Inclusive Reviewing

This week is flashing past like a speeding bullet. Before it's completely gone, let me point you to a discussion (if you haven't already encountered it) of reviewing and issues of inclusivity, featured this week at Strange Horizons. It comes in three parts: Nisi Shawl's excellent essay Reviewing the Other: Like Dancing about Architecture; Samuel R. Delany's essay Escaping Ethnocentriticty?; and Inclusive Reviewing: A Discussion, by Samuel R. Delany, L. Timmel Duchamp, Fabio Fernandes, Andrea Hairston, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Sofia Samatar, and Aishwarya Subramanian.

Suddenly, it's winter in Seattle

Winter is rolling in. We may not have reached the solstice yet, but it's a fact: here in Seattle the days are now short, the sun (when it appears)  low in the sky, and the leaves all fallen from the deciduous trees. When I went away for the long holiday weekend on Thursday morning, it still felt like fall, for the temperature was in the 50s and enough leaves remained on the grand old cherry tree in my backyard to turn the light shining through it golden. When I arrived home yesterday, the leaves had all vanished, and the temperature was dropping. Will the thyme and marjoram in the garden survive the winter? Who can say? Some winters they do, others they don't. (The marjoram usually doesn't.) Big portions of my yard have gone dormant. Some herbs and greens continue to thrive, but everything else is sleeping or dead. Which is, of course, as it should be.

I'm always aware that many people find winters in Seattle difficult to survive. The scantiness of the light, alone, can bring great suffering. But though I'm of a horribly moody temperament, I don't suffer from seasonal affective disorder. And so I can take great pleasure in Seattle's winter face. I've developed an affection for the strangeness of the light filtered always through the atmosphere (because, of course, of the sun's lowness in the sky). And I've learned to know to look for the birds, especially waterfowl, that visit here in the winter. (In a few weeks I can expect to find swans, for instance, swimming in Lake Washington, and snow geese on the Skagit Flats.) And of course the beaches are always beautiful, even when they're socked in with fog. (And of course for those who ski or snowshoe, day trips into the mountains can be spectacular.)

A few notes and thoughts on the Worlds Beyond World and Women's Stories, Women's Lives Symposia

I wanted to write at least a little about the conference I attended last weekend in Eugene, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. The conference kicked off with a documentary film, "Agents of Change: A legacy of feminist research, teaching, and activism at the University of Oregon" by Gabriela Martinez and Sonia De La Cruz, which I'm sorry to say I missed because I was helping Kath to unload Aqueduct's books and set up our tables in the vendors' room. But I did attend about half of the sessions of the first symposium and all of the sessions of the second. I took the occasional note on some of them.

The first symposium, titled "Women's Stories, Women's Lives," was held on Thursday. The sessions were nominally organized by decades-- 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s-- but since most of the work presented was historically conceived, in fact ranged over larger spans of times. Shelley Grosjean's presentation "Lesbian Lands in Oregon," for instance, began with the 1960s and went beyond the 1980s in tracing the history of a lesbian separatist community. It is quite a while since I've thought of feminist separatism-- probably since reading Joanna Russ's What Are We Fighting For (which devotes a chapter to it). Listening to the presentation, I realized that probably a lot of younger feminists don't realize that separatist communities often came about in the way this one seems to have done. Apparently, when a couple of women in a mixed-sex, "back to the land" group, Jeanne and Ruth, challenged the group's conservative gender roles, they were booted out--and promptly organized a group of women to form a new community. This community explicitly defined itself as seeking spiritual connection via women's physical bodies in relationship to the landscape, and published Woman Spirit Magazine (1974-1984) as a means of doing "long-distance consciousness raising." (I think she may have said that Mother Kali's bookstore in Eugene was associated with the community. I remember Mother Kali's from visits I made there in the 1980s. Just thinking about it made me long for the days when feminist bookstores were to be found all across the country.) The presentation did not attempt to gloss over the community's feminist shortcomings. The community was white-- lacking in "universal sisterhood in reality," and so "attempted to appropriate other cultures to give them sense of being universal." The presenter said that the women she talked to viewed separatism as "a hospital"-- a place for being healed. But, she says, the community discovered that women severely damaged by patriarchy could never leave separatism because they were never healed. The presenter summed up the community's ideological differences from contemporary feminism as "hugely emancipatory, hugely exclusionary."

Cheris Kramarae, a longtime women's studies scholar, who is probably best known for her statement "Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings," presented next, on the subject of Global Antiviolence. "Feminism 'dies' continually," she remarked at the beginning of her talk. (So true, so true...) She finished by noting how the issues of sexual harassment, sex trafficking, and domestic violence remain important issues. "There is still no economic aid for battered women-- only individualized solutions for social problems." Most of the money appropriated for dealing with domestic violence, she says, goes to anger management programs for men rather than foucsing on the complexity of the social problem. "There is no ancient history as in 'gone'," she concluded. "The issues of the 1960s are still with us."

The third presenter in the session was Eugene's mayor, Kitty Piercy, speaking on reproductive rights activism. I couldn't help be struck by her story of being recruited at a NARAL booth in the 1980s. (I was recruited at a NARAL house party in 1981.) She referred, amusingly, to "speculum parties" where women had the opportunity to see their own cervices. As I recall, at least some of these parties had a lot to do with Our Bodies, Ourselves developments--which had a major impact on all feminists. (Indeed, it changes many practices in the medical mainstream, not only in gynecology, but in family practice as well. Medical practice in the US has never been the same, thank the goddess.)  Piercy emphasized that she was strongly motivated by personal experience to work for reproductive rights-- and as a result became a "more public person." (More personal resonance here-- the NARAL organizers I worked with in the 1980s also attempted to get me to do public speaking, but I begged off--and instead did a lot of writing and analysis for them.) In Piercy's case, one thing led to another-- which eventually included election to public office.

Margaret Hallock, a member of the faculty in Economics at the University of Oregon, spoke next on Pay Equity and union organizing in the 1980s. She helped organize the Oregon Public Employees Union. Clerical workers, whose jobs were labeled "unskilled," joined the fight for pay equity. Many of these public employees needed food stamps to supplement their pay. (Like quite a few workers today, actually.) Eventually they came up with the idea of a "rolling strike," which was do-able in the way a general strike was not. The rolling strike was so successful that the legislature has since outlawed it. Every day the clerical workers in a different department walked off the job. (Imagine the surprise of all the people relying on the labor of clerical workers discovering how dependent they were on it...) Briefly, the gender gap in pay was closed. (Sad closing note: the gender gap in pay is back.)

Shannon Elizabeth Bell spoke about the origin of the environmental justice movement in the poorest county of North Carolina. This is a movement aimed at protecting health and economic well-being of communities (rather than focusing on protecting the Earth). It is grassroots and on-going, particularly in Appalachia vis-a-vis the coal industry. The presenter played a moving audio clip of an Appalachian woman talking about why she fights for environmental justice and the backlash she faces within her own community.

Next we broke for lunch, after which we had the pleasure of listening to Molly Gloss reading from her Tiptree-Award novel Wildlife. I'm afraid I can't find my notes for the afternoon sessions. I missed most of the first session (presumably because I was talking to someone at the time, though my memory is weirdly hazy). The second afternoon session, on the 21st century, entailed Gabriela Martinez on the University of Oregon's Diversity Project, Nichole Maher on Native American Families ( a wonderful success story of community organizing and coalition work), Susan Sygall on disability rights in the global context, and Charli Carpenter on "interest gaps between intentions and outcomes" in national security policies. Carpenter is particularly interested in the gendered norms for defining civilian immunity and the "Making Amends" campaign, based on the idea that governments need to not only not commit war crimes, but also need to assist civilians harmed by violent conflict. (I have to say-- and several members of the audience agreed with me, this latter would have been more effective without an overwrought sound track.)

Dinner break was a bit of a rush, since seating for the Ursula Le Guin reading began at 6 p.m. The reading was, as you might expect, wonderful. Ursula read from an unpublished story that only three people (I think) had previously read. I won't say any more about it, though, since Ursula swore us all to silence. (Given the hundreds of people listening, I'll be interested to see if details of the story leak out.) After the reading, Ursula did some Q&A, first with a professor and graduate student and then with the audience. A signing, which I and several other writers participated in, followed.(I was seated between Suzy McKee Charnas and Kate Wilhelm.) And then it was back to the hotel and the hotel's bar, where a good time was had by many (including me), and it felt a lot like WisCon, if you know what I mean.

Saturday's symposium was "Worlds Beyond World," and was all about feminist sf. The first panel, moderated by Roxane Samer, featured three undergraduates and one graduate student talking about class projects using the University of Oregon archives (which includes the papers of Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ). Laura Strait talked about Ursula Le Guin's correspondence with Eleanor Cameron and Cameron's run-in with Roald Dahl and her critique of the racism in his work. Strait made the point that she believes an understanding of an author's intentionality can inform literary criticism of the author's work. Grace Shunn, who admitted knowing very little about science fiction, talked about reading UKL's correspondence with Alice Sheldon. Mahkah Wu, who spoke so quickly the person writing captions gave up even trying to follow his presentation, talked about men's advantages in debates-- because men are allowed to be verbally aggressive without penalty and can talk as fast as they want and still be intelligible (especially if their voices are deep). Debate, he said, creates a hostile atmosphere toward women. He mentioned debating the proposition that "Women should not be allowed access to political institutions" (on the con side)-- though I have no memory of how this related to anything else he was saying-- about which, later, someone (I think it may have been Vonda McIntyre) wondered why the proposition hadn't been "Men should not be allowed access to political institutions" instead. He finally, after much preamble, noted that he had chosen to focus on an argument Ursula had with Darko Suvin. Amy Jones concluded the session by talking about reading documents in the archives to trace changes in language use (which is something that interests me mightily).

I was a panelist for the next two sessions, one before and one after lunch, and so I'm afraid I can't really say much about them. (I was told that a written transcript of the sessions is being prepared. When/if I hear of one, I'll let you know.) I was a bit uncertain going into these because I wasn't sure of what our audience would be. Nevertheless, the level of the discussion was in no way a sort of "feminist science fiction 101." My impression after the event is that the audience's level of comprehension was varied. The first panel focused on "Feminist Science Fiction as Political Theory." Larissa Lai moderated this beautifully, and Suzy McKee Charnas, Vonda N. McIntyre, Kate Wilhelm, and I were the panelists. I enjoyed it immensely, as I did the second panel, "Building Feminist Worlds," moderated by Margaret McBride, with panelists Molly Gloss, Andrea Hairston, Larissa Lai, and me. I think we talked more specifically about particular works on the second panel. (Though I may be wrong!) My hope is that we conveyed a sense of just how lively, diverse, and burgeoning feminist science fiction is.

The last session, moderated by Grace Dillon, included Kathryn Allan, Joan Haran, Andrea Hairston, and Alexis Lothian. Grace Dillon questioned the prevalence of frontier and pioneer metaphors in science fiction research and cited Katie King's Networking Re-enactments. "True tradition," she asserted, "is dynamic" rather than static. Joan talked about her article with Katie King in the new issue of Ada. (Which I liked to in an earlier entry on this blog.) She argued that new historiographies enable us to think about alternative futures (an idea I've gotten behind myself, particularly in my "Toward a Genealogy of Feminist Science Fiction"). She emphasized how wrong it is to assume that the present is single and unified. Alexis talked about feminist science fiction's exploration of ways of knowing, which allows us other ways of looking at the world. Andrea declared that when she sits down to write a paper, it is as "a performance monologue by Andrea the Professor." "I follow the desire for knowledge and then I write about it," she said. Kathryn Allan studies "feminist post-cyberpunk" as an independent scholar. She works on disability in science fiction and has written "Cripping the Future" using an approach to disability studies that takes the modeling of disability away from the medical estabilishment and gives it to the disabled.

In retrospect, I'm struck by how the discussions that unfolded over the last three sessions always came back to the importance of community for feminist science fiction. On one of the panels (probably "Feminist Science Fiction as Political Theory") I noted that for me, three metaphors characterize feminist science fiction. The first is the one Carol Stabile (one of the key organizers of the conference) articulated at the beginning of the Worlds Beyond World symposium: Feminist science fiction provides space for creating alternatives to "what is" (which is especially important now that most people in the US have been taught to believe that how things are is the only way they can be). Karen Joy Fowler gave me the second metaphor when she wrote to me (back in 2002, I think) that "feminist science fiction is the sea I swim in." The third metaphor is my own: feminist science fiction is a grand conversation. Each of these metaphor help us to see different aspects of feminist science fiction, all of them absolutely critical. The first explains what feminist sf does and why it matters. The second tells us about how the individual reader or writer engages in feminist science fiction within a crucial, indispensible context. (A work of feminist sf is only possible and intelligible because of the existence of feminist science fiction as a whole.) And the third metaphor makes explicit the connections the second one implies and explains how it is intelligible at all.

It was a wonderful weekend, y'all. I wish more of you could have been there.

Science Fiction as Theory Incarnate

I've just posted, on my personal website, an essay that was published in 2007 in Sci-Fi in the Mind's Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction. It came to me, after my panels this weekend in Eugene, that it might be interesting reading for people wanting to know more about the relationship of feminist science fiction to political theory. You can download it at http://ltimmelduchamp.com/essays/theory_incarnate.html.

Worlds beyond World Symposium

In about a month's time, the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon will be celebrating their 40th anniversary with two symposiums, one of them focusing on feminist science fiction. All the programming will be free and open to the public. So, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you might well want to consider attending, especially when you see who will be participating. (I'm thrilled to say, the list includes several Aqueduct Press authors. including me.)

 Here's the relevant scheduling info:


Symposium 2: Sally Miller Gearhart “Worlds Beyond World” – Nov. 8-9 
In this symposium, authors and cultural critics explore feminist creative production and the roles of science fiction and utopian ideas in imagining feminist futures. Sessions include the following:

FRIDAY, 6:30-9 PM • Keynote event: “A Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin”

SATURDAY, 9 AM-6 PM

• Session 1: “Feminists in the Archives,” a panel featuring Clark Honors College students working with the papers of feminist science fiction authors housed in Knight Library Special Collections and University Archives

• Session 2: “Science Fiction as Feminist Political Theory” featuring Suzy McKee Charnas, L. Timmel Duchamp, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Kate Wilhelm

• Session 3: “Building Feminist Worlds” featuring L. Timmel Duchamp, Molly Gloss, and Andrea Hairston

• Session 4: “Directions in Feminist Science Fiction Research” featuring Andrea Hairston, Joan Haran, and Alexis Lothian

Registration: Free and open to the public, but registration is required at guestli.st/164928. For travel and other event information, go to csws.uoregon.edu and click on “40th Anniversary.”

Quiet pleasures

When back in 1979 I first moved to Seattle, my number-one favorite destination in the Pacific Northwest was the Washington coast, especially the La Push area, and after that, the San Juan Islands. I've spent a lot of time in those places over the decades, but a couple of other places have been edging their way into my heart, particularly the Columbia Gorge, which straddles a good stretch of the Washington-Oregon border. The Gorge possesses a stark beauty that the many dams that have been foisted onto the river haven't begun to diminish. Its pleasures, for me, are of the quiet sort. And interestingly, as one moves away from the Columbia River (north or south, back into the Cascades), the climate quickly shifts and the land moves from scrubby chaparral to lush Pacific Northwest forest. I think I intuitively understand why such pleasures failed to draw me when I was younger, but I can't easily put that understanding into words. If I were a poet, I think I'd give it a shot. Seems like that's the sort of thing poetry can address without rendering the subject dull and labored-- which I suspect my attempt to write about it in prose would inevitably be.

When I spend time in the Columbian Gorge, I almost always visit the museum at Maryhill (which has a winery associated with it-- wineries being as thick on the ground in the Columbian Gorge as they are in Sonoma, California). During my visit the week before last, I found, in the museum's sculpture park, a sculpture of a horse that evoked, for me, a sort of Wild West Steampunk aesthetic.

Dixie Jewett's sculpture, titled Merriweather (2011), was constructed from scrap metal-- specifically welded metal, wheels, and gears. According to the placard accompanying the sculpture, the artist specializes in larger-than-lifesize horses. I generally think of Steampunk aesthetic as all shiny brass and polished wood powered by steam and lubricated by springs and gears, but the materials in Jewett's horse evoke mechanized locomotion shaped to look like a horse. Hmm. Maybe this is more an 18th- rather than 19th-Century conceit-- pre-steam rather than steampunk, when mechanized creatures in Enlightenment circles were all the rage. (I don't know that anyone other than E.T.A. Hoffman ever wrote about those.) Was such an evocation the artist's intention? Probably not. The materials she used were probably chosen for their aesthetic rather than associational qualities. But the image she has created engages my imagination, and I delight in that evocation nonetheless.

Links for early June

--Autostraddle profiles Andrea Hairston in Eleven Women of Color You Should Know and Admire.

--My story, "The Fool's Tale," which engages with Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, appears in the June issue of Lightspeed Magazine, along with an exceedingly crunch interview with me. (I promise you, some of those questions made me sweat.)

--Vonda N. McIntyre has just posted at Bookview Cafe about the event launching Squaring the Circle at the Public Library last month. She has three more photos in addition to the one of Ursula Le Guin signing a guitar.

--Gay City News has an article on Richard Bowes by Kelly Jean Cogswell, titled "Time Traveling with Richard Bowes." She muses that in his books, "gender doesn't stay on its assigned track," then concludes:

In another recent book, “The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others,” Bowes takes on fairy tales, plunging further into the ambiguities of time and gender. Here, he narrates most of the stories from a female point of view, and he seemed a little puzzled, telling me about a writer who asked him why — and how — he pulled it off. “There’s no trick to it,” he responded. “All the characters are still me.”

--My review of Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds has gone live at Strange Horizons.

--If you haven't already, you'll want to check out two excellent recent posts by Kameron Hurley: Dear SF Writers, Let's Chat about Censorship and Bullying, and We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative.

The Simons Foundation blog has an entertaining article by Natalie Wolchover, Is Nature Unnatural?, reporting on a cosmological controversy among physicists that the confirmation of the Higgs Boson has only exacerbated.

“Ten or 20 years ago, I was a firm believer in naturalness,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute, where Einstein taught from 1933 until his death in 1955. “Now I’m not so sure. My hope is there’s still something we haven’t thought about, some other mechanism that would explain all these things. But I don’t see what it could be.”

Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. Otherwise, why should we be so lucky? Unnaturalness would give a huge lift to the multiverse hypothesis, which holds that our universe is one bubble in an infinite and inaccessible foam. According to a popular but polarizing framework called string theory, the number of possible types of universes that can bubble up in a multiverse is around 10⁵⁰⁰. In a few of them, chance cancellations would produce the strange constants we observe.

--The US Justice Department has launched an anti-trust court case charging Apple with colluding with the world's top publishers to bump up the price of e-books. The Guardian reports:

The closely watched trial will review evidence from late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley luminaries. Though the company does not face a fine, it could face damages in a separate trial by the state attorneys general if found guilty.

The outcome could shape what deals online retailers can make with content owners. The DoJ is seeking a block on Apple engaging in similar conduct in future. The company denies any wrongdoing and its lawyer dismissed the case as "bizarre".

In court Monday Buterman argued Apple rallied top publishers to fight off Amazon's $9.99 per book deal for new releases and bestsellers. They then used that deal with Apple to renegotiate with Amazon, threatening to pull titles if they did not get a better rate. Buterman said customers paid "hundreds of millions of dollars more than they would have," because of the agreement.

The five publishers have already settled with the DoJ. The trial judge has urged Apple to follow suit, after looking at evidence including emails from Steve Jobs to James Murdoch, then head of News Group-owned Harper Collins. Jobs, who died in 2011, told his biographer: "We told the publishers, 'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30% and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway.'"

Apple is being represented by Orin Snyder, one of the US's top lawyers whose other clients have included Facebook and Bob Dylan. Snyder told the court Apple had done nothing wrong. He said the government was taking emails out of context to make "sinister inferences" and that Apple had fought hard with the publishers in negotiations.

"What the government wants to do is reverse engineer a conspiracy from a market effect," Snyder said.

Home again, from WisCon 37

I wanted to post from WisCon, to bring you photos and reports (however brief), but it turned out, as has usually been the case over the last few WisCons, that my every brain-functioning moment was jammed full with engagement. I love nothing more than engagement, whether it's with tests, ideas, or live conversations, but for me, engagement has a downside (though one I can easily live with): I can't adequately report on it (much less reflect on it) while it's in progress. (Pace the twitter coverage of this year's WisCon.) Hence, my regretted silence here. I hope to offer up some reports and reflections in the days to come, but I can't promise. (Because of all those books Aqueduct launched at WisCon, I've come home to a mountain of work.) The photo of me, by the way, is from one of the Aqueduct Press readings held at Michelangelo's, around the corner from the Madison Concourse.

In the meantime, let me point you to a post by Jeff VanderMeer for Ominvoracious, which I think as a complement to my post of May 10, Last Night at the Seattle Public Library: Translation as an Act of Love: Ursula K. Le Guin and Squaring the Circle. As he often does for his Omnivoracious posts, Jeff contacted Ursula to supplement his review. Really, it's all about the beauty and the love.

On discovering a "first sale" I somehow never knew about

For years I've had dreams in which I discover a cache of stories I've written and completely forgotten about, only to discover them with amazement and delight. What's just happened to me shares something of the feel of those dreams-- only with an unpleasant affect.

Thanks to Google Scholar, I just this afternoon learned-- 24 years after the fact-- that a story of mine was published without my permission or even knowledge in the minnesota review. Though this is not exactly catastrophic news, it's turned my stomach inside-out and is making my brain buzz with so much noise that I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that my sense of reality feels threatened. (I'm expecting that this rocky feeling will vanish soon, when I've processed this revision of my personal history.) What adds an extra little force to the punch is that this would have been my first sale (had my permission for publication been solicited by the journal).

 One part of me is trying to imagine the difference this sale would have made to me in 1989 (the year I made my first sale, "O's Story," to Susana Sturgis for her Crossing Press anthology Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy and Science Fiction), when I had given up on marketing the Marq'ssan Cycle or indeed any of my novels and was trying to break into the short fiction market. When I didn't hear back from the minnesota review after ten months, I assumed they'd rejected the story, "Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Coffee," and next tried Interzone-- around the time the minnesota review published it. The story then received 19 rejections from a mix of literary and genre magazine, until Terra Incognita bought first serial rights to its publication in 1996. Some of the rejections were brutal, because the story was overtly political. It went through numerous line-edits over those years. So the version published by the minnesota review is slightly different from the one published in Terra Incognita. I have no idea why the editors published it without contacting me. But I do note that the contributors page omits my name-- presumably because they did not solicit a bio from me.

Another part of me is wondering whether I've been naive about this. I always tell writing students that reputable publications do not publish submissions without permission-- that they have little to fear from publications with an established reputation. I'd probably say that still--and yet, I wonder whether I ought to. This strangely improbable thing happened to me-- something I wouldn't have known about if Project MUSE hadn't archived old pre-internet issues and Google hadn't included that issue in its search. One part of me is sure there must be some benign explanation. Some mix up in paper work. An overworked assistant dropping the ball. Is that naive? I don't think so. As a publisher myself, I know enough about the nuts and bolts of publishing to imagine such a thing happening even with the best intentions.

 A third part of me worries about a question I can't answer and might need an attorney to instruct me on: did minnesota review's appropriation of my work rob me of my rights? Did I lose the rights to that story after they pirated it? I fervently hope not. I've had it posted on my website for free download for several years now-- not knowing that someone else had published it first. And it would seem the height of injustice that their violation of my copyright would result in my loss of ownership. (Which is not to say that even more egregious injustices don't often happen.) Ought I to remove "Ms. Peach" from my website?

And yet another part of me-- the part that is always producing sfnal thoughts-- is yearning to imagine an alternate history, in which I received an acceptance letter informing me of my first sale (likely prior to my sale of "O's Story"). Would it have made any difference to me? After all, I'd already written "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." and "Sadness Ineffable, Desire Ineluctable" and was at the peak of my political activism and about to go on to write The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)." Probably it wouldn't have substantially affected my writing or my self-confidence (except to make me interested in submitting to that journal again-- which I never did, simply because they couldn't be bothered to send me even a form rejection). So, no significantly divergent alternate history. But in a way, it feels as though two splits in the historical thread have suddenly converged. I suppose this is because something involving myself happened that I've only now become conscious of. As though where my own words have been can't have happened in real time unless I know about those places... which is just wrong, of course. People usually have to learn the hard way that once something's been out on the internet--say, posted to an obscure list-serv, it's to all intents and purposes there for good. And now it seems unaccepted submissions to pre-internet print publications may fall into the same category, too. (God knows I've learned that pre-internet letters to the editor, invidiously doctored by the editors, are now out and accessible on the internet.)  

(The image shown, by the way, is W. Gregory Stewart's illustration to "Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Copy" published in the first issue of Terra Incognita.)

Tis the season...

...for mating displays among ducks. Ducks are always so interesting at this time of year-- in their gorgeous nuptial plumage, in their behavior, even in their apparent inflation in body size. Yesterday when we were out doing the rounds of the Union Bay Fill, the Southwest Pond offered us the most interesting scene, where turtles were basking in the sun, some of them piled atop one another, two great blue herons were perching on different dead tree limbs positioned on the diagonal, one of them staring intently down into the water below, the other preening itself, and most ostentatiously, several male mallards continually reared up out of the water flapping their wings (sometimes it seemed more at one another than for the delectation of the females), occasionally taking flight in order to make showy landings in the water a few yards away. Meanwhile, the blue herons ignored them totally, and the lone pied-billed grebe quietly swam into a far corner of the pond where it spent more time under water than on the surface.

The mallards' performances was the most striking thing we saw. (No, the ducks at the right aren't mallards. I think they're probably American Wigeons.) But probably the most peculiar was seeing two crows fishing on the lake. They fished the way eagles and osprey do--flying over, then circling and swooping in and ascending with fish in their bills. After they'd caught some prey, the crows flew up to the upper branches of a tree on the bank, presumably to dine in style.

In my backyard, in the meantime, the robins have been singing their heads off and the northern flicker and stellar's jay have been making a racket. I feel quite sure they all think winter's a thing of the past.


In short, it feels as though spring is almost here in Seattle, even if my hellebore plants are at their peak. Daffodils and crocus are in evidence, & going onto Daylight Savings Time, while difficult for those routinely short of sleep, confirms that sense.

A few links of interest

--Ursula K. Le Guin applauds the existence of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Refusal, which she informs us is made to writers who've turned down awards. (I haven't been able to find any information on this prize on the internet; Ursula's source is the Nov. 23, 2012 issue of The Times Literary Supplement.) Interestingly, she talks about her refusal of the Nebula Award for her novelette "The Diary of the Rose" because of her anger at SFWA for having ejected Stanislaus Lem

It was in the coldest, insanest days of the Cold War, when even the little planet Esseff was politically divided against itself. My novelette “The Diary of the Rose” was awarded the Nebula Prize by the Science Fiction Writers of America. At about the same time, the same organization deprived the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem of his honorary membership. There was a sizeable contingent of Cold Warrior members who felt that a man who lived behind the Iron Curtain and was rude about American science fiction must be a Commie rat who had no business in the SFWA. They invoked a technicality to deprive him of his membership and insisted on applying it. Lem was a difficult, arrogant, sometimes insufferable man, but a courageous one and a first-rate author, writing with more independence of mind than would seem possible in Poland under the Soviet regime. I was very angry at the injustice of the crass and petty insult offered him by the SFWA. I dropped my membership, and feeling it would be shameless to accept an award for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance, took my entry out of Nebula competition shortly before the winners were to be announced. The SFWA called me to plead with me not to withdraw it, since it had, in fact, won. I couldn’t do that. So — with the perfect irony that awaits anybody who strikes a noble pose on high moral ground — my award went to the runner-up: Isaac Asimov, the old chieftain of the Cold Warriors.

What relates my small refusal to Sartre’s big one is the sense that to accept an award from an institution is to be co-opted by, embodied as, the institution. Sartre refused this on general principle, while I acted in specific protest. But I do have sympathy for his distrust of allowing himself to be identified as something other than himself. He felt that the huge label “Success” that the Nobel sticks on an author’s forehead would, as it were, hide his face. His becoming a “Nobelist” would adulterate his authority as Sartre.

Do go and read her reflections on awards generally.

--Nin Andrews interviews me for the Best American Poetry blog. The interview concludes with Liz Henry's "Mother Frankenstein."

--I read today that

The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year recorded in the contiguous United States.

How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year’s 55.3 degrees blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.

If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 daily high records were set at U.S. weather stations, compared with only 6,664 record lows, according to a count maintained by Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records.

That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year.

“The heat was remarkable,” said Jake Crouch, a scientist with the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which released the official climate compilation Tuesday. “It was prolonged. That we beat the record by one degree is quite a big deal.”

While in Australia, which is suffering record heat and fierce wild fires, "meteorologists have had to add a new color to their temperature maps to reflect an "uparalleled setting of new heat extremes."

Wild fires continue to rage across Australia Tuesday and temperatures have become so hot the country's Bureau of Meteorology was forced to add a new color—deep purple—to show areas that have exceeded all-time heat records.

Previously the Bureau's heat index was capped at 48°C (118.4°F), but now recorded temperatures of over 50°C (122°F) have pushed the limit of the scale to an unheard of 54°C, which is equivalent to 129°F.

"The scale has just been increased today and I would anticipate it is because the forecast coming from the bureau's model is showing temperatures in excess of 50 degrees," David Jones, head of the bureau's climate monitoring and prediction unit, told reporters.

Indicating that the worst may yet to come, Jones added that, "The air mass over the inland is still heating up - it hasn't peaked."

Climate scientists in Australia—with Jones among them—say the fires and the heat are unprecedented in scale and intensity, but that Australians should understand the destructive temperatures and ensuing fires across Tasmania and southern sections of the country are the new normal of runaway climate change.

The reports keep coming in-- about the arctic antarctic melting at much faster rates that previously thought, about how levels of carbon in the atmosphere have passed the point of no return, about extreme weather, and so on. That these reports keep coming in ever thicker and faster curiously enough doesn't mean that the "issue" is getting the attention it needs-- here in the US, anyway. The public sphere (i.e., the US's elites) are still not paying attention. Why do you suppose that is?

Reflections on the last day of the year

Perhaps it's because this particular December has been exceptionally gray and dismal in Seattle, or perhaps it's because of the way the two December holiday weeks fell this year, but I've had the feeling of being in a kind of limbo lately. When I woke this morning to another day-with-the-lights on and remembered it was the last day of the year, my mind made a couple of odd connections (not in itself odd for me, of course). One of these was the ancient Romans' practice of going off the calendar at the end of the year to make up the days of the year not accounted for in the official calendar. (Julius Caesar was the one to put a stop to that, in 46 BCE, adding 11 or 12 days (the variation caused by the addition of leap years, to make it all come out even). The other was Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars colonists going off the clock late every night to make up the minutes needed to make up the rest of the day not accounted for in a 24-hour clock operating on Mars, which doesn't have a 24-hour day. We are still on the calendar and the clock, of course. But this living in very short days when the light is so thin and gray and, when the sun briefly does appear, it is so low in the sky (something like 16 degrees, I think), feels strangely in-between.

The end of the calendar year doesn't usually move me to reflect on and review the year past (except, of course, for reading retrospectives)-- for me, that usually comes in the fall-- but this gray in-betweeness seems to demand some sort of effort to that end, perhaps to give me a sense of more solid footing. Two person events dominate my reflections. In September I lost my mother-in-law, whose humane extraordinariness became apparent to me slowly over the course of the 42 years I knew her. I met her at one of the most stressful periods of her life, and then had the pleasure of seeing her mature-- and seeing that maturing can be the concomitant of aging. I don't think I can overemphasize the importance of this for me-- of seeing this sort of beautiful becoming unfolding before me (perhaps more clearly because I saw her only at intervals). Despite our age difference, I never thought of her as a role model or any kind of authority. And yet it comes to me now, as I look back, that she was among the women who showed me that done right, age can give a woman a substance and an interior power previously denied her. How could I fear or regret the signs of age in my own body, having first beheld them in her?

The second personal event was the bizarre, serious infection that swallowed up more than two months of my year. It made me realize that doctors, especially the ones we regularly visit (in my case these days, residents, who often don't know basic things about human physiology or psychology and, being in their mid- to late-20s, have too little experience in either life or medicine to do more than follow crude formulas while speaking with the stern, absolute authority of a pupil repeating recently learned lessons), are shooting craps. I suppose it's a good thing most of us draw a veil over how much doctors don't know about the complex operations of the human body or disease, since the fact of their ignorance is very scary to face head on. I've long recognized that doctors generally follow formulas and just hope they work, and that the best doctors are able to apply the judgment and intuition acquired through experience to mediate their application of the formulas. But I don't think I properly understood how little experienced specialists know about, say, infection, even when the bacterial strain at work has been identified. In the course of a week, the official diagnosis of my infection change three times, as I moved from doctor to doctor. Treatment was a series of crap-shoots, along the lines of first we try throwing the most appropriate antibiotics at it, and if that doesn't work, we'll up the dosage, and if upping the dosage doesn't work, then we'll try draining the infected material, and if that doesn't work, we'll have to go to the last resort (i.e., surgery). For several days I was warned that if the infected area continued to expand, I should immediately stop eating & drinking so that I could be ready to undergo surgery as soon as possible. Various aspects of my infection puzzled the people treating me (and fascinated some of them, too), but since the practice of medicine is empirical, no one (but concerned and geeky me) was much interested in figuring out the microbiological mechanics of the infection. One of the doctors said the bacteria was so unusual he'd had to google it, but that apparently marked the extent of his interest in it. He also assured me that this kind of infection was so rare that its occurring again in my body is statistically speaking virtually impossible. I've long known of course that medicine is not a science and that a diagnosis is basically a sketchy narrative provided to justify treatment rather than a scientific identification of a problem, but I didn't realize just how black-box oriented medicine really is until I realized that once the treatment began to work, all the mysteries of my medical situation had become irrelevancies never to be explained. In the end, the doctors were very pleased that the infection responded to medication. Empiricism, sans theoretical knowledge, has triumphed. I now have only a very tiny bit of infection left and am confident that even that will soon be gone.

In fact, I'm ecstatic to be well again: although I complain a lot about my problems with insomnia, spending two months doing a lot of sleeping was really demoralizing. If insomnia is the price of health, so be it! That's one of my take-aways from this experience. The other is this: Medicine is based on empirical practice and is by no stretch of the imagination a real science; thinking of the practice of medicine in the early 21st-century US as science can only be wishful thinking. Given the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry calls the shots, I suspect it may be a long, long time before the practice of medicine even comes close to being in any way scientific.

Stepping back a bit from my personal life-- but still, of course, embedded in my own pov-- it strikes me (and a lot of other people) that this has been a year in which the reality of global warming has loomed large enough in the US to claim widespread awareness, despite its continuing to be politically unspeakable. Seattle has a mild, moderate climate, and so far our experience of the extremes felt through most of the country has been, well, moderate. Our rainfall this year, one of the wettest ever recorded, amounted to 48.26-- but apparently our annual average rainfall is only 36.3 inches. According to wikipedia, "Seattle receives the largest amount of rainfall of any U.S. city of more than 250,000 people in November, and is in the top 10 through winter, but is in the lower half of all cities from June to September. Seattle is in the top 5 rainiest U.S. cities by number of precipitations days, and it gets the least amount of annual sunlight of all major cities in the lower-48 states." Our spring was wet and cool and very long, followed by a summer so dry and long that the tomatoes we thought doomed (because of the length and wetness of the spring) actually yielded a bumper crop, as did the bush beans we planted later than recommended. The length of the dry period felt wrong, and the constant barrage of unbroken sunlight felt unnatural; seeing the trees leaves green long after they should have started turning gold and red and brown fretted me. (And why, I keep wondering, do some trees still have leaves-- some green, some dried up and brown-- hanging on them in late December? Did I never notice such a thing before, or is this anomalous, as I think it must be?) But how could I complain at the length of the summer, given the terribleness of the serious drought plaguing so much of the US? And then, when summer finally departed, the overcast rainy days arrived-- and are still here, with Dec showing 27 days of rain-- and again: how can I complain, given what Sandy has done to so many lives on the east coast?

Apart from such moderate versions of extreme weather, Seattle got another taste of the future here when a high tide washed into the yards-- and in a few cases, into the houses-- of 100 Seattle residents. Here's the Seattle Times on the event:

The damaging tides are magnified partly because sea level in Seattle has risen by 8 inches over the past century. "And the best available science tells us it is going to continue to rise and it is going to accelerate," Rufo-Hill said, adding that studies indicate the level of Puget Sound could rise by 2 to 4 feet by the end of this century. The combination of high tides and strong winds poured seawater onto yards and homes along Beach Drive Southwest, although just a small number had water that needed to be pumped out of their homes. The South Park area along the Duwamish River also sustained damage from high water. "Climate change is real," said Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn in the wake of the damage. "It is one of the things we've been looking at with regard to seawall design, shoreline codes and coastal areas subject to erosion."

Again, this bears no comparison to the experiences of people living on the front lines of climate change. But it's a reminder of the inexorable reality that our politicians refuse to face.

To give you a sense of how well we're doing in Seattle with environmental issues: although we have one of the oldest urban recycling programs, 2012 was the first year in which recycled materials outweighed landfill disposal. I was shocked by this, particularly since we have compost pick-up (which includes dirty paper, meat, and cheese). But it turns out that it's not household waste that is primarily responsible for landfill disposal, but construction materials. Apparently one reason the balance shifted this year was that the amount of construction debris fell below normal levels because construction was down. And then I have to note that we only this year freed ourselves from plastic shopping bags. The big-bucks lobbies have been fighting this for years. We're all adjusting nicely to this, thank you. But really it shouldn't have taken so long to achieve such a very small, obvious step.

Another widespread realization in the US this year was the reality of the demographic trends long in the making unmistakably brought home in this year's election results. For some, this recognition betokens a shift in mainstream conceptualizations of what "America" is and who "Americans" are. For others, of course, this realization has only heightened the phobic, racist panic that certain white men have been evincing since the election, in 2008, of Barack Obama to the presidency. 2012 also seems to have been the year mainstream opinion has noticeably begun to shift on both the many-decades-old "war on drugs" and what we in Washington State call "marriage equality" (i.e., extending the right to legal marriage regardless of gender). I'm not sure yet whether a broad shift is in progress in our attitudes toward gun control, but it's possible we might see that in 2013.

Rather than talk about the increasing curtailment of civil (and human) rights in the US, which the mainstream media take as the norm and excuse politicians from answering for, I'll mention one bright moment that strikes me as an important crack in the authoritarian totality of our administered reality: this year, the US Supreme Court declined an appeal to the Seventh Circuit court's ruling against a law banning citizens from videotaping police activity (which, in practice, usually turns out to be acts of brutality). This is serious, since all over the country people who videotape outrages committed by police officers have been going to jail for doing so, and cities, counties, and states have been passing laws banning any videotaping of police activities, which has resulted in some really awful arrests all over the country.

Reading Barbara Kingsolver's magnificent Flight Behavior, I find it difficult to feel honestly hopeful about our shared near future. All the moments of beauty matter tremendously to me, as they do to Kingsolver's characters. We need such moments, each and every one of us, as many as we can get. They keep us going, and when they're not a part of our daily existence, we know we are in trouble. But as Kingsolver drives home, those apprehensions of beauty are tiny shards that tell us only part of the truth of our lives. Earth, of course, has changed dramatically many times in its cataclysmic history; only a tiny portion of species have persisted through all of those catastrophic changes. One way to look at what is happening to the planet is to view it as part of the long, on-going process, in which most species live for a while and then die. Humans like to think we're not like other species-- hence, distinguishing them as animals, opposed to us-- also animals-- as humans, transcending the category of animal. Being smart enough to change the state of the planet doesn't necessarily mean, though, that we will survive the changes we trigger. If we can't become sufficiently aware and smart enough to save ourselves, will that distinction mean anything? The earth, of course, would go on without us, and likely spawn a new flowering of species. Most science fiction presumes humans will survive. How many people, I wonder, really care if they do? I have to wonder.

Solstice yes, end of the world not

Yesterday we reached the winter solstice. We really notice such things in Seattle, where the sun barely rises in the sky-- when one can see it at all, that is. It's rained just about every day for the last three months-- which has put even those fortunate enough not to suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder to the severest test. As you might imagine, because the days are mostly heavily overcast, we have to have the lights on during all our waking hours. And so we seize on sun breaks, when they come. And yesterday, we had one. (Actually, we had sun for about an hour today, too.) So out Tom and I went to the Lake Union fill, a piece of reclaimed land so wet at this time of year that boots are needed, even for the graveled paths. In past Decembers, more than a dozen swans have hung out in that bit of Lake Washington, but we haven't seen them yet. Yesterday we did see, in addition to the many mergansers, northern shovelers, and buffleheads usually to be found at this time of year, some spectacular wood ducks. Oh, and the red-winged blackbirds are back in huge numbers. Also, I was bemused to see three pied-billed grebes swimming together. Grebes tend to be loners, except during mating season. Their behavior changes completely, then.

Since I'm currently reading Susan Cain's book on introverts, it occurs to me that perhaps grebes are the supreme introverts of waterfowl... Certainly they're the opposite of American coots-- which form long noisy rafts across vast swathes of the lake, pivoting and shifting position collectively on a dime. This time of year, the coots are always to be seen at the fill. American coots strike me as embodying both instinctively compulsive groupthink and extroversion.

I also saw a lone woman, kneeling in the soaking muddy grass at the edge of the water, celebrating the solstice with a burning candle and some foodstuffs that couldn't be identified without violating her privacy (which I was unwilling to do). It wasn't exactly picnicking weather, but I suspect that didn't matter in the least to her. Nice for her, I guess, that the rain had paused, though perhaps she might have put up an umbrella to protect her candle's flame, if it hadn't. 

We have more 2012 Pleasures posts yet to come, but I'm pausing them for today. They'll resume on Sunday.

Looking at looking

Late Wednesday SFSignal published short essays by me and some other writers on viewpoint in genre.  Timmi joined an online discussion of what we'd said, adding:

"I've--more times than I can count--written a second version of a story in first (if the first version was in third) or in third (if the first version was in first)--when unsure of which would best serve the story. It's an illuminating exercise in any case. And sometimes the second version really is the correct one (and brings out different sorts of details that collectively change the reader's affect)."

She rewrites entire stories to make sure she's using the correct viewpoint?  That is some mondo literary muscle.  That is the authorial equivalent of hauling pianos around with your teeth--but much more useful.

Just a Sunday afternoon in spring

It's been a long time since I've posted here: sorry about that! My allergies have been in high gear for the last few weeks, compounded, alas, by a persistent sinus infection. As a result, I've spent little time online, except for doing stuff that absolutely had to be done. Today actually seems to be headache-free, probably for the first time in two or three weeks. In fact, I dared to visit the Lake Union Fill to look at birds this afternoon, thinking I'd probably be sake, for the sky is heavily overcast, the air very still, and the air so heavy with water that I swear I could feel tiny, invisible drops brushing my face. And lo, I didn't start sneezing, my eyes didn't run, and a headache didn't start up in my left eye! Yay!

We saw few ducks today (though we did see a spectacular cinnamon teal), but Vaux's swifts were to be seen everywhere, swooping and darting, red-winged blackbirds (of course), and--Great Blue Herons, in the most definite plural. My first sight was of one in a tree, then of several roosting in another tree. And of another one, which looked on the small size, standing in the reeds at the edge of the lake, darting forward and pulling a fish out of the water. That one then took to the air and flew off, to relocate in another set of reeds near the stadium, as we discovered when we continued our walk. We then saw another, much larger blue heron in the southwest pond, standing very still, peering down into the water. Everywhere across the expanse of the fill we passed photographers with huge cameras set on tripods-- a typical of any spring Sunday at the Fill. I heard various warblers, but never managed to actually see any. I was amused to pass a small boy shakily riding his bicycle followed by his father, jogging along behind him: a fortuitous arrangement that probably won't last more than a few months more, since even shaky as he was, the boy already had his father running at a good clip. A robin atop a thin trunk of a dead tree about twice as tall as I caught my amused attention because he wasn't perched on it, as one might expect, but lying on it such that he looked as though the trunk had been thrust through his breast. Since he was singing quite lustily, it was clear that no such thing had happened. We were getting out our cameras in the hope of taking his picture when he flew off, annoyed at us for staring at him.

Bird life in our own yard continues to be interesting. A Stellar's jay, beautiful even in profile, spends most of his time in the tree facing the windows of my office and also likes to forage in the turned-up garden plot in our back yard. The humming bird that visits our yard as part of its routine in the summer has begun making occasional appearances. And sometimes, in the morning, when I look out the window over the kitchen sink, I see black-capped chickadees perching in the kiwi vines below my neighbors' bay window.

I won't speak of the crows, the seagulls, or the geese. No doubt they consider themselves the city's true rulers. They can be seen--and heard-- everywhere.

2011 Tipree Award is announced

Thrilling news! Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire has won the James Tiptree Jr. Award! Here's the low-down from the James Tiptree Jr. Award website:

Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct Press, 2011) is the winner of the 2011 James Tiptree Jr. Award.

Redwood and Wildfire was a favorite of the jurors from the moment they read it. They reported: “This vivid and emotionally satisfying novel encompasses the life of Redwood, a hoodoo woman, as she migrates from rural Georgia to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. While Redwood’s romance with Aidan Wildfire is central to the novel, female friendship is also a major theme, without deferring to the romance. Hairston incorporates romantic love into a constellation, rather than portraying it as a solo shining star. Her characters invoke a sky where it can shine; they live and love without losing themselves in cultural expectations, prejudices and stereotypes, all within a lovingly sketched historical frame.

“Intersections of race, class, and gender encompass these characters’ entire lives. They struggle with external and internal forces around questions of gender roles, love, identity, and sexuality. This challenge drives how they move through the world and how it sees them. The characters in Redwood and Wildfire deftly negotiate freedom and integrity in a society where it’s difficult to hold true to these things.”

Honor List:

In addition to selecting the winner, the jury chose a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year’s Honor List is:

Libba Bray, Beauty Queens (Scholastic Press 2011) — In this atypically comedic Tiptree candidate, a cast of iconic characters trapped on a hostile island (populated by the capitalist analog of Doctor No) illuminates the limited palette of roles for women and offers the hope of more rewarding and rounded lives.

L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Nones of Quintilus” (in her collection Never at Home, Aqueduct Press 2011) — This standout story addresses the relationships between mothers and daughters and how the world looks different when you become (or intend to become) pregnant.

Kameron Hurley, God’s War (Night Shade Books 2011) — Set on a marginally habitable world divided by a common religion with diverse interpretations, this engaging work explores a militaristic matriarchal society.

Gwyneth Jones, The Universe of Things (Aqueduct Press 2011) — Running through these gorgeous stories is a fierce awareness of how gender roles and other social power imbalances are always factors in how we think, how we approach one another, how we see the world. The author questions the status quo, and then questions the questioning, so what emerges is a mature, honest, thoughtful complexity.

Alice Sola Kim, “The Other Graces” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2010) — This elegantly written short story revisits the role of mirroring in self-actualization and casts that path in a new and skiffy light as its heroine, Grace, is mentored by her older alternate selves. It also depicts racial/cultural intersections with gender roles.

Sandra McDonald, “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots” (Strange Horizons, 2010.10.04) — A surreal and subversive take on human-AI relations. An older female character exploring her sexuality is a rare thing in science fiction, and it is refreshing to see it handled here with such a deft hand.

Maureen F. McHugh, “After the Apocalypse” (in her collection After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press 2011) — This title story of an impressive collection brings to the foreground gender expectations concerning the practice of motherhood in extreme situations and then completely and matter-of-factly upends them.

Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze (Big Mouth House 2011) — A clear-hearted, magically immersive time travel story that explores powerful ideas. Thrown back through time to an antebellum plantation, a thirteen-year-old comes to understand how women’s experience is shaped by cultural expectations as they interweave with social, economic, and racial truths.

Kim Westwood, The Courier’s New Bicycle (Harper Voyager Australia 2011) — This compelling novel depicts a variety of sexually transgressive characters and looks at themes of fertility and alternate family structures through a dystopic lens.

Planned Parenthood and Me

Since the Susan G. Komen Foundation lost its reputation for being "apolitical" when its decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening program for low-income women came to light last week, I've spent time recalling, with gratitude, my own long-ago personal acquaintance with Planned Parenthood. It began in 1971, during the months that I received food stamps. I was working then as a cleaning woman, and Tom (who had started back to graduate school) and I were living on my earnings cleaning houses and a small student loan that with all the scrimping in the world couldn't be made to cover our living expenses. (We just made it with the food stamps, $54 a month, as I recall.) Since I had dropped out of school, I had no access to the university's student health center. I had never heard of Planned Parenthood until a friend, learning that I couldn't afford to see a gynecologist to get a prescription for oral contraceptives, told me about their clinic-- and that they had a sliding scale.

I remember bicycling to the clinic, in Urbana. It was in the basement of a building and distinctly makeshift-- the person doing reception sat at a card table (and indeed, all the "desks" were folding tables of one sort or another), the examination cubicles had curtains rather than doors, and the amenities were nothing like any doctor's office I had ever been in. But the doctor, a woman with a heavy German accent, astounded me with her deftness and gentleness with the speculuum. (I'd had only a few experiences with pelvic exams before that one, and they had all been painful.) Most astonishing, though, was that she did something that has now become standard practice, but certainly wasn't back then: she told me everything she was going to do before she did it, and what she was doing as she did it. And she explained why. She made me--all of me-- part of the process (unlike the male doctors I'd previously had who talked about the weather or a skiiing trip they'd recently taken or else just breathed hard or grunted as they poked around inside my body). I hadn't yet encountered Our Bodies, Ourselves, but when I later did finally see it in the bookstore and buy it, I recognized the attitude and approach to women's health care. It is an approach that puts the woman herself at the center of the process, and seeks to increase her sense of agency. My experiences in that clinic gave me a different idea of what gynecological examinations could be like. When two years later I resumed my undergraduate course work and had the option of getting my health care from the university's student health center, I never gave doing that a thought. And that's probably a good thing, since it was through my annual exams at Planned Parenthood that I learned that estrogen was raising my blood pressure.  When lowering the dosage, which was the first response to the problem, wasn't sufficient to lower my blood pressure, the doctor discussed other options with me, and then introduced me to my first diaphragm. She did this in a way that countered my dismay and sense of helplessnes at learning that oral contraceptives would be deleterious to my health. The people at the clinic also, of course, taught me self-breast examinations. Back in the 1970s, this was unusual. Certainly it wasn't something that was ever done in an ordinary gynecologist's office. I only stopped going to Planned Parenthood when I moved to another city.

My gratitude for the good care of me taken by the people at that clinic is only part of the reason I've been a long-time monthly supporter of Planned Parenthood. As the attack on women and women's agency has escalated over the last few years, Planned Parenthood has been a primary target. The attitude of those attacking the organization is: How dare they give women options? How dare they educate and care for low-income women? At a time of escalating costs of health care and an ongoing campaign of dis- and misinformation about women's contraception, abortion, and women's health issues generally, Planned Parenthood is a bulwark we cannot afford to lose.

The Komen Foundation has (temporarily at least) restored the funding it had been providing for the breast cancer-screening program at Planned Parenthood. But Planned Parenthood is under attack on other fronts. If you can afford to make a contribution to them, please do. This is no time for Planned Parenthood to be forced to cut back its services. I am fortunate that they were there for me when I needed them.

A word with such a sulfurous reputation

This morning I read a poignant essay on Anna Banti's Artemisia by Susan Sontag. (It is reprinted in At the Same Time, a posthumous collection edited by Sontag's son.) I suspect at least partly because Banti repeatedly addresses the protagonist of her historical novel, bringing in a few carefully circumscribed details about her own life, Sontag's essay ventures into the area of Banti's life as a scholar and writer and her vehement disavowal of feminism. While speaking specifically about Banti, Sontag takes up the phenomenon of intellectual and creative women expressing hostility to feminism more generally. This has always been an interesting issue for me, one strewn with pitfalls for the feminist faced with an apparent contradiction, and so I read this passage with great interest:

To refuse, vehemently (even scorfully) refuse, a reputation as a feminist was, of course, a common move for the most brilliant and independent women of her generation-- Woolf being the glorious exception. Think of Hannah Arendt. Or of Colette, who once declared that women who were so stupid as to want the vote deserved "the whip and the harem." (La Vagabonde, her novel-manifesto about a woman choosing her career and a single life over the love of a worthy man and emotional dependence, was translated into Italian by Banti.) Feminism has meant many things; many unnecessary things. It can be defined as a position-- about justice and dignity and liberty-- to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation. Or it can be defined as a position easier to disavow or quarrel with, as it was by Banti (and Arendt and Colette). That version of feminism suggests that there is a war against men, which was anathema to such women; that feminism suggests an avowal of strength-- and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection); more, it proclaims pride in being a woman, it even affirms the superiority of women-- all attitudes that felt alien to the many independent women who were proud of their accomplishments and who knew the sacrifices and the compromises they entailed.

Artemesia is full of affirmations of the pathos of female identity: women's weakness, women's dependence, women's solitariness (should they want to be anything but daughters, wives, and mothers), women's sorrows, women's grief. To be a woman is to be incarcerated, and to struggole against incarceration, and to long for it. "'If only I were not a woman,' that futile lament," Banti's Artemisia reflects. "Far better to ally herself with the sacrificed and imprisoned, participate in their veiled, momentous fate, share their feelings, their plans, their truths; secrets from which the privileged, men, were barred." But of course, Artemisia's achievement-- her genius-- banishes her from this home. (53)

Interestingly, Sontag then observes the simliarities between historical and "fantastic fiction":

Artemisia is a tragic reflection on the condition of being a woman and of defying the norms of one's sex--as opposed to the comic, triumphalist, tender fable that is Orlando. As an account of exemplary tribulations that follow from being independent, an artist, and a woman, Banti's novel is also exemplary in its depair and its defiance: the merit of Artemisia's choice is never in doubt.

Read only as a feminist novel, which Artemisia certainly is, it confirms what we know (or think we know; or want others to know). But its power as literature is also that of an encounter with what we don't know or fully understand. The feeling of strangeness is a particular effect of that branch of literature tamed by the label "historical fiction." To write well about the past is to write something like fantastic fiction. It is the strangeness of the past, rendered with piercing concreteness, that gives the effect of realism.(54-55)

Sontag writes more about the book as a historical novel, all of which I found deeply interesting. She concludes by remarking "Anna Banti did not want to lose her manuscript in the battle for Florence in early August 1944. No writer could welcome such a destiny. But there can be no doubt that what makes Artemisia a great book--and unique in Banti's work-- is this double destiny, a book lost and re-created. A book that by being posthumous, rewritten, resurrected, gained incalculably in emotional reach and moral authority."(55-56)

I have often, in the past, reminded myself of this-- to remember that first versions, however complete they might seem, are not necessarily the only or best versions of the story one wants to tell: and more particularly, of the kind of book that resulted from Banti's having lost the first completed version of her novel and, in re-creating it, had found it necessary to haunt her re-telling of Artemisia's story with the pain of that loss. Her insertion of that loss into the novel, rather than being self-indulgent, is painfully spare, resonating with the others sorts of painful losses that Banti perceived in the brilliant Artemisia Gentilleschi's life.

I've written about Anna Banti's work before on this blog, here.

The 2012 Galactic Suburbia Award

Have you heard? The f/sf field now has a feminist award! It's called The Galactic Suburbia Award for activism and/or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction in 2011. The women of Galactic Suburbia, Tansy, Alex, and Alisa, have just announced the first year's winner and Honours List.


Honours List"

Carrie Goldman ad her daughter Katie, for sharing their story about how Katie was bullied at school for liking Star Wars, and opening up a massive worldwide conversation about gender binaries and gender-related bullying among very young children http://www.chicagonow.com/portrait-of-an-adoption/2010/11/anti-bullying-starts-in-first-grade/

Cheryl Morgan for "Female Invisibility Bingo" ( http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=10805 ), associated blogging and podcasting, and basically fighting the good fight

Helen Merrick, for the "Feminism" article on the SF Encyclopedia: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/feminism (i think its a rewrite not new)

Jim C Hines for “Jane C Hines” and associated blogging, raising awareness of feminist issues in the SF/Fantasy publishing field. - http://www.jimchines.com/2011/09/jane-c-hines/

Julia Rios, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond for episode 11 of the Outer Alliance podcast (The Writer and the Critic special episode)

http://blog.outeralliance.org/archives/875

L. Timmel Duchamp - for continuing to raise issues of importance on the Ambling Down the Aqueduct blog [I'm sure they mean Ambling Along the Aqueduct--td] and various Aqueduct Press projects
http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/


Michelle Lee for the blog post “A 7-year-old girl responds to DC Comics’ sexed-up reboot of Starfire” http://io9.com/5844355/a-7+year+old-girl-responds-to-dc-comics-sexed+up-reboot-of-starfire


Winner

Nicola Griffith - for the Russ Pledge, and associated blogging http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2011/06/taking-russ-pledge.html

The winner will receive a Deepings Doll (www.deepingsdolls.com) hand-painted figurine of a suffragette with a Galactic Suburbia placard.

Congratulations, Nicola!

If you have ideas for the Honours list for 2012, please email Tansy, Alex, and Alisa at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com or tweet @galacticsuburbs

Middle-aged protagonists and ducks that aren't dead

I didn't go out yesterday but sat tight, waiting out yet another storm. I'd never seen Admiralty Inlet so white with chop before. Today, though, has been calm. And when I walked down to the beach a little after one, there was actually beach to walk on. Best of all, the waterfowl busy in the water were many and varied. I saw my first marbled murrelet, black scoters, and Pacific loons, in addition to the more usual ducks-- buffleheads, common golden-eyes, and hooded mergansers. I spent about ten minutes standing in one place, binoculars lifted to my eyes, watching a duck off by himself-- probably the same one I saw last week, also solitary-- which I eventually identified as a juvenile common golden-eye. Why did I watch him for so long? Because he was dabbling, with his head underwater, for such a long time that I began to wonder if he were dead. (I wasn't sure at that point if it was the juvenile golden-eye because all I could see was his body and some spiky black feathers sticking up.) And then, finally, as I began to think about moving on, he lifted his head out of the water. It made me happy to see he wasn't a dead duck after all. And then I found myself wondering why I've never see a dead duck in the water or on shore yet. Where do they go when they die? Do they wash up on the shore? Do their carcasses get scavegened? Or do they go someplace sheltered when they know they're dying?

It was warm enough that when I reached Point Wilson I was able to sit down on a log, take my gloves off, and jot a few thoughts in a notebook. (Until, of course, my fingers got too stiff to continue writing.) Here's what I jotted:

I've been watching the gray green waves roll in so near to the Point, right where the land curves sharply. No matter one's viewpoint, the waves seem inevitably to come in crooked even if they don't always collide at an angle with the ones rolling in a little further south. It occurs to me that so, too, my character's limits are by this point in the novel all too clearly established. The land, unlike the wind, tide, and currents, is a given. Some days the waves comming in at an angle to the the straight line of the beach and waves south of them do collide, with great turbulence--the wind, tide, and currents create a variety of possibilities. Today, though, the difference that the curve of the beach just there makes in the waves seems a thing in itself, without relation to the waves coming in along the straight line of the beach-- perhaps because the latter are barely perceptible as surf. Under these conditions, the collision between the waves coming in at different angles is below the threshold of my perception.

M. is middle-aged. And my ms is at 85,000 words. It is easy to see that her younger self would have scorned her for having gotten into the situation she's in. It's not a matter, in this story, of her being comfortable and not wanting to give up her comfort-- no one would judge her exactly "comfortable" (except by the most moralistic standards). Though certainly one could argue that she's looking for a way to make her life more comfortable. It's more a matter of her having made, for most of her life, one compromise after another, as each new crisis befell her. She began making these compromises by thinking she was being practical and doing what was sensible. But having done so time and again has put her into a state in which compromise is the preferred-- learned-- response to every demand for a decision.

This is the problem with writing middle-aged protagonists who haven't lived their lives in a constant state of self-actualization. Oh sure, a middle-aged character can undergo a conversion experience and be swept out of her inertia. And then, of course, there's the cliche of the midlife crisis. But midlife crises usually result in an attempt to turn back the clock, to shed social and personal responsibility. As someone holding on by her fingernails, that's just not an option for my character. The challenge here, for me, is to find a path that avoids her defeat but is nevertheless true to her character and is not a magical resolution. I have a very clear sense of her limits. But what I need to have now is a better sense of the possiblities within those limits. (She did, after all, start life with some solid resources. Utilizing those resources-- arguably dormant-- must suggest a horizon for the possible.) I hate it when writers suddenly gift their characters with possiblities that ignore their limits, as though when it comes to individuals in fiction, it is an act of good faith to believe in miracles. I know a lot of people insist on this as a sort of moral good. But when I read such stories, I'm left with an unpleasant taste in my mouth, as though I'd been eating saccharine.I damned sure don't want to find myself feeling that way about this novel.