two Mary Wollstonecrafts," Brody writes. "One who loved and one who was contemptuous of love. The first is the woman Virginia Woolf called a 'dolphin,' a creature who 'rushed Gilbert Imlay through the waters until he was dizzy and only wanted to escape,' the same woman who would attempt suicide to end the despair of her unrequited love for him. The second is the woman who wrote the feminist argument of the Vindication, recommending passionless friendship between husband and wife, hoping that the fires of sexual love will cool by the time the marriage is well established so the couple can get on with the rest of their life."

Mary wrote the Vindication before she fell in love with Imlay, of course. But it seems to me that her awareness of what passion can do to one's life might not be a contradiction at all-- that she might have believed in theory that one must try to suppress one's "appetites" (as she calls sexual desire) precisely because she saw the havoc it often wreaked in the world around her. (And so, we might characterize her Vindication as a sort of Do as I say, not as I do!) Many second-wave feminists, though, have blamed her for having founded a "puritanical" strain of feminism, one that eventually expressed itself as aiming for safety rather than liberation (which as you might recall, became a major issue in the late 1970s in the Women's Liberation Movement in the US). Does Gordon's biography address this issue?

Wendy: Gordon doesn't distinguish between first- and second-wave feminists in her discussion of the puzzling example Mary left for women who came after her, but she does make some original and fascinating points. Early in the book, introducing her topic, she suggests that Mary's greatest advance was in the conceptualization, which she at least partially realized in her relationship with Godwin, of a new kind of partnership between a man and a woman, one that contained romance, sexual love, a shared intellectual pursuit, independence and dependence, and fidelity. Imlay was a trial run that failed. It seems that she was in love as much with what he represented-- the experiment of a new nation, one that had shaken off Old World tyranny in favor of something better-- as she was with the charming, disingenuous man he actually was. Mary was always adamantly opposed to a woman's entering a relationship injudiciously (she had seen where that would lead with both her mother and her sister, both of whom entered upon disastrously abusive marriages at a time when there was no legal escape) so it seems unlikely that she threw herself at Imlay in the way that the story has been told. Gordon goes into detail about the way in which Godwin was largely responsible for the character of Mary that has come down to us, a character which has alienated so many. Godwin felt, as did Mary, that the truth must be told-- but he chose his informants about his wife's earlier life rather oddly. He refused to talk to her three sisters, and relied strongly upon the "memories" of Henry Fuseli, a painter for whom Mary had great regard. Fuseli made out to Godwin that Mary was obsessed with him, and had in fact wished to move into his house in menage a trois with him and his wife. Mary did propose living with the Fuselis, but she had lived in the house of her publisher Joseph Johnson (who had taken her in when she left her position as governess, in order to support her writing) and no one suggested there was anything sexual there. Fuseli was a charismatic, ambiguous character who wrote erotic letters to both men and women. (He painted one great picture, "The Nightmare," of a woman asleep with a demon crouching upon her chest.) He produced a great deal of pornography, and did not believe that women could contribute anything of lasting value to intellectual discourse. There is every reason to doubt his version of Mary-- but after she died, everyone wanted a place in her biography, and Fuseli carved out a such a place for himself, as an object of Mary's immoderate affections. It seems that the myth of Mary as a sexual wanton started there. She was a virgin at thirty-four when she embarked on her relationship with Imlay-- how sexually wanton is that?

As for the conflict among feminists about the contradiction between what Mary prescribed in the Vindication, and the life she subsequently lived, it seems to me to make little sense to try to separate her thinking from the historical moment and her own personal experience. In the late eighteenth century women lost not only their property and the right to their future children when they married, but the right of habeas corpus. There was no legal appeal against physical abuse, forced confinement or sequestering. The closest thing to a law that protected a married woman was a law about the size of the stick a man was allowed to beat his wife with-- no thicker than his thumb. (But the larger the man, the thicker the thumb.... no?) One of Mary's key experiences in regard to marriage as then constituted happened when her sister Bess fell into an extreme case of postpartum depression after giving birth to her first child. She begged Mary to help her escape her husband, and when Mary saw her
descending into madness, she and her other sister organized what can only be described as a kidnapping with consent. Helping her sister get away, even though they left the baby behind, was a criminal act. In such a context what do the words "puritanical" and "liberated" with respect to marriage mean?

Timmi: The tendency for women to be characterized after their deaths in misleading (and often clumsily simplistic) ways seems to be something women writers have been particularly susceptible to (when, that is, they are remembered at all!). It does seem
that how the work left behind by women writers is read posthumously is often determined by the filters that are put in place more or less soon after their deaths. Not necessarily maliciously, but always-- inevitably, even-- with respect to various gendered issues. The idea that Godwin would not talk to her sisters is a little shocking-- though I suppose it accorded with how little importance educated men placed on the perceptions and memories of women (presumably not themselves writers or intellectuals). (And Mary, being a weaver's daughter, educated herself: which makes me suspect her sisters had little if any education.) And so another irony occurs to me-- our whole conversation seems to be drenched in ironies-- namely, that a predominantly male-shaped image of Mary is the one that most feminists know.

Of course I agree with you absolutely that it is a mistake to separate Mary's (or anyone's) ideas from their historical moment. And what a moment! I suspect it's difficult for us in the early 21st century to make intuitive sense of the full force of Enlightenment ideas playing out so violently in the last quarter of the eighteenth century-- what it meant, for instance, that the French Revolution adopted the language of Virtue-- a Virtue fiercely dissociated from religion-- and a kind of Rousseauian logic that permeated its public discourse. Could you talk a bit about how Mary came to write the Vindication? I seem to recall back when I read it (a quite a long time ago, I'm afraid) that it struck me, even as it angrily confronted the situation of women, as gesturing powerfully toward an almost utopian impulse: the sense that the world doesn't have to work like this, that all that is wrong needn't be that way and that therefore we must fight for it until our last breath.

Wendy: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a sequel to Mary’s first full-scale political publication, A Vindication of the Rights of Men Before that she had written other books, but they were easier to classify under traditional women’s preserves of education and fiction, and she had signed them in the customary modest way (“by a lady”), as Jane Austen did her works some years later. A Vindication of the Rights of Men was Mary’s first venture into what was then the exclusively male preserve of political philosophy; she signed it with her own name. It seems to me that the immediately compelling circumstances of both works were the onset of the French Revolution and, more personally, the unwavering, multifaceted support and friendship of Joseph Johnson, Mary’s publisher. I have been reading A Vindication of the Rights of Men for the first time. It is now much less read than the more famous feminist sequel, but is astonishingly relevant to our time, a denunciation of the political “spin.” It was written as a response to Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke, Britain’s most eloquent parliamentarian, who came down squarely on the side of the ruling classes, and against “mob rule” when the evolution broke. Mary’s critique of Burke’s “flowers of rhetoric” could be applied to many disingenuous and inflammatory contemporary voices. She berates him for saving all his tears for “the downfall of queens,” to which Paine famously added that “in mourning the plumage he forgot the bird.” Lyndall Gordon does not speculate as to why Mary followed up the first Vindication with the second, more explicitly feminist document, but two events are suggestive. In 1791 the French published a new constitution, which ended aristocratic rule but failed to give women equal political standing. In the same year, France’s great feminist Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Mary could have been taking her cue from either of these events, or she could have decided to balance her Rights of Men with a Rights of Woman for conceptual and aesthetic symmetry.

Incidentally, Mary’s father was not a weaver, that was her grandfather, but even so the term is misleading. Her grandfather was sufficiently wealthy from his weaving business at the time of his death to allow his son, Mary’s father, to set himself up as a gentleman. This climb up the social ladder did not work out. He tried his hand as a gentleman farmer, but drinking to excess does not foster successful farming, and the venture failed. They moved from one place to another, none working out, until he was borrowing his children’s money and removing the girls’ chances of marrying by doing so. Nevertheless, Mary and her sisters were fairly well educated by the standards of the time. When Mary went out to work, as a companion, governess, and teacher, it began a long cycle of her supporting her sisters, and she saw to their education above all. She really moved into a maternal position with respect to her sisters, and this led to complicated feelings relating to their dependency and Mary’s success. Godwin may not have wanted to communicate with them because he feared their financial impositions and other resentments…..still, his behavior is a little odd, given the book he was trying to write.

Certainly it is hard to imagine oneself back into the eighteenth century mindset of a person first experiencing the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I somehow think it is less hard to imagine now than it was eight years ago. We have entered another such watershed moment…. Although Mary’s vision was utopian by the standards of the day, it has proved to be workable, at least in part. I always feel uneasy about using the word utopian, as it literally translates as both “good place” and “nowhere,” a deliberate irony, no doubt, on Sir Thomas More’s part.

Timmi: Could you talk a bit about Mary's fiction? I know you've been reading at least some of it. How would you characterize it in terms of the fiction of her day, and is any of it still readable today, when fiction is built upon such different conventions?

Wendy: I do think Mary's fiction is still readable.... very readable. I don't find the difference in conventions an obstacle at all, in fact, I find it refreshing. Conventions, no matter from what period, grow tiresome very quickly. A really fine writer, in my opinion, works to alter conventions by manipulating them-- shifting the weight that the reader expects. Part of the reason I read so much fiction from other countries and other times is that I find the current American mainstream literary conventions in most genres pretty stale.

That being said, fiction was not Mary’s strongest suit. The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria, her last book, unfinished at her death, has both narrative suspense and tragic eloquence for the first sixty pages, which show what the book might have been had she finished it. The rest is a draft, and, I think it’s safe to say, would have been much revised if she had survived childbirth. What I find most interesting in this book is the way it embodies what we now call the horror genre. If one began a novel today with a protagonist speaking from the private madhouse cell where she has been taken by force under her husband’s orders, deprived of her newborn child, and sequestered forever, we would scarcely imagine we were reading in the genre of realism. It sounds a bit more like Stephen King. To my ear this book falls squarely into the nascent genre of Gothic. It’s no coincidence that the text of The Wrongs of Woman resonates with images that spring from the abolition movement, with which Mary strongly sympathized, and with which early feminism had strong ties. None of the resonances are programmatic or heavy-handed, but seem to grow very naturally out of the story she has to tell. Her other novel, Mary, is a veiled and sometimes wishful autobiography, and therefore, to me, less interesting as fiction, but still great to read because the writer is such a fine stylist. By that I mean, her use of the English language is so unobtrusively elegant, so taut and musical, that the sentences are a joy to read. Her mastery of English as a medium for creating meaning is finally what I go to Mary for, and the issue of the genre is secondary. This is my attitude about writing in general. One loves to hear stories, and one associates stories with fiction, but the ever-present story lies in the way a sentence unwinds. Mary’s great strength lies in the fact that her ideas are simply not separable from the language that expresses them. What one misses in most discussions of her is a consideration of the total infusion of her thought with a simultaneous apprehension of beauty and justice (to use Elaine Scarry’s phrase). A moral aesthetics.

Timmi: Could you quote a passage, please, that exemplifies this infusion of her thought with a simultaneous apprehension of beauty and justice?

Wendy: Here is one. It comes from A Vindication of the Rights of Men: A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke.

I glow with indignation when I attempt, methodically, to unravel your slavish paradoxes, in which I can find no fixed principle to refute; I shall not, therefore, condescend to shew where you affirm in one page what you deny in another; and how frequently you draw conclusions without any previous premises-- it would be something like cowardice to fight with a man who had never exercised the weapons with which his opponent chose to combat, and irksome to refute sentence after sentence in which the latent spirit of tyranny appeared. I perceive, from the whole tenor of your Reflections, that you have a mortal antipathy to reason; but, if there is any thing like argument, or first principles, in your wild declamation, behold the result:-- that we are to reverence the rust of antiquity, and term the unnatural customs, which ignorance and mistaken self-interest have consolidated, the sage fruit of experience: nay, that, if we do discover some errors, our FEELINGS should lead us to excuse, with blind love, or unprincipled filial affection, the venerable vestiges of ancient days. These are gothic notions of beauty-- the ivy is beautiful, but, when it insidiously destroys the trunk from which it receives support, who would not grub it up?

Timmi: This is really magnificent prose. It's bold and direct-- hardly the style used by women of the day-- and goes straight to the heart of arguments supporting the insupportable status quo: that they're based on "ignorance and mistaken self-interest" (you're right that her rhetoric here could well be applied to many "disingenuous and inflammatory contemporary voices"!), a reverence for "the rust of antiquity," and sentimentality. I'm really impressed that she did sign her name to this work.

To return to Gordon's biography: what did you find most interesting and insightful in it?

Wendy: Oddly enough, I think that the things I found most interesting in the book were somewhat peripheral to the story of Mary’s life. One was the story of Fuseli’s betrayal of Mary after her death, and his motives for it. Gordon speculates, on the basis of Mary’s amused silence in reaction to insinuations Fuseli made during her lifetime, that Mary knew the relationship between Fuseli and Johnson to be something more than collegiality. Since "sodomy" was at that time a capital offense, Mary would have said nothing, rather than endanger Johnson, or even Fuseli. Gordon’s speculation sheds some light, to my mind, on what could have driven Johnson to publish so many works defending the rights of slaves, Jews, prisoners, Dissenters and women. If he himself were an outsider, it makes his activism more comprehensible.

The other discussion that will stay with me from this book is that of the effect Mary had on the younger women whose lives she touched. Of these, the stories of her pupil Margaret King, later Lady Mount Cashell, is perhaps the most dramatic. Margaret King was a teenager when Mary went to her parents’ estate in Ireland to work as a governess. Margaret married young, to a wealthy neighbor, who gave her nine children in nine years. During this time she declared herself a United Irishwoman and a republican. When she and her family visited Italy, Margaret fell in love with another man. Defying the social code, she left her husband, even though this meant giving up her children. She continued to live with her lover, who went along with her decision to study medicine, even though this required her to disguise herself as a man for the years she pursued her degree. After she completed her studies, they moved to another part of Italy and she set up a medical practice, and later wrote and published the period’s authoritative text on the treatment of childhood diseases.

Timmi: Oh yes, I recently read about Lady Mountcashell-- Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, wrote a story for her daughters (by her lover), titled Maurice, that was only recently discovered.

One last question, to bring our discussion to a close. Do you think Mary Wollstonecraft's work, thought, and life are interesting now chiefly as historical artifacts and an important piece of feminist history, or do you think they still have
meaningful things to say to women today?

Wendy: I definitely think Mary's life and work still have meaning. One of the things I've learned from this book is how crucial it is that such lives be revisited and reinterpreted by each generation. The Mary Wollstonecraft Lyndall Gordon has elicited in her research and thinking is a completely different person from the woman we all thought we knew. Part of the scholar's work is to eliminate, or at least expose, those filters you spoke of, that are put in place after a person's death, to reveal a more balanced image. And each generation is able to see things that the generation before was blind to.... So biography is a work that is never done, and I think it is really for ourselves that we engage in it, not out of some kind of piety towards the dead and the great, although those emotions can figure too.

I have found through my own historical research (on Constance Kent) that you just can't accept what people have written before you without extremely close examination. Part of the problem is that history and fiction are so easy to confuse, because both involve telling stories. In fiction the criterion of truth has to do with aesthetic meaning-- arrangement and rhythmic placement of elements. In history the criterion of truth is what Willard Van Orme Quine, the philosopher, called "a good fit." The scholar's job, and the reader's too, is to discover where the evidence and the narrative don't fit well to each other. Where that is true, a new biography is needed.

Timmi: Thanks so much, Wendy, for your thoughtful discussion. I've enjoyed our conversation immensely.

Wendy: Thanks for the great questions, Timmi. It was a real pleasure doing this!

A Brief Conversation with Andrea Hairston

Aqueduct author Andrea Hairston recently finished a new novel manuscript, which she recently read from at WisCon. Intrigued by her shift in focus from the future to the past, I asked her to talk a little about the new work.

Timmi: In Mindscape, you wandered about in a vivid mid-future, exploring postcolonial and gender issues (among others). Last May at WisCon, you read a powerful, moving excerpt from a novel that is set in the past. Could you tell me, please, what called you to write fiction that looks back into the past, and perhaps tell me a little about the characters and their stories?

Andrea: I wrote this book to celebrate folks like my great aunt and grandfather, to counter Willful Amnesia, and to offer myself hope.

I teach Theatre and African American Studies at Smith College. On sabbatical in 2003, I researched minstrel shows, vaudeville, and early film. Minstrelsy solidified American caricatures of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. These stage stereotypes have gone through spiraling permutations, peopling novels and films, TV shows, Music Videos, and the News. We continue to do battle with the core creations of the minstrel stage. Brutal Black Bucks, Drunken Savage Indians, Helpless White Women, Inscrutable Orientals, and Angry Black Women still inhabit the American imagination.

From my research, I developed a course and planned a contemporary novel, “Exploding in Slow Motion.” I actually didn’t want to write about the early twentieth century I’d discovered. So when the ideas and characters for “Redwood and Wildfire” came to me, I resisted for three years. I tried to have the historical story sneak into the contemporary one. I tried to have ancestor tales ghost around the lives of the major characters. It didn’t work.

By researching hoodoo and blues and teaching my minstrelsy course three times, I fell in love with the people coming up from Georgia and making a life on stage and screen in early 20th century Chicago. Here was a treasure trove of exciting stories that haven’t been told, that were too good to keep secret! In addition to sustaining the storehouse of minstrel stereotypes, these performers were tricksters, magicians, shapeshifters. The richness, complexity, and brilliance of their lives dazzled me. Many early performers were connected to hoodoo, often confused with “voodoo,” a pejorative term. Hoodoo is an African American “magical” practice, not a religion like Vodou. Hoodoos use herbal medicine to cure physical and psychic ailments. They create fetish bags to attract lovers or punish enemies. Working through a performative healing practice, hoodoos devise rituals to conjure the future and celebrate the here and now.

On sabbatical again in 2007, I broke the spell the contemporary novel had on me. Using what I had tried to sneak into “Exploding in Slow Motion,” I wrote a film script of Redwood and Wildfire’s story and used that as an outline for the novel:

Growing up in rural Georgia at the turn of the 20th century, Redwood Phipps longs to be a hoodoo conjurer and performer like her free-spirited mother. Most people condemn hoodoo as backward superstition, as a belief system black folk need to let go of in order to join a modern society, but Redwood wants to learn how to conjure the wondrous world she believes in. Her brother (and everybody else) wants her to avoid this dangerous route, do something sensible, like teaching.

Aidan Wildfire is a Seminole/Irish musician just trying to keep his head clear, lead a good life, and do the right things. He’s a magic man too, but no one knows who he is and he drowns his power in drink. The troubled spirits of the land haunt him.
Power and talent can be a torment in a system stacked against you, but Aidan witnesses Redwood catching a storm on a hilltop and this changes their lives. They believe in each other and become secret friends.

After Redwood commits a deadly act in self-defense, Aidan helps her leave rural Georgia. He follows her to Chicago which holds as much danger and wonder as the Okefenokee Swamp. Aidan and Redwood work their magic in vaudeville and silent films. They struggle to share secrets, friendship, power, and eventually, after much hardship, love. But the past won’t let them escape so easily. Haints and demons have come north with them and challenge the dreams they would conjure in Chicago.

Timmi: As someone who has studied history, I've often thought that the past is as alien and strange as the future, especially when it comes to imagining living in it. Do you find that the case in your writing?

Andrea: The past is very alien and nothing we really know. I can’t believe what people ate, said, and fought over in 1959 or 1963 and I was there doing it. I’ve changed so much since then, I can’t easily find my way to the feeling state of being a 1963 American, where normal people watched dogs attack their neighbors and I played cowboys and Indians with my big brother, attacking white settlers before being sent off to a reservation. My brother never wanted to play the Indians, but would have liked to attack the settlers.

I had to conjure the past as much as I had to conjure the future.

Timmi: Joanna Russ has characterized science fiction as written in the subjunctive tense—as creating a possible version of reality that could (but is not likely to) come to pass. Many people probably assume that writing historical fiction is the exact opposite—re-creating what has already been, or writing, so to speak, in the past tense. I myself tend to think that although who we are collectively a product of the past, since we cannot really know it, representations of it are as provisional (and subjunctive) as representations of the future. Would you agree or disagree with that? And has your view of this affected how you go about writing fiction set in the past?

Andrea: “Redwood and Wildfire” is a work of fiction. I am wallowing in metaphor, engaging in artistic play, experimentation—which has gotten a bad rep in the age of high reason and gold certified authenticity. My novel is unapologetic speculation in the subjunctive case. In Science Fiction and Fantasy writers do not just imagine what might be, but also what might have been.

I have also found that many people view the future as if it were as known as the past.
I have had provocative critiques of my first novel, Mindscape. During a writer’s workshop at a convention in Boston, the moderator told me that a filmmaker character in Mindscape wouldn’t be making a film about the history of his/her world. He’d be making a movie about the now. The moderator declared my filmmaker character unrealistic, authoritatively saying, “history is just not that important.”
To whom?

Willful Amnesia. The colonialist underbelly/core of the American and European democratic and economic “success story” is a history some of us would like to forget as we focus on a sanitized now where we are all surely equal.

Many readers and critics have asserted that languages wouldn’t/won’t disappear as they do in Mindscape, leaving only a few behind. They say this even as languages are vanishing at a rate often compared to species extinction. They say this living in America, which has hosted the demise of Native American language, European and Asian language diversity, and African languages and African inflected dialects of European languages. They say this as people deride Ebonics as a “stupid” or debased English used by people who are not intelligent enough to engage in proper discourse. These critics generally do not comment on the political power of language or why certain languages are not respected, but exploited—the African-Americanization of mainstream world culture is fueled by the vigor of the cultural expressions and the poaching power of predatory capitalism. The use of transgressive blackness continues, of course, from the minstrel blackface past to the hip hop present.

What you think you know that is not so
Make you a slave

The above lines are from a praise poem that I recently wrote to Eshu, West African deity of the crossroads. How we see the future is to a great degree determined by what we believe of the past. Collectively, what we consciously or unconsciously create as our history is the ground for the now and tomorrow. Who we think we are, who we think is possible is in the stories we tell on ourselves, on our ancestors. As the Hopi say:

The one who tells the story rules the world.

I have decided to speculate on a past we vociferously deny in the narratives of the American nation that we take to be true. Our reality delusion is sustained by the wizard magic of those who control the story. Because of this magic we often cannot see other stories, other happenings that are right before our eyes.

The recent political campaigns display a nation rife with Willful Amnesia. In the national minstrel myths, the Angry Black Woman (Bitch) is a monster coming to get you. We have eliminated the Angry White Woman (Bitch) from the presidential race, and although Michelle Obama isn’t running for office, we can’t have another Angry Black Woman (Bitch) greeting folks at the Big White House.

We are not supposed to worry about Crazed White Male Genocidal Maniac.

Who are these Angry Black Women monsters?

Did I miss their serial killer rampages?

What bombs have they dropped?

What markets have they collapsed with predatory capitalist zeal?

Whose sons and daughters did they lie into war?

What species have they hunted to extinction with their rage?

What tribes have they marched to death?

What genocide have they sanctioned?

Whose babies have they nuked or lynched? or just abandoned in the wasteland?

Ms. Rice aside, have I missed the hordes of power mamas wrecking havoc on this world?

Did the parade of sassy black ruler wenches march by my house while I was asleep?

“Redwood and Wildfire” is a story, a fiction, not an attempt at historical authenticity, but rather an entertainment that perhaps allows us to see what could be hiding in plain view. As I wrote the novel, the present wasn’t making me happy and the future looked even worse. A catalogue of disasters danced continuously in my head: assaults on land, sea, and air; human misery on the rise; flora and fauna reeling. Psychopathic corporations were doing business as usual—thoroughly normal self-destruction, sanctified even. Predatory capitalism was a fundamentalist faith, with high-tech warriors heading out for the Crusades. I didn’t see heroes running, riding, driving, or flying in to the rescue. A juggernaut rolled over us and I could barely see what good any of us were doing.

For most of my life I have been much more hopeful—seeing devastating difficulty as a challenge to the human spirit and imagination. A child of 1950’s American Dreams, I expected we would change the world for the better, not exceed the planet’s capacity to sustain our existence. Yet without all my hard-earned middle class, professional privileges—

How the hell would I have survived in 1910?

Aghast at the mess we were making of the present, and fearing for the future, for the worse mess it could become, I imagined African American and Native American theatre and film artists in the past surviving more difficult restraints, more oppressive social constraints than what I face now, yet still being able to express themselves eloquently. I imagined those who made me possible, going against worse odds to conjure a world they believed in. These ancestors had good times, love, and triumphs. They had vision. They did what had to be done. “Redwood and Wildfire” is a celebration of the sort of vision and love we need to make it to the very next moment!

In the subjunctive text of what might have been, I offer myself and my readers a bridge to tomorrow.

Timmi: Thanks, Andrea. I know I'm not the only one eagerly awaiting the publication of "Redwood and Wildfire" (which, incidentally, is a fabulously evocative title).

A Brief Conversation with Lucy Sussex

Like many sf writers, Lucy Sussex is also a scholar in addition to writing fiction. I recently had this conversation with her.

Timmi: Could you tell us, please, about the "woman of mystery" who signed herself as "W.W" or "Waif Wander" and about the research project you and linguist John Burrows undertook that involved her?

Lucy: Her name was Mary Helena Fortune, and she was probably the first woman to specialize in crime fiction, writing the longest early detective serial known, "The Detective's Album," from 1867-1908. It comprised over 500 stories/novelettes, all published under the pseudonym of W. W. For more feminine writing, like her (unreliable) memoirs and some quite gothic melodramas, one called "Clyzia the Dwarf," she used the name Waif Wander, apparently a self-description. The connection between the two pseudonyms was not revealed until the 1880s, and her real name did not emerge until the next century, in the 1950s. She wrote quite unknown to her large reading public, who had no idea who she was.

Pseudonyms were common with Victorian women writers, such as Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell) and George Eliot. But none were quite as secretive as Fortune. It involved concerted archival research to establish that she was born a Mary Wilson in Belfast, Ireland, of Scottish ancestry, emigrated to Canada with her father and married a surveyor, Joseph Fortune. She subsequently emigrated to Australia, to join her father George Wilson on the gold-diggings. In 1858 she married a policeman, Percy Brett, from whom she gained much of the knowledge for her crime writing. She had two sons, one by Fortune, the second born in Australia between the two marriages.

The complications of this particular life narrative was that Brett later remarried, and that divorce was very hard to obtain at the time. It seems that Fortune left her first husband in Canada, had an illegitimate son in Australia, and comitted bigamy when she married Brett. The most likely explanation of her move to Australia was that she was running away from Fortune, who would have inevitably otherwise gained custody of their child in any formal separation.

These secrets made Fortune a "scarlet woman" in terms of conventional Victorian morality. Small wonder she kept her identity hidden, as it could have affected her living from writing. In the 1890s the mores had begun to change, and she was described as a "bohemian." But she and her surviving son had paid a price--he became a jailbird, and she was alcoholic, living in defacto relationships.

I edited her memoirs, and later a book of her short crime stories.

[Timmi: The memoirs, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, have been published by Spinifex Press. The book of short fiction, The Detectives' Album: Stories of Crime and Mystery from Colonial Australia, has been published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.]

Fortune began writing crime stories apparently as a response to "inauthentic" crime memoirs by the writer James Skipp Borlase. They went on to collaborate on a short story serial, published anonymously. I wanted to know which stories had been written by her and which by Borlase. Professor John Burrows of the University of Newcastle had developed a software program which looked at writers in terms of stylistic nuances, and could identify and quantify differences at the grammatical level. We fed the disputed stories through, and compared them to works definitely by Borlase and Fortune. Not only was Fortune's early work identified, but an early story claimed by Borlase, "Mystery and Murder," proved to be by her hand.

I have just used that story as the basis for a science fiction tale, "Mist and Murder," which won a Sir Julius Vogel award. It is set in the New Ceres universe, and features a female detective, as well as her sidekick, who is disguised as a man and writes detective series.

Timmi: In your interview with Maureen Kincaid Speller, which was published in your Conversation Pieces collection Absolute Uncertainty, you make the fascinating comment:

it is actually easier for a modern writer to imitate a nineteenth-century woman, than a man from the same era. The only way to do the latter was to utterly immerse yourself in overheated, overwrought masculine Victorian prose —which was like learning to swim in jelly. Once you had the mindset, or had set yourself inside an ornate jelly mould of the era, then you could do it. But I still don’t think you can ever really get inside the mind of someone from the past.

Could you unpack some of that for us? I'm fascinated by the idea that the prose of a Victorian woman is closer to modern sensibilities than the prose of a Victorian man. What are some of the differences between them? And given that so many nineteenth-century women wrote under male names, I'm wondering whether you'd peg pseudonymous women's writing as male or female? (And incidentally, I wholeheartedly agree that you can't ever really get inside the mind of someone from the past.)

Lucy: As John Burrows has discovered, when searching for quantifiable differences in style, there are yawning gaps in gender in C18th-19th writers. It has to do with education. Men went to grammar school and had formal habits of prosody literally beaten into them. Women were taught by governesses or not at all. Autodidactic men and women thus wrote far less elaborately than the gentleman--which makes them much more accessible to modern readers, who get impatient when a spade is described as "an agrarian or horticultural device favoured by sons of hoary-handed toil." In a project I'm involved in with ship's diaries, a man and a woman travel on the same boat, but while she describes the departure in one simple sentence, he meanders on for half a page, with classical allusions. The differences tend to level out with the reforms in schooling from the mid-century onwards, but are still present.

Even now computer analysis can identify gendered differences in writing, style being as distinctive as DNA.

Timmi: Having edited a volume of Fortune's memoirs and another of her crime fiction, are you now done with her, or do you have more such projects in the works?

Lucy: I'm still finding works of hers...

Timmi: And are there any other C19th writers you're working on?

Lucy: I'm finishing two books at the moment, one a collection of C19th travel writing, the other a study of the first women to write crime and mystery fiction. Must find a publisher for the latter...

Timmi: You often use historical themes or interests in your science fiction tales, which interests me a lot (particularly since I sometimes do myself). Most sf writers approach history by writing alternate versions or secret histories. Your approaches strike me as more interrogative and playful. Would you care to comment about that vis-a-vis particular stories?

Lucy: Alternate histories are a bit like historical novels--heaps of research, but often the sense of the time itself is missing. And depend on it, some detail will be wrong, so that you will get a pedantic but perfectly justified note of complaint from some local historian. Even a good writer might not know that when the Victorians mentioned lovemaking, it wasn't referring to sex but verbal or written courtship or flirtation. Or the values of our time are imperfectly hidden in the novel, so that the heroine is improbably feminist or improbably keen on oral sex (often in novels by men, surprise).

It's more fun to interrogate a text, like the time I had a go at the Australian song "Waltzing Matilda." I decided I didn't believe a word of it. So I introduced a very unreliable narrator, and an alternate explanation of the song's narrative, guaranteed to annoy any number of people. Here fantasy met history, with I hope the notion conveyed that the grand narratives of history are not necessarily the only ones. I similarly took Mary Fortune's story "Mystery and Murder," kept the plot but introduced a female detective (something she very rarely used) and an alternate murder explanation. Thus in my "Mist and Murder" I teased out a subtext in the original, which had really bothered me. Most fun was learning how to write in the C18th mode--Latinate roots and what I can only describe as using words now more usually known in their noun forms, but as verbs. Mentally plumbing for the more decorated and formal modes of expression rather than the colloquial and terse. By trying to replicate the language I think I got a sense of the mind-set. But I'd never try writing in Middle English!

Timmi: Ah, I think you must be talking about "Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies," which appears in Absolute Uncertainty. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to reading "Mist and Murder"!

A Brief Conversation with Jeff VanderMeer

I first became acquainted with Jeff VanderMeer when he bought my story, "Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman" for Leviathan 2. Not long after that, he brought me into the (now defunct) Fantastic Metropolis editorial collective, which had its own email list and could at times be lively and far-ranging in its discussions. In our conversation below he characterizes himself as optimistic. I would add another adjective to that: enthusiastic. Enthusiasm and optimism work powerfully together and are of inestimable importance for getting things done. Many people have ideas for projects, ideas for stories. But Jeff is someone who follows through on his ideas, and that makes him an exciting person to know.

Timmi: The subtext of a piece of fiction exerts enormous influence over how a story is read, regardless of the reader’s (im)perception of the subtext or the author’s awareness of the subtext’s presence in the story. When faced with sophisticated analyses of their stories, many writers angrily deny the presence of a subtext, claiming that because they didn’t deliberately put it in the story, it’s not there and must thus the invention of the critics who say that it is. Similarly, many readers resent critics who engage with the story’s subtext, claiming that by doing so they wreck everyone else’s pleasure in the story. When I deliver critiques in workshops, I almost always point out the subtext in the stories I critique because I think the subtext is too important to be left out of any discussion of what a story is trying to do and whether it is effective in what it is trying to do. Beginning writers are almost always surprised (and sometimes unpleasantly so) when I do this. In peer workshops (like Sycamore Hill and Rio Hondo), though, quite a few of the writers are fully aware of their stories’ subtext. I’m wondering, Jeff, what your take on subtext is, generally, as well as in your understanding of your own work. Do you avoid thinking about subtext at the time of composition? When, if at all, do you become aware of its presence in the stories you write? And what—if anything—should we be teaching beginning writers about not only the role of subtext in their stories, but also how it is produced and its possible technical uses for the conscious writer? And finally, in your opinion, is it possible for a writer to be too conscious of what they’re doing?

Jeff: I hadn't thought about it this way, in terms of teaching beginning writers about subtext. I think this is because I tend to want to help them with the story at the level at which it fails, and usually it fails at a much more basic level than the subtext. However, having thought about your question, it will probably change the way I teach in future, even though I don't believe a writer's awareness or lack of awareness of subtext makes much difference in their writing. If there's a more specific subset of the context--say, something clichéd about the gender relations in a story, or underdeveloped; for example, a male writer who has allowed all of the female characters to populate the story as caricatures or types—then I would of course talk to them about that, as a flaw in the story. But it's interesting to think of talking to them generally about subtext, to see if making them aware of it is useful.

Inasmuch as subtext is related to theme, I don't think about it much when writing. I learned a long time ago that theme and image come to me naturally, almost subconsciously, and that what I need to do as a writer is nurture this aspect of myself by doing the most mundane things: taking care of my physical and mental health, not get too stressed, etc. Then it's effortless.

In another way, I do monitor the subtext. After I write the rough draft, then I go back and I ask myself what I was trying to do with the text--what do I want to emphasize, bring to the front, de-emphasize, etc. And during this phase, I will try to look at the subtext—as an outsider. I will try to look at it from someone else's point of view. What would a woman think of the character dynamics? For example—and knowing that this is a gross generalization. Ten different women might view the same female character in vastly different ways. But the point is to look at the story from another perspective of some kind. What is the subtext of the story? Is the subtext as complete as the surface of the text? Why or why not? Are there places where the subtext has broken the surface and needs to be subsumed?

As for a writer possibly being too conscious of the subtext, this comes into play with what I'd call political correctness. At a certain level, a writer is a complex bundle of prejudices and lack of prejudice, and if you try to go too far against your own nature, you tend to steal the power of your work. Sometimes, as in the case of someone like Philip K. Dick, you just have to take the bad with the good, because they're so inextricably bound together: a chemical, not a physical, reaction.

Timmi: Has quitting your day job and going the literary freelance route impacted your writing life? Is it better for your writing, or worse, or just different? Could you talk, please, about how you came to take such a major decision?

Jeff: My day job workplace situation had devolved over my last year there. It was becoming more corporate. I felt many of the personalities I had to deal with were dysfunctional. A few I felt were borderline sociopathic—or, perhaps, situationally made to seem sociopathic by the contortions of the corporation. In other words, the unnatural and illogical demands of the corporation were beginning to warp personalities—my own included. Eventually, it was less painful to not be in that place than to be there. The result is a different kind of stress. I have less financial security and knowing I only have X-months of income at any one time can freeze me up, although since my wife Ann has a day job, I have some safety net, even though I have to pay my half of the bills. (I'm being open about this because I think writers need to think about and understand the psychological trade offs.)

For a long time, I thought I needed the day job, that I needed that financial certainty to write. But the fact is, I don't. I am much more of a loner than I was forced to be with an office job, and I am generally less stressed and more productive now. I have written more short fiction and more creative nonfiction in the past year than ever before. I enjoy the work. I find that I no longer am cranky in the mornings, because I can write. All those missed opportunities to write in the mornings when I had the day job. I would gladly live a life of poverty if necessary to continue to have mornings to write. At a certain point, especially as you get older, you realize the trade-offs. You realize that if you're not careful the regret will outweigh the joy. And I can honestly say now that this is not the case for me.

Timmi: Are you conscious of gender issues while you are in the process of depicting male characters?

Jeff: I am always conscious of gender issues when revising. I am wary of being conscious of them while writing the rough draft. I want my subconscious to control the process, even if I don't like the person I see in the text. Beginning writers are always told a lie, a convenient lie, a lie to protect them. This lie is that you are not your manuscript. To some extent this is true, in that many writers are much shittier human beings than the ideal expressed in their fiction. But you really are your manuscript, and you have to accept at the rough draft stage that how you view the world is going to be in your manuscript, should be in your manuscript, or, really, what is it we're reading you for? Why should we care?

This is all by way of saying, I then go back and look through the entrails. I ask myself if I'm working with stereotype, and if so, what does simply playing against stereotype do to the story? Also, if it's a first person narrator, what do the gender issues as set out in the story tell us about that narrator? And did I do it deliberately or is it a mistake? The point isn't to make it politically correct, but I do think a male writer writing about both male and female characters should be testing those characters to make sure they are as fully-realized and original and unique unto themselves and each other as is necessary for the good of the story. I don't know if enough writers do this kind of testing.

Timmi: What are you working on now?

Jeff: Honestly, this will sound strange, but I'm working on how I view the world and what I think the future of the world is. I'm essentially an optimistic person but see the future of the world we live in as somewhat bleak. For this reason, I am reevaluating what kind of fiction I want to write and who I want my audience to be and what the value of fiction is in a world that might have collapsed in another hundred years. Art should exist for its own sake, for the pleasure of the writer as well as the reader, so the questions don't really have to be answered, but I think I will begin to tackle some of this in my fiction anyway. Baby steps at least. "The Memories of Others" is a new story I'm working on that deals with this issue. Another story that's mostly just for fun is "The Three Quests of the Wizard Sarnod," which is for an anthology of Jack Vance stories. In addition, I am working on a failed-consumer-state novel called "Borne" and the next Ambergris novel, "Finch," among several other things. I am having fun being various.

Timmi: Thanks, Jeff. This was fun. Let's do it again soon!

For more about Jeff and his work, visit his blog, Ecstatic Days.

A Conversation with Julie Phillips

Last summer I spent a couple of hours talking with Julie Phillips about her compelling and illuminating biography of the feminist sf writer, Alice Sheldon. The biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which more than a few people have characterized as being a page-turner, has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Locus Award, the Washington State Book Award, and the Hugo Award. Julie had just spent several hours talking to the screenwriter who’s working on a film of Alice Sheldon’s life, so the pump was well primed before we even began talking. Perhaps that’s why I failed to notice that I pressed PLAY rather than RECORD on my tape recorder? Only later, as Julie was preparing to leave, did I discover that the tape meant to record our fabulous conversation was blank. But all was not lost! Julie kindly essayed a reconstruction of the salient points of the conversation on tape for me, which I then transcribed. The reconstruction is a bit dryer and more focused than our live conversation; nevertheless it has much to offer anyone interested in the issues Julie tackles in her book.

Timmi: Although literary biography is a recognizable genre, in some sense it is still a hybrid of biography and literary criticism. I’m interested in what your take on the balance and interaction of these two foci were for your biography of Tiptree/Sheldon. Did you have a clear sense of it when you began the work, and did your sense of it change over the course of the decade in which you carried it out? Did you read all of Tiptree’s fiction before you began, or later? Did your understanding of the Sheldon’s life change your reading of the fiction? Did your reading of the fiction ever change what you made of Sheldon’s life?

Julie: The book started as a piece of criticism, a book review. So I had read almost all of Tiptree’s stories while I was writing that first review, and—you know there’s a lot to say about them, but when I started writing the biography, to me the stories were very subordinate to the story of her life. And I tried as much as I could to put them at the service of Alli’s life.

I had to include the stories to some extent if only just to show that she was going to become a writer, to foreshadow that a little bit. I would have liked to mix the stories through the book more, I would have liked to give it a more unconventional structure, but nobody knew anything about Alli’s life; I didn’t think I could pull it off. I thought it would be too frustrating narratively not to make it a straight story. You could get away with that, the way Hermione Lee does in her biography of Virginia Woolf, if it was a life-story where the outlines were known, but not where people didn’t really know anything about her life.

Obviously the stories aren’t autobiographical, and I didn’t see the fiction as a reliable guide to her life. But I do think that knowing something about Alice’s life helped me in reading the fiction. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” didn’t make much sense to me at first, because I kept trying to read it as an ugly duckling story. It was only when I knew more about Alli’s life that I began to feel that it was about the opposite experience, of growing up in a beautiful body that doesn’t feel like it matches the mind inside.

I did include some literary criticism. I had to do that, to explain to readers what Tiptree’s literary achievement was. And in some places I put in bits of literary criticism where I felt like I had come up with something that hadn’t been said before and I was just pleased with it.

But to me the book was primarily a story. And I don’t think that I would go back and write more about her fiction. I think actually that I’m a better storyteller than a critic, which surprised me, because I had thought of myself the other way around. I struggled with the lit-crit parts of it. They were very hard for me to write. I felt like they were some of the most boring parts of the book. I hope that there will be more criticism of Tiptree written because of my book, and I hope that other people will do it and not me.

Timmi: By the time I finished reading your book, I had formed the distinct impression that for all that Alli admired her mother and was anxious to establish professional friendships with women as well as men writers, at bottom, she was a male-identified woman. Do you think this is a faulty conclusion on my part?

Julie: I think that’s absolutely true, that she was a male-identified woman. I think that almost every woman of her period who had any talent was male-identified, because there weren’t that many opportunities for talented women. You can say “Oh well, you know but look at her mother,” but her mother’s only one example, and when she needed to separate from her mother in order to get her own life, there weren’t any other examples, there wasn’t anyone else that she could model herself on or attach herself to.

She wanted to like women and she was dying to find women with whom she could identify. They just weren’t there. She was very politically minded, very technically minded, and even now there aren’t that many women who are like that. There are still very few women engineers, for instance, or women computer scientists. Women aren’t necessarily encouraged to think that way, and women who do think that way are not believed and not given credit, and it was easier just to think of oneself as a man. Besides, Alli liked men and felt very comfortable in their company.

I think that Alli was very good—I said in the book somewhere—at defining women so as to exclude herself. I think that it was frightening to her to identify with women because if you were too womanly, that was a kind of a trap; but if you fell in love with women, that was also a kind of trap. To identify with men was very much off limits for Alli. As much as she wanted to be a man at some moments of her life, she was terrified of that desire and spent a lot of time trying not to feel that, and I think that probably had to do with her closeted sexuality. The more she admitted to herself that she wanted to be a man, the more it must have made her think of her generation’s image of a lesbian, and that must have been scary.

Alli was ambivalent about feminism too. She believed in it but, like a lot of women of her generation, felt uncomfortable with consciousness-raising. It was too emotional for her, too personal. And she thought younger women, like Joanna Russ, were naïve to think that they could get away with being so angry.

One of the interesting things about her looking back on having been Tiptree—because I don’t think she thought through why she had become Tiptree, and what it meant to her to be Tiptree, very much until after it was over. Charles Platt interviewed her, and he later told me that it was very hard for him to get her to admit that she had wanted to be a man. He thought that’s what the deception was about, and she didn’t want to say that. And I wondered why? To me it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to admit that she had wanted to be a man, because of course who doesn’t want a man’s privilege and a man’s literary opportunity? And in her journal, for instance, just after Tiptree was unmasked, she said that she had wanted to be a man. It’s possible that she had revised her opinion by the time she talked to Charles Platt. But I wondered if her sexuality, and her fear of not just of admitting but giving in to her sexuality, didn’t play a part in that reluctance.

(I think we rambled on quite a bit about this question when we talked and I’m not sure I’m including all of the important bits. I know we were talking about women’s intellectual life and how women didn’t get much of it.) Alli wasn’t exposed to much of it. Maybe if she had gone to Vassar where the women were more intellectual she would have had an easier time, but she really deliberately turned her back on that, too. To please her mother, maybe? To spite her mother, maybe? To try to fulfill this promise of glamour that she had at an early age? To try to turn her back on the precocious child-prodigy-genius expectations that her parents had of her? I don’t know. Her choice not to explore her intellectual side until very late in her life was always a really strange one to me, because I started out with a very strong intellectual side and I couldn’t imagine anyone as brilliant as Alice who didn’t want to study, who didn’t want to learn. I came to feel that I understood it, or could accept it anyway, but that took awhile.

Timmi: In her review of your book, Elizabeth Hand characterizes Alice Sheldon as “a woman tragically born a half-century too soon.” She doesn’t say precisely what she means by this, although I think we are meant to infer that if Alice Sheldon had been born in 1965, she would have been able to have come out as a lesbian or else had gender reassignment therapy. (Quote: “Later, after Alli’s identity was revealed, [Harry Harrison] concluded that his friend had not been ‘nuts’ but ‘a woman was just being very female about it.’ Phillips refrains from commenting on Harrison’s observation, but I won’t. Why is behavior that would be considered ‘nuts’ for a man considered normal for a female? This is the crux of Alice Sheldon’s often tormented life, the disconnect between her projected voice—her stories—and her everyday self. She sometimes seems like a prime candidate for gender-reassignment therapy; at other times, a lesbian so deeply closeted that one’s instinct is to drag her into daylight and shout, ‘See? IT’S NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL.’”) & yet Hand also acknowledges that Alice’s childhood had a great deal to do with her problems as an adult. Is there any sense in which you would be able to agree with Hand’s characterization?

Julie: I certainly think she would have approached her sexuality and her sense of her gendered self very differently. But I could not possibly say how she would have done it. She’s so very much a person of her own time; who am I to say what she might have done in a different time? There’s no way I can know whether she would have been transgendered, whether she would have chosen for women or for men. The opportunities would have been so different for her. And the way she saw herself I think would have been really different.

Timmi: Hand ends her review by talking about the essential scariness of the human being who wrote could write that “finish[ing] the series with one about a man who kills EVERYBODY, that will make me feel better” and claiming that the reader encountering “The Screwfly Solution” or “The Last Voyage of Dr. Ain” or “The Women Men Don’t See” for the first time will feel “the same emotion, perhaps, that gripped that physical education teacher in For Des Moines, or Alice Sheldon’s husband when he realized, as Phillips suggests, that his wife was going to kill him: pure fear.” One person I recently talked to said that when they’d received a fan letter from Tiptree, they were wary and so did not respond. Another person who had a correspondence with Tiptree said that there was something “creepy” about certain questions Tiptree sometimes pressed on her. Do these responses surprise you? Or do they resonate with your own reading of Sheldon’s life?

Julie: Finishing the series about a man who kills everybody. Elizabeth Hand thought that was frightening. I don’t. There’s something to me very liberating about Alice Sheldon’s anger. I don’t think it was necessarily liberating for her—it certainly didn’t make her happy—but I’m always cheering her on when she’s angry, and wanting her to explore her anger and use it and use it to pry open the parts of her life that were hidden to herself. In the story Hand is referring to, “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” there’s also a promise at the end that killing off people will save the world, and that life will begin again. What I think Alli’s doing in that story is tipping over the chessboard, an act I find childish, unsatisfying, and exhilarating all at once.

Besides, some of Tiptree’s friends and fans, Mark Siegel in particular, saw her as this wise, compassionate figure, concerned with the world’s problems. Whereas I thought she used worrying about the world as an escape from her own problems, and that she ought to save some of her compassion for herself. So I was pleased whenever I got a chance to contradict that limited and, I thought, damaging, image of kindness and concern.

At the same time it disappoints me that Alli wasn’t able to finish her stories except by killing everybody. She was often able to explore more satisfying futures for women or imagine more satisfying futures for women, but she was never able to resolve those stories in any positive way. Instead she shut everything down. She didn’t dare, maybe, to allow herself to imagine a future in which she could be herself. No, I don’t think that her anger is frightening. I have mixed feelings about it, but I think it needs to be there.

I don’t think Alli murdered Ting, by the way. I don’t think he was very happy about the pact, but I think he went along with it. Peter Sheldon thought the same; I remember he told me (though I didn’t put it in the book because I couldn’t confirm it) that they had been found in the guest bed, not in their own. Rightly or not, he took that as a sign that Ting had lain down willingly in that bed.

People shouldn’t go too far the other way and make a scary monster out of Alli, either.

Timmi: What in your opinion is her best work?

Julie: I would say her performance as Tiptree in the letters she wrote as Tiptree. Other than that, of course, there are lots of stories I love. “The Women Men Don’t See” is one. “A Momentary Taste of Being” is another; it’s funny, it’s very gloomy, it’s incredibly psychologically rich, and I still don’t feel like I’ve got to the bottom of it. I just admire it incredibly for its depth.

Timmi: In an essay in Asimov’s SF reviewing your book, Paul di Filippo writes:

It seems to me that a cabin in Yucatan and a lodge in Wisconsin, among other perks, were necessary prerequisites for the exfoliation of Tiptree’s odd and extravagant personality, in a way that, say, having to support oneself scrubbing toilets would have precluded. I hesitate to call Tiptree a “drama queen,” since she was so often stoic and silent in her suffering, but perhaps you’ll take my meaning if I say that had Tiptree been born equally talented, but black and poor, or even white and lower middle-class, it’s hard to imagine she could have afforded such self-indulgence and often morbid introspection as she exhibited and was permitted. And although such counterfactual speculations are really beyond the pale of a biography, still it would have been nice to see more acknowledgment of the role Tiptree’s above-average economic freedom played in allowing her character to become so involuted.

Would you care to comment?

Julie: Paul di Filippo is not the only one who has wondered why a woman with all Alli’s privilege had such a hard time. He gives some of the answers himself: her brain chemistry and her relationship to her parents, which made it particularly hard for her to break out of their mold. (A book I drew on a lot in thinking about Alli was The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, which talks about how children who are enlisted in the project of comforting their parents can end up constructing a “false self,” which makes their own desires and emotions inaccessible to them.) To your point, that introspection and unhappiness are absolutely not limited by class, I would add that daughters of privilege, in Alice’s generation, led terrifically constricted lives. Don’t forget what happened to Alice’s talented, rich friends: they were married off or became alcoholics. If Alli had “economic freedom,” then it was of a very limited and contingent kind. The “economic freedom” of marriage, same story.

Besides, a lot of her free time to think and write came as the result of her not being able to have children. So it wasn’t exactly an unmixed blessing. *

I’m not quite sure what Di Filippo wants me to say. That she was spoiled and privileged? That her money allowed her to be arrogant about, for instance, not looking for a teaching job after she got her Ph.D.? I kind of thought I made that clear.

Timmi: I suspect he’s missing a context largely invisible to a lot of men. Perhaps he ought to read a few more biographies of twentieth-century women writers to get a clearer sense of what creative women have been (and to some extent continue to be) up against.

Thank you, Julie, for taking the pains to recreate our discussion. It’s always a pleasure talking with you.
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* Would Alice have been happy having children? I wonder. But that’s another story.

A Conversation with Nicola Griffith--part two

Timmi: I’ve been interested in the post-composition stage of writing for a long time. So when I read Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing, it particularly provoked me into thinking about this aspect of the writing process. In his opening essay, “Emblems of Talent,” he uses the German term Begeisterung to designate the passion that is needed to drive the writer to the heights of achievement, and he roughly translates this term as “inspiration.” Now most people—especially those who aren’t artists—conceive of “inspiration” as what happens in the moment that one has an idea, rather than as the passion to take that idea and the work it is based on past the initial rough stage to its ultimate realization. In effect, Delany’s use of the term insists on the primary importance of that second stage of work, where the artist is reshaping the material that she has already brought into existence. Does this way of talking about it make sense to you?

Nicola: It makes sense only if 'inspiration' means vision--not just a clear vision of the work but of self. I'm committed to the notion of brilliance, of never letting a mediocre piece of work past my door. Flawed, yes, inevitably so; mediocre, never. I see myself as a great writer. I have to live up to that vision. I will draw on whatever it takes: will, drive, hope, psychotic self-belief. I understand The Yellow Wallpaper much better now. Am I willing to stare into the abyss yet again with another novel? No! Except, well, yes, of course, because why be a writer if you're not willing to go all the way to make the best possible book?

Timmi: Does the work of composing prose feel more immediate to you than the work of rewriting?

Nicola: Often rewriting is original composition: new scenes with new characters, employing new metaphor systems in the service of new emotional depth. It's just doing it inside a previously explored framework.

However, if what you're asking is: does doing the first draft feel different to subsequent drafts the answer is yes, it does, absolutely (see my answer below).

Timmi: Do you consider the rewriting and reshaping part of the process as vital and important as the immediate composition of the prose?

Nicola: Vital, yes, important, yes. Different, yes. The first draft is the first time with an idea, and it's all about the thrill of the new: discovery, challenge, uncertainty, ecstasy, delight. On some level, a first draft is also deadly serious, exploratory play, it's where you find out if it's going to work, if it's going to be worth developing a long-term relationship.

Big structural rewrites are like those discoveries of something different with a long-term partner: wow, who knew?! Mind-blowingly different and yet strangely familiar. Vastly rewarding.

Intending only a first draft is like a one-night stand. It's fun, and it has its own rewards, but I wouldn't want to take it home to my mother, y'know?

It occurs to me that building a sequence of novels around one character, as I've done with Aud in TBP, Stay, and now Always, is not dissimilar to rewriting in this way. With each novel I re-examine Aud, dig just a little deeper into a woman I already know.

Timmi: Does the knowledge that the first draft may be substantially changed when you’ve finished it make you feel freer to follow your intuition wherever it may lead you? Or do you think the way you write the first draft would be pretty much the same?

Nicola: It's all necessary. I can't imagine any part of the process without the other parts.

The notion of 'intuition' in writing doesn't please me. The first time, yes--I think we all start out writing beyond ourselves--but at this stage I'm far happier thinking about the non-verbal understanding of where I need to go and how as 'expertise'. Intuition is for beginners.

Timmi: And finally, how do you decide when you’re actually, absolutely, done?

Nicola: I think there's a crossing point: where book and author reach an equilibrium, and understanding, where I'm ready to let it go, and I know it can stand on its own. I won't let a book out of the house until I know I can look it in the eye year after year. Twenty years from now, any fault I let by because of impatience will be magnified. For me, a book has to be as close to perfect as humanly possible.

Books, however, come from people. People change. If you start changing in the middle of writing a book, then all bets are off, because if you're changing, what you want from a novel changes. Then you have an awful decision to make. My desktop (and desk drawers) are littered with dozens of abandoned projects. Ideas are cheap. Some are not worth pursuing.

When it comes to being 'done', writing is unlike anything else. Unlike a relationship with a person, when a novel is done it's not over; it's not broken; it's ready to begin, ready to venture into the world.

Timmi: Thanks, Nicola. The next time we drink wine together, please remind me to make a toast to all writers who choose, like you, to risk writing a flawed novel instead of taking the more usual path of writing a mediocre one.