Category: Art

Art

On The Road Part Two

A quick follow-up to my abbreviated MadCon report just past.  Harlan Ellison arrived at the hotel Thursday evening, around eight o’clock.  Only a few of us were in the lobby.  Allen Steele, Peter David, Donna, and myself.  Peter David’s wife Kathleen and their daughter (who Harlan “terrorized” to our surprise and her later delight).  From that point on it became a really good experience.  All the rumors that had been floating around about Harlan’s imminent demise proved exaggerated.  Though he didn’t look his best—clearly he has been ailing—and he arrived wearing a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms (Pierre Cardin, as he repeatedly joked, since he wore them all weekend), as the weekend progressed he came more and more alive.

I have a couple of photographs of Harlan.  I will not post them.  Harlan has developed a deep antagonism toward the on-line postings that pass for “news” on the internet.  He loathes the practice of recording and uploading on the spot.  Someday, maybe.  The pictures are for Donna and me.

But I do have a shot—a bit blurry, not great—of one of my panels.

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From left to right, that is  Gene Wolfe, John Krewson (of the Onion), Allen Steele, and Yours Truly.  I believe this was the panel on how we all got into writing science fiction in the first place.  Or just writing.

Saturday morning Donna and I drove down to the capitol, downtown Madison, for their semi-legendary farmers market.  It was brisk, but a bright, lovely morning, and we walked around among all the vendors.  I have a couple of shots from that, but not yet ready to post.  They will likely end up in my Zenfolio portfolio.

On the way home, however, we stopped a couple times to take shots of the sunrise.  We left the hotel at 4:15 AM and drove south into a wonderful morning.  At one of the first rest stops, I shot this.

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Not the greatest work of art ever produced, but there are elements of it I quite like.  I may work on it further.

Anyway, it was a fine trip, in the best company.  Maybe I’ll say more.  Later.

Or maybe not.

Art

Robert A. Heinlein: Grand Master

I finished reading William H. Patterson’s large new biography of Robert A. Heinlein yesterday.  I knew I wanted to write something about it, but I gave it a day to simmer.  Frankly, I’m still not sure what to say other than I was positively impressed.

Basically, Patterson achieved the remarkable goal of demythologizing the man without gutting him.

I’ve read any number of biographies of famous (and infamous) personalities which tended either to be hagiographic (and therefore virtually useless as any kind of honest reference) or a brutal airing of personal failings in some sort of attempt to drag the subject down to “our level” and resulting in a catalogue of reasons to think ill of the person under study.  (This is one reason I tend to urge people that if they like an artist’s work, read it all if possible, see it all, listen to it all before finding out about them as human beings.  Too often the person, depending on the book, spoils the work for many.)

Patterson has done something useful for aspiring science fiction writers.  (Hell, for any kind of writer as far as that goes.)  Heinlein’s reputation casts a long, dark shadow across the field.  He is one of the pantheon of timeless Greats and in many ways the most intimidating of the lot.  It is, I think, useful to know that he had just as much trouble getting started—and staying started—as any other decent writer.  (Harlan Ellison has observed that the hard part is not becoming a writer but staying a writer, that anyone basically can get lucky at the beginning, but over time the work simply has to stand up for itself.)

The legend has been repeated ad nauseum, how Heinlein saw an ad for a short story contest, wrote a story, then decided to send it to Astounding instead of the contest because Campbell paid better, and it sold.  That story was Life Line.  From there, up was the only direction Heinlein went.

The reality is much more as one might expect.  True, he sold that first story to Campbell and sold more, but not without rejections getting in there and Campbell making him rewrite some of the pieces and not without a lot of wrestling with reputation and deadlines.  Writing is hard damn work and this book shows what Heinlein had to go through.  Yes, he was better than most, but he wasn’t teflon.  And he had to learn, just like any of us.

Reading about time spent living in a four-by-seven foot trailer on $4.00 a day while he sweated a new story makes him suddenly very human.

But also very admirable.

The other problem with Heinlein is that he did codifying work.  There were time travel stories, generation ship stories, alien invasion stories, and so on and so forth before him, but he wrote a number of stories—all lengths—that more or less set the standard for how those stories should be done.  He wrote “defining” stories, and for a long time people gauged their work and the work of others by that gold standard.

One gets tired of having such a bar hanging over one’s head all the time and naturally a reaction emerged over time that was as nasty as it was inevitable, casting Heinlein as the writer to work in opposition to.

By the time I discovered Heinlein, during my own golden age at 11, 12, and 13, he was already being touted as “the Dean of Space Age fiction.”  In my reading he was up there with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, the other two giants.  It was as if he had come right out of the box that way, never having been anything else, never having had to climb up any ladder of success, never, seemingly, having had to learn anything.  One of those people who simply appeared, complete and omnicompetent, already polished and important.

And for a long time I didn’t like him.

Which was odd, because years later I noticed that I had read more novels by Robert A. Heinlein than any other SF writer.  By choice, obviously, since no one was making me do that.

The reason for the dislike was bound up with the actual process of reading one of his books.  Later, I was happy to recall the story, the characters, the message, but while reading it—and being unable to put it down, whatever it was—I disliked it intensely.  I realized finally it was because, unlike so many others, he made me think.  He had a gift for portraying the process of figuring things out and would take you through it, and make you question assumptions.  It was work to read one his books, but it was also work I couldn’t seem to get out of.

Later in life I was very grateful for that.

Past the legend and the success, though, came the controversy.  He broke ground, tilted at windmills, said things that shook people up.  Sometimes the people he made uncomfortable were those you thought should be uncomfortable, you agreed with him, and it was delight to see them lampooned so effectively.  But other times he made you uncomfortable and that wasn’t so much fun.

Sometimes he fell flat on his face.  (I wonder how many other novels by such popular writers are so universally derided as I Will Fear No Evil.)  But the impact of the fall was proportional to the chance he took with the work.  The trajectory was pretty damn high.  When he missed the impact would leave a big crater.

By the time I was beginning to try my own hand at writing SF Heinlein had become the Great Target.  Just about any group in SF that had a grudge or an axe to grind could take aim at Heinlein and bitch about his politics, his solipsism, his sexism, his pedantry, his arrogance.  And while I could see where many of these arguments were coming from and where they were going, I always thought they missed a big point.  There wouldn’t be many of these arguments if he hadn’t opened the field for the debate.

Maybe that’s crediting him with more influence than he deserves.  It’s still difficult to judge.  But people still get worked up to a froth over Starship Troopers and its presumed fascism or Time Enough For Love and its self-indulgent solipsism or The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and its political demagogy or…

To put it in perspective for myself, Heinlein was the first author I read who made me question gender inequality.  I never read his women as subservient to anyone.  They were all, to my mind, their own people, fully realized, and free.  He was the first author I read that pointed out clearly that political cant is a disease of all political ideologies, left, right, or center, and that they should all be mistrusted.  He was the first author I read to make it clear that ethics and morality, personal loyalty, and conscience are stateless and should transcend parochialism and provincialism.

Later, in discussion with people who took a less generous view of the man and his work, I could see and acknowledge that he had failed to support his own theses quite often and occasionally seemed to work against his stated ideals.  Fine.  He told stories.  Sometimes characters take over (actually quite often) and do things on their own.  Sometimes a conscious set of ideals have to work against in-grown proclivities.  Everybody has to work hard to transcend personal prejudice.  And Heinlein showed that, too.

Was Robert A. Heinlein the greatest SF writer ever?  No, I don’t think so.  But then, there’s no such thing as “The Greatest” anything.  He was one of the very best.  Was he even the most important?  Well, taking the Beatles argument, a case could be made—that argument being that while the Beatles were not in any single way the best band ever, what they did opened the field and sort of gave permission for others, who were often much better, to do what they did.  Heinlein fits that description and fits it handily.  So what if some of his work is dated or quaint or embarrassing archaic?

Reading Patterson’s book restores context and without that it is difficult at best to make an honest judgment of anyone.  Against the times in which Heinlein lived and what happened to him during the course of a life lived according to a different set of cultural expectations than ours, we see just how extraordinary much of Heinlein’s work truly was.  He ceases to be a relic, a holy icon, and becomes a talented, intelligent writer who did some damned good things.  Flawed, occasionally incomprehensible and from time to time a bit intolerant, the man emerges from the shadow of the legacy and the legacy itself becomes more relevant, because it begins to make a larger sense.

This volume only takes us up to 1948.  The year he married his third wife, the one who became almost as legendary as he was, two years before the film he worked on that set a standard for “realistic” science fiction in cinema, before the decade that saw his rise to an enviable prominence within SF and even in the larger reading world.  Patterson has done a remarkable job of telling a coherent story comprised of a dizzying array of facts.  A handful of writers at the time more or less made science fiction—Asimov, Clarke, de Camp, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, and Heinlein.  Heinlein remains the most controversial.  This book goes a long way toward explaining why.

I can’t wait for volume two.

Art

Ideas and Execution

A few weeks ago I read a really terrific story by Adam-Troy Castro, called Arvies.  Check it out, it is, as they say, killer.

Last weekend I went to ConText, as I reported.  Usually when I come home from a convention I’m energized, can’t wait to get to the computer and write something.  Not this time.  I was unusually enervated.  Maybe I have too much on my mind.

Maybe.

Last night, though, a story idea popped into my head from something Donna said and I have written the first few paragraphs.  I look at it and see that it is inspired in part by Adam’s story.  Probably not nearly so good, but there’s a connection.  Not at all the same thing, but a connection.

And I’m balking.  This one is edgy.  Serrated, in fact.  The kind of idea that could draw blood.  I’m balking not because I’m afraid to write it, but because bad execution could turn it into farce or insult or worse.  So I’m being careful.  The trick is to not be so careful I careful the life out of it.

But now that I’ve told you about it, I have to finish it.

Sneaky, eh?

Stay tuned.

Art

More Playing With Pictures

I had to call a friend to help me set up to scan slides.  It was literally a matter of not having something plugged it.  No, I don’t mind admitting “Doh!” moments.  Learning is filled with them, embarrassment shouldn’t prevent sharing of knowledge.

Anyway, the scanner works for color transparencies now and I have a mother butt load of them in the closet.  Thousands upon thousands.  At least half of them are Kodachrome.

So I began with a couple on hand and started playing.  One I did this morning I have worked up into two versions.  Here’s the first.

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Yes, I said and you read correctly that this is from a COLOR transparency.  But it was shot late in the day and was pretty monochromatic, all browns and yellows and hints of red.  I thought it would make a better black & white image and it is pretty dramatic.  (I just desaturated it in Photoshop, played with the contrast, etc.)

But I thought it had a bit more potential.  A photographer I used to admire was Pete Turner, who developed a style of intensely monochromatic images often with one variant color.  I always liked the idea, but the best I could do from what I worked with (unless I lucked into a shot that was basically all one color) was to hand tint black & white images.

Well, Photoshop allows me to indulge it and do it a bit better.  Hence—

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This is now my preferred version.  I isolated the two brightly color areas, oversaturated them, and then drew down the saturation over all.  I didn’t quite manage it right to get a completely black & white overall image, but this has some charm I quite like.

Anyway, both images will appear in my Zenfolio portfolio.  A fun morning’s work.

Enjoy the weekend.

Art

Photography and Change

Steve McCurry, a famous photographer whose image of an Afghan girl with brilliant green eyes for National Geographic has become iconic, has been given a great and sad gig—Kodak has handed him the last production roll of Kodachrome to take and shoot.  He’s doing it in grand style, traveling all over the world, with a film crew shooting a documentary about it.

I wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic when I was a teenager.  I knew nothing about how to do that, and for numerous reasons I won’t go into I never found out or took the chance.  I played it safe with a nice steady lab job and didn’t pursue a dream.  Oh well.

But I have nevertheless made some images of which I am very proud.  Here’s one:

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I just finished Photoshopping this and doing some work on it to make it more what I wanted it to be.  There are reasons for the abandonment of film, yet I feel sad.  Kodachrome had a special look and it was for a long time my favorite film.  The idea that Kodak won’t be making it anymore—or any of its other films—is just too weird to me.  I remember when they purged their paper line.  They once made dozens of types of photographic paper (b & w) in a variety of surfaces and in the mid to late 70s they discontinued 90% of them.  The market was changing, resin coated paper was becoming popular, sales flagged on the harder-to-use fibre papers…

Still, it’s a loss.  I will be very interested to see what Mr. McCurry does with that final roll.  Meantime, like most of the rest of us, I’m learning to do this digitally.

Gotta say, it has possibilities for me that are very seductive.

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Both images were shot in New Mexico.

Art

New Fiction

I’ve been working this past few months on short fiction.  You wouldn’t think this would be such a hard thing to do, given my rate of production in the last ten years (almost fifteen novels, scores of book reviews, a few assorted nonfiction pieces, and all the blog entries, both here and on Dangerous Intersection), but short fiction is peculiar.  Hell, anything is peculiar.  If you’re used to writing one form, switching to another can be very difficult.  There are some writers, I know (and some I know) who have no trouble moving between forms, but for whatever reason I do.

I feel as though some time in the last several years I’ve forgotten how to write a short story.

So after completing my last novel (the murder mystery) I opted to go back to short fiction.  I finished The Drowned Doll in late March.  Here it is nigh unto to the end of July and finally I’m doing short stories.

Last month I finished a story for Lee Martindale for an anthology she’s editing, got it in the mail, and she took it.  Amazing what a sale will do for your spirits.  This past week I finished the rough draft of a novelette and this morning I have begun another new story.

These last two are interesting in that I have no idea where they came from.  Writers get asked with such numbing regularity “Where do you get your ideas?” that it seems to me occasionally I should print up small cards with the various answers to hand out.  There is only one true answer—I have no idea!

Once in a while I can trace the germ of a story back to a couple of sources—an overheard comment, an article, something on television or the radio—and in the case of anthologies, it’s a bit simpler.  The anthology is about X, ergo the story will be about X.  The unique feature will be the way it’s about X, and that’s the whole point.  The real guts of a story is in the execution, the approach, the viewpoint.  Ideas are easy—so easy we often don’t even know we’ve had them until we start writing the story.

What you do with your ideas is where the action is, and that’s where the work comes in.  That’s why when someone approaches us and says “Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a novel.  I’ll tell you what it is, you write it, we’ll make a fortune” we usually laugh.  Thanks.  Got plenty of ideas, friend.  What is required is lots and lots of hard work!  You do half the sweating, you get half the money.

Case in point is the story I just finished and the one I just started.  In both instances, all I had was a title.  The title of the completed one was a phrase I jotted down at the Dante reading group we attend.  It just sounded cool.  So a couple weeks ago, I sat my butt in my chair, opened a new file, typed in the header, and put the title up.

And stared at it.

About an hour of that and I came up with a first sentence.  That sentence had the seed of the rest of the tale.  I just started writing.  With a few pages I had the basic concept fleshed out.  I laughed, too, because I still have no idea where this idea came from.

Now, it’s a first draft and I already know it won’t survive the rewrite.  But I needed to get this stuff down and out of the way before I could get to the meaty stuff.

So while Donna goes over it with her vicious red pen, I decided to write another new one.

Again, I opened a file, put all the top matter in, and typed a title:  Decadence.  (I know where that came from, there’s a copy of Jacques Barzun’s Dawn To Decadence right in front of me.)  Okay, catchy title.  Now what?  There’s a lot to say about that subject, a lot has been said.  I want to write a science fiction story below that title.

Stare at the screen.

Hell with it, walk the dog.  We did almost two miles this morning.

And I sat down and wrote the first sentence:  Lew heard them talking.

I know what the story will be now.  I just have to build it.  (No, I won’t tell you what it is, you’ll just have to wait.)  But I couldn’t tell you where it came from.  There are galaxies of loose-floating factoids in my brain and when I require them to they collide, join, recombine, coalesce.  Sounds mysterious and miraculous, doesn’t it?  Again, though, it’s sweat.  I work hard to gather all those bits so that when I do need to come up with a story there are plenty of them available to at least start.

If I finish this one, I’ll start to feel a bit better about my program to recover my short story skills.  It’s always a work in progress, a construction project.

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So, on now to the task.

Art

James Hogan, Troubled In His Stars

James P. Hogan had died.

He wrote science fiction.  The books I read, over 20 years ago, were generally pretty good.  He has the distinction for me of having written one of my favorite debut novels, Inherit the Stars.  It was a murder mystery, a science mystery, a space adventure, and a thorough-going exposition on forensics of all sorts, including, in the end, “evolutionary” forensics (if such a thing exists).

There is profound irony in that.  The plot hinges around a spacesuited corpse found on the moon at a time when it shouldn’t have been there.  The story is the series of investigations finding out where it came from.  Mars, it is ultimately learned.  But the creature in the suit—hundreds of thousands of years old—could not possibly have evolved on Mars.  Hogan employed genetics and evolutionary biology to solve the mystery.

The irony is that later in his life—for all I know, even then—he became an evolution denier.  Go to his web page and you can find links to papers by such leading lights of woo-woo Intelligent Design as Michael Behe and William Dembski.

But that’s not all.  He was a Holocaust Denier.  He was careful not to put it up as a category on his site, with the other things he seemed to be opposed to.  Yet he had made public statements to that effect.

I stopped reading Hogan when it became clear in his novels that he harbored an absolute hatred of communism and the Soviet Union, so much so that occasionally the polemic spilled into the prose and he seemed at times on the verge of blaming everything on them.  I was never a fan of the Eastern Bloc, but science fiction ought to be about opening possibilities, not treating our entrenched fears as some sort of biblical dogma.  I got bored.  I never went back.  I wonder sometimes how he coped with Perestroika and the collapse of the Wall.
I write this as a coda to the bit on Mel Gibson.   I read many of his novels and enjoyed them.  I had even spent time in his company and found it pleasurable.  He could tell a good story, a good joke, he was witty, and certainly smart.  But smart doesn’t guarantee rationality or a lock on truth.  Very smart people sometimes hold the most bizarre ideas in the face of reality—of course, being very smart they can explain their misconstruals in such a way that undoing them can become nearly impossible.

But the work was one thing, the man something else.  I doubt, knowing what I know about his politics and beliefs now, I’ll bother to read another of his books—there’s too little time and too many other books, so any method of cutting back on the list is viable—but all I can do in retrospect is shake my head and wonder at the dark cul-de-sacs humans sometimes slip into and never get out of.

Art

A Few More Memories

I thought I’d post a handful of photographs from Clarion ’88.  Just a few.  The temptation to try to do humorous captions is great, but I decided to simply be informative.  Enjoy.

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The entrance to Owen Hall, the dorm building
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Van Hoosen, where the workshops were conducted

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Tim Powers, our first week writer-in-residence, in session

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Pizza with Powers

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Daryl Gregory, doing his Tim Powers “I Got No Story” Clarion Blues

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Kelley Eskridge arrived already injured, with sprained ankle, but as optimistic as the rest of us

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One of many outdoor meals held in the courtyard of Van Hoosen.  Lisa Goldstein, second week instructor, is in the midst of students here

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One of the other eateries in East Lansing frequented by Clarionites

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Chip Delany, third week instructor

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Nicola Griffith

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Andy Tisbert, Me (attempting inscrutability), and Kimberly Rufer-Bach during a workshop

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Kate Wilhelm, Kim Stanley Robinson (fourth week instructor), and Damon Knight.  Kate and Damon were fifth and sixth week

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We had our own t-shirts and sweat shirts made, with a logo for our year, and “reading matter” on the back.  This was the day they arrived

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During the last week we wrote a “group story” which blatantly abused all the “rules” we’d learned.  This was it’s one and only performance.  Daryl Gregory, Brooks Caruthers, Me, Lou Grinzo, and Kelley Eskridge

The quality of the photos may not be the best, but these were done long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.  The memories cannot be contained in so few pictures, yet for those of us who were there, they may trigger the infinity of all that we shared.

Art

Clarion

Tomorrow, June 26th, is the 22nd anniversary of my arrival at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop, on the campus of Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan.  The following piece was written for an anthology about Clarion several years ago, one which firstly did not take the essay and secondly seems not to have appeared at all.  Be that as it may, I’ve decided to post it here.  Enjoy.

And to all my fellow Clarionites, Happy Anniversary.

Baked Grass and Surgical Evisceration

The room could double for a steambath late into the night.  When we arrived—seventeen of us from Maine to California, plus one from England—the weather was the last thing on our minds.  Now, four weeks into it, ignoring the weather was a consuming pasttime.  East Lansing was a torpid landscape of browning grass, heat mirages, and wilting humans.  Earlier it had been 103; as the sun vanished it left behind an afterwash that, I swear, raised the heat index.

Owen Hall.  Seventh Floor.  So this is Clarion.

When I had applied for the workshop it was an act of measured desperation.  I’ve always, in one way or another, wanted to be a writer, but not until 1981 or ’82 had I done anything about it.  Even then it was more a hobby than—well, than the passion it has become.  In the fall of ’87 I filled out the applications, placed my two stories with them into an envelope, and sent them on their way, like a bottle with a note for help cast out to sea.  I had every expectation that this, like most of what I had written in the previous five or six years, would be rejected.  I had solemnly told my companion-best friend-lover Donna that if Clarion did not want me I would give it up.  The writing.  Like a junky I was not at all certain that was possible.  But rejection after rejection adds up and the demand of the Gods Who Edit And Write The Checks seemed unachievable.  I had reached the end of my sanity.  I had no idea why I was unable to write salable work.  I had no idea what I was doing wrong.  I had no idea why my offerings came back unwanted.  If there was one thing I knew clearly about my expectations of Clarion it was that this question be answered.  What was I doing wrong?

Being accepted to Clarion was not quite as great a relief as a cancer patient being told he is in remision—but I think I have an inkling what that must feel like.

Now, the heat sapping what energy was left after workshopping and writing, my thoughts drifted toward doubts of a different, though kindred, sort.

What the hell am I doing here?

Long distance to Donna (glumly):  “I don’t know what I’m doing here.  There are some incredibly talented people here.  I feel like…I don’t know…I don’t measure up.”

Donna:  “Do you want to come home?”

Me:  “I don’t know.  Yeah, maybe.”

Donna:  “Okay.  Then walk.  And make sure you bring everything with you.”

I had brought a coffeebrewer, my own coffee, a MacIntosh computer, half a dozen reference books, a tape player and two dozen cassettes, vitamins, and clothes.  Oh, yes, a small portable fan, which in this heat had become a cooling fan for the computer, lest it seize up on me and mightily crimp my progress.

The white screen of the MacIntosh seemed as daunting as the proverbial blank sheet of paper so many writers have mentioned.  I was supposed to fill that screen.  Hm.

Clarion was a six week escape.  I had never had, and would probably not have for a long time afterward, so much time to simply write.  I wanted to take advantage of it.  I hyped myself into overdrive whenever the least thread of a story line presented itself to me.  Get it out, get it on the disks, don’t let it get away whatever you do!

Fourth week.  The story I had finally finished the previous night had come out easily enough, but then I printed it out.  I listened to the insect buzzing of the printer and with each pass of the ribbon felt worse.  Another piece of crap.  Another failed experiment.  It had a beginning, a middle, and an end.  So much for improving.

I stepped out into the hallway while it printed.  From around the corner at the far end—emerging from the “girl’s hall”, a result of MSU sexual prudery or something (which never made sense because there were regular MSU students of both sexes strewn up and down both corridors, which meant only the Clarion students were segregated…)—Daryl, Andy, and Brooks came advancing toward me, Andy aiming a video camera and Daryl reciting some narrative like a demented Inside Edition reporter.

Everyone ended up doing a spot for Daryl’s tape, a video documentary of bits of Clarion.  When the excitement had died down and the camera was gone, I went to bed.

Swelter, swelter.  Listen to heat melt the oxygen in the air.

In the morning I woke to the gurgling of my coffeemaker.  I looked over the story again, grimaced (there is a word, are we in the sf genre aware? that almost never appears in any other form of fiction, and I have heard solid arguments from english professors why sf will never be significant because we insist on using “grimace”), and stared out at the highrise shimmering across from our building.  It was already too damn hot.

I read the last story that had to be critiqued that day, made my notes, knocked back some more coffee, and dressed.  I left my cubicle and headed for the back stairs.

Behind Owen Hall a narrow river, the Red Cedar, runs through the campus.  A forest area sprawls against the river.  There are trails and it is preternaturally quiet and beautiful.  I had gotten into the habit of going this way to Van Hoosen every morning, camera in hand.

Van Hoosen is a conference hall connected to rows of fairly nice apartments surrounding a grassy courtyard.  The writers-in-residence live in one of these spacious apartments.  They are air conditioned.  We had commented to Al Drake and David Jones, our director and assistant director, that many of these other apartments seemed empty.  It would have been nice to have been allowed to occupy them rather than the monk’s holes on the seventh floor of Owen.

“Expensive,” David had said.

“They’re empty,” we replied.

Van Hoosen was air conditioned.  Mercifully.  I handed my manuscript to David for xeroxing and got another cup of coffee.

This was week four.  First we’d had Tim Powers; then Lisa Goldstein; Chip Delany; now we had Stan Robinson.  Stan brought with him memories of his Clarion experience, a quietly academic approach, a croquet set, and we were considering blaming him for the heat.

The workshop was conducted in the round.  Each of us took a turn, rotating clockwise, starting at the given week’s instructor’s left and coming full circle back to him.  After the writer, then Al Drake would add something.  Each of us did what we could to avoid being First.

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It’s difficult to describe what goes on at such a workshop.  Stan had congratulated us for not indulging in shotgun/machinegun crits, as, he explained, had happened during his Clarion.  We spoke to the story in hand, examined it technically, almost clinically, and tried to keep our visceral reactions objectifiable.  Sometimes that wasn’t possible.  Sometimes a story was either too good or too bad to be objective about and sometimes that aspect had to be addressed.  But we tended to be—if this is applicable to students—professional about it.  From some of the stories I’ve heard some workshops had been bloodier than a Brian dePalma flick.

The workshop went until lunchtime.  Then we had time to write.  Or wander the campus.  Or go into town and blow it off.

I was written out.  I felt dismal about my story.  I mentioned it to Kelley, but I couldn’t explain without telling her the story, and we had all gotten into the habit of not discussing the specifics of our stories before they were written.  I felt by and large out-of-place here.

I grabbed my cameras and walked down Bogue St. into town.

Bogue dead-ended at East Grand River Avenue, which borders the campus, separating it from East Lansing proper.  It’s a broad street with islands running down the center, and containing shops, restuarants, message boards with layers of posters and personal notes tacked to them.  One of these boards had caught fire recently; no one had cleaned off the charred remnants and now more messages were being tacked over the blackened tatters.

I hesitated before Curious Books.  This had become the bookstore of choice for us, not least because the owner, Ray Walsh, had arranged for each of our instructors to do a signing every Wednesday.  It was a wonderful bookstore, crammed with used and new, the air permeated with the heady odor of printed matter.  I’d already spent a small fortune here.  I walked by.

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I went straight to the Olde World Soup Kitchen.  As far as I had been able to tell I was the only one who had discovered this place.  I adore a good bowl of chicken soup (they make excellent sandwiches, too) and I wasn’t unhappy about being alone.  I could sit and think.

Some of the things I thought about were facets of Clarion that nobody ever talks about—at least, they didn’t tell me.

One: you learn just how much you can accomplish on five hours or less a night sleep.

Two: there are worse things than not being able to write at all—being able only to write garbage.

Three: you discover just how much alcohol you can take in and still be coherent.  Sort of.

Four: the workshop structure of Clarion lends true insight in just what an editor must go through daily dealing with the slush pile.

I had my soup and a sandwich and I thought about these and other things.  No conclusions, just mental exercise.  At this point I wished I could have turned my brain off for awhile.  When I had no more excuses I stepped once again into the blastfurnace and made my roundabout way back to Owen Hall.  As I entered the lobby George was passing through.

“David’s looking for you,” he said.  “Something about missing a page of your story.”

“Shit.  Where is he?”

George had a number jotted down and I called on one of the lobby phones.  David explained that I was shy the last page of my story, could I get him another and run it over to him?

What else was I supposed to say?  No, David, let everyone read the damn thing and guess the ending.  I ran up the stairs—the elevators took too damn long—sprinted to my room and booted up the story.  I printed out the last page, closed everything down, and bolted for the stairs again.  The copy room for our use was two buildings away.  I ran.

When I entered the building I encountered a large group of Asian exchange students, all talking animatedly in their own tongue.  I strode through them, silent, out-of-breath, and sweating profusely, a lone sheet of paper in my hand, and somehow did not seem to attract their attention.

David was in the basement.  His eyes widened slightly when I entered the copy room.

“Here,” I said, handing over the page.

“Thanks.  I’m sorry about this.”

“No problem.  My fault.  But I don’t understand how one page could’ve gotten lost.”  I glanced at the pile of copies he’d been running.  We had a lot to read tonight.  At least I didn’t have to go through my own story again.

“Well, yours was the last one in the stack and I’d gotten all the rest copied, then I couldn’t find the last page.”  He scratched his head.  “I’m glad George found you.”

I opened the copier lid.  A sheet of paper lay there.  I picked it up.  We both stared at it.  My original last page.  David winced.

“Sorry.”

I didn’t mind too much.  This building had fully functional air conditioning.

When he finished, I walked with him back to Owen, talking about various things that didn’t require a lot of thought.  David slid the copied stories under the door of each room containing a Clarionite.  As I watched each copy of my effort disappear under each door I felt worse by degrees.

We parted at my room and I locked the door behind me.  The small, rather noisy refrigerator I’d gotten from management contained a couple of six-packs of wine coolers.  I stripped, showered, and sat staring out the window, downing one after another.  In the middle of the third one I started reading the small pile of stories.

I’m a slow reader.  I was worried about that when I came and found out what the schedule was.  I had to read all these tonight, critique them, and be ready to be constructive in the morning.  As long as the stories were short I had no trouble, but once in awhile someone—like Daryl—would dump a novelette or novella on us, hence a night that basically allowed me about three and a half hours’ sleep.  Tonight there were four stories, including mine.  Well, I didn’t have to read mine.  One of the others was about nine thousand words.  I read that first.

It was dark by the time I finished the other two.

I was on my fifth cooler.

Instead of trying to sleep in the sauna of my room, I decided to go down to Stan’s room to soak up some atmosphere—cooled atmosphere.

(I’m also not a party sort.  I tend to be horribly shy in groups larger than two, so I hadn’t attended very many late night bashes with instructors.  To be fair, there hadn’t been many till Stan’s week.)

When I arrived at his room, my head nicely encased in cotton from the coolers, things were quiet.  Stan was holding forth about his Clarion.  Andy was there.  Sharon and Glenda, too.  I had no idea what time it was.  I helped myself to a glass of white wine and sat and listened.

“—no, we weren’t even here,” he was saying.  “We over in ____ Hall.  The workshop room was in the same building.”

The air was nice.  I sort of nodded off.

“Wanna go for a walk?”

I looked up.  Andy was standing before me.  “Hmm?”

“We’re going for a walk with Stan,” he said.

“Where?”

“Over by his old hall.”

I glanced at my watch.  It was nearly midnight.  I was tempted to stay in the room and enjoy the air, but what the hell?  I had missed a lot of this sort of thing so far (I thought) so I shrugged and stood.

It had actually cooled down somewhat.  The night air was maybe ninety degrees?  The grass crackled sadly underfoot, like we were walking on small snack crackers.

The stars were brilliant, though.

Stan spoke in semi-reverent tones about water fights, group readings, the horrible cafeteria food, tristes, trials, and travesties.  I thought, my what a placcid, boring group we are compared to his.  (Later I asked Damon about that and he opined that the 88 Clarion class was an older median age than the others, older enough that we didn’t—well, behave younger.)

We arrived at a gothic manse of a building that hulked in the night like a troll’s mound.

“This is it,” Stan announced and bounded up the front steps.  He grabbed hold of the door handle and pulled.  The doors rattled.  “It’s locked…”  He tried the other doors.  “What time is it?”

“Twelve ten,” I said.  I stood next to Andy, hands in my pockets like a tourist, watching Stan go from door to door, peer through his framed hands into the dimly-lit interior, grow visibly disappointed.

“I guess they lock up at midnight,” he said.  “Well, my room was over here.”  He crossed the law (crackle, crackle, crackle) to a row of windows that looked into the basement.  He started searching.  “Damn.  They aren’t dorm rooms anymore.  They look like store rooms.”

I walked up beside him and looked in.  Boxes, old desks, unmarked rolls of something (maybe maps) filled the rooms.  Stan went to the next, then the next.

“I don’t remember which it is,” he said.

“Let’s try the back door,” Sharon suggested.

I nodded and followed Glenda and her to the rear parking lot.  The doors were all locked.  Stan and Andy came around then, Stan talking once more about his days at Clarion.  I told him none of the doors were open and he gave the building a sort of wistful look.

“Oh, hell,” I said, pulling my pocket knife out, “there’s always a way in.”

Stan looked at the knife.  “What are you going to do?”

I shrugged.  “Find a way in.  What are they going to do, arrest us?”

Stan frowned.  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Andy was grinning.

“For nostalgia’s sake?” I suggested.

Stan shook his head.  “No.  Let’s get back.  It’s not important.”

I raised my eyebrows, trying to look very Spockian, then shrugged and closed the knife.

We wandered back to Van Hoosen.  Daryl was walking his computer down from Owen.

“What are you doing?” Andy asked.

Daryl gave us a frantic look.  “I can’t take it anymore!  I’m melting!  I can’t think!  I won’t stand for it, I tell you, I just won’t!”  Then he grinned.  “I’m setting up in Van Hoosen.”

I faded away from them then and wandered back up to my monk’s hole.  The coolers, the wine, the walk—hell, I passed out.

In the morning I woke up and sat on the edge of my bed staring at the coffeemaker that I had forgotten to set.  No coffee.  Shit.

I splashed water on my face, then made coffee.

A note had been slid under my door in the night.  Sleepily, I scooped it up and returned to the edge of the bed.  The coffeemaker gurgled energetically.  After a couple of minutes I turned on the stereo behind me.  Genesis came out.

I opened the note.

“Mark:  just wanted you to know, loved this story.  Your writing gets clearer and clearer.  Keep up the good work.  Kelley.  Ditto, Mark.  Nicola.  Me, too.  Glenda.  Chin up. Peg.”

I sat there with a goofy grin—I could feel it, I know when I have a goofy grin—staring at that note.  In one note I went from maudlin to mushy.

Later, in the workshop, they eviscerated that story.  Of course.  Being a friend means being honest.

That was the other thing nobody told me about Clarion.

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New Fantasy Thugs, Clarion class of 1988:  l to r (roughly)  Lou Grinzo, Jay Brazier, Daryl Gregory, Kimberly Rufer-Bach,Kelly McClymer, Mark Tiedemann, Peg Kerr Ihinger, Brookes Caruthers, Sharon Wahl, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, George Rufener, Glenda Loeffler, Sue Ellen Sloca, Mark Kehl, Andy Tisbert

Art

Dad

My dad.  I have a lot of mixed feelings about him, as every child does even if they don’t admit it.  Most of mine are positive.

To be clear, he is still alive.  He’ll be 80 next month.

In his own way, he encouraged me in just about everything I ever did.  The problem usually was that I didn’t appreciate his encouragement.  Partly this stemmed from a profound misunderstanding between us of the reason for his encouragement—or perhaps I should say the purpose behind it.  See, Dad was a Depression Baby.  Even in today’s economically stressed climate, most people born during or after World War II really don’t grasp all that meant.  For one thing it didn’t mean the same thing for everyone.  But for everyone of that generation, it meant something that drove them to make sure their children and grandchildren never had to live through such a time, or such conditions.

The irony of this—which I think was largely successful—is that the children of these people can’t grok the essential nature of their fears.  Oh, you can think your way to it—after decades of wrestling with some of this I believe I can describe it and write about—but at the time of life when they are trying their damnedest to both impart their values and protect loved ones from the severities of the Depression, there is a profound mismatch of perception and apprehension.  My parents both wanted me to be safe from what they went through—but they also wanted me to share the value they placed on money and caution and common sense and success.  To succeed in one meant the failure in the other.  I did not for years understand why my dad got so angry with me over how I went about choosing what to do with my time.

For what we had, my parents lavished me with largesse.  I took an interest in art, materials appeared.  I took an interest in music, a 1964 Thomas organ arrived in the house, state of the art with a Leslie speaker built in.  I took an interest in photography, a lab arrived, then cameras, then more cameras, then supplies.

And there was Dad, peering over my shoulder, encouraging and sometimes driving me to master these things.  It often led to horrible days of screaming and crying and nastiness.  He could not tolerate mediocre work or ambivalence or sloppiness or…

Or the fickle attention span of a child.

What I did not understand until about a decade ago was this: all these things showed up, underwritten, sponsored, encouraged because he was trying to make sure I had a skill by which to earn my way in life.  Whatever I wanted to do, he wanted me to do it at a level where I could make money at it.  All of it was aimed at a career.

I was a kid.  I wanted to play.  We ended up dealing with each other at crossed purposes.

Had I known this then, I suspect I would have kept my interests to myself.  I did finally do exactly that when I took up writing.  That was the one thing I did not share with Dad.

But all the haranguing and yelling and insistence on quality that had preceded it ended up going into the work on the page.

I can say now that all he did I know he did out of love.  He was trying in the best way he knew how to protect me.  To make sure I’d be all right.  He just neglected to tell me that’s what he was trying to do.  I accepted all the things he and my mother provided as any child might, as expressions of indulgence.  As toys.  And I played.

Unfortunately, none of what he tried to help me do came to fruition in the manner he expected.  He might have been happier had I become a studio musician, but learning to play in the traditional manner (lessons, constant practice of boring music, etc) left me cold and frustrated.  I didn’t really start playing well until I got involved in a rock’n’roll band and of course that was music he couldn’t stand.  (Even so, when he realized what was going on, he and mom actually went looking at portable keyboards and started learning what I would need if it turned into something.  I nipped that in the bud by being secretive about it.  No way did I want another two or three thousand dollar millstone around my neck.  But they would have done it.)

The photography turned out to be different.  He pretty much left me alone to pursue it the way I wanted to.  And in my usual approach, I jumped head first into the most difficult parts, ignoring the tedious basics.  Sure I wasted a lot of film, a lot of paper and chemistry, but in two and half years I was doing fairly high-quality work.

As an example, here’s a portrait I did of Dad that actually got some outside attention while I was still in high school.

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This piece actually got entered into a state art contest.  It made it all the way up to second place at that level and one result was to change the mind of the head of the art department about the value of photography.

At the time this image was made, Dad posed for a lot of pictures.  He was still working as a machinist.  Hard, intense labor at the time.  These were the days before numerical control machines.  He had to do the calculations by hand, load the steel stock by hand, operate the machines by hand.  He was immensely strong at the time.  He’d come home covered in sweat and grime, shower, sit, eat dinner.  And then ask what I’d been up to and did I need help with anything.

He has always been there ready to help.  So what if he got the method wrong?  It wasn’t all wrong and the results were nothing to complain about (at least, I hope not).

After getting out of the shop—because he was the only one to volunteer to take the training when the company he worked for bought their first numerical control lathe—he worked just as hard to ascend a management ladder and ended up head of an engineering department with nearly a hundred engineers under him.  He built an entire factory from the ground up for a single project and came in under budget and ahead of schedule.  He taught himself four computer languages and learned the complex ins-and-outs of procurement for an international corporation.

He was retired—asked to do so, offered a big bribe to leave—because, despite all this, he only had a high school diploma.

As I said, he’ll be 80 soon.  Physically, he’s much diminished.  But the mind is still as sharp as ever and he still challenges me.  And once the stories and novels started appearing, he was not at all shy about bragging on my behalf.  (“I don’t know much about this literary stuff,” he told me once, “but your mother does and she’s says you’re a damn good writer.”  Which meant he thought so, too.)

I found this photograph recently, scanned it, cleaned it up a bit.  I thought I’d share a bit about my dad.  He was and is Something Else.  I love him.