So I went first to music school, then to war, and then to art school, where I met Ed Emsh. Actually we met in front of a naked lady—in life class. After we married, we went off to France for a year and studied at the Beaux-Arts. In the summer we rode all around Europe on a motorcycle.
When we came back, Ed started out as an science fiction illustrator, but then went into abstract expressionist painting and experimental film making. We influenced each other. I went into more experimental writing and became part of what others called the new wave in science fiction. That was a long time ago. Now I call it the old wave.
Kafka is my favorite writer. I love most of his short stories, better than his novels. (Though I don’t care for all the short stories. My favorites are “A Hunger Artist,” “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk,” and “A Report to an Academy,” which I imitated in Report to the Men’s Club) I like Kafka because his stories resonate beyond the story. And I like that you can’t quite put your finger on the meanings. It’s more a feeling that it’s telling you more than is on the page. I recently heard a writer on the radio say that stories should be like icebergs, most of them underwater.
I’ve done many a story without resonance. (All my early work in fact.) But I don’t care much for those stories of mine.
The nicest thing that was ever said about my science fiction writing was by Jim Gunn. He wrote that my science fiction stories “estranged the everyday.” That’s what I like best about science fiction. You can make the everyday seem strange. You can see ordinary things with new eyes. Sometimes alien’s eyes. You can write about the here and now and have the reader see us as odd. Which we are.
Since thinking about this speech I’ve been watching myself write more closely than I usually do. I see that “estranging the everyday” is often why I work on a story in the first place. (I have several beginnings hanging around that I never went on with because they were simply telling “the story” so why bother?) Also I think it’s science fiction’s best reason for being. I like the other stuff, too. Some of it I like a lot, just not as much.
I’m finding, in my new war stories, that I can make anti-war comments through science fiction in a way I wouldn’t be able to if I couldn’t place the stories in a sort of limbo. My story “Repository” (out in the July issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) would have been impossible without a science fiction premise that had wiped out all the soldier’s memories so they weren’t sure what side they were on.
Also I don’t like to write about a specific war or place or time. I prefer to universalize it. Put it in limbo and make it stand for all wars. Science fiction is perfect for that.
A lot of people like science fiction because they’re fascinated with gadgets and inventions and odd doodads and all different kinds of aliens, and that’s fun and takes a lot of imagining, but I prefer stories with few science fiction elements.
I may have been brainwashed in this—that is in having as few sf elements and as possible—by Damon Knight. I obey that rule of his, but not his other rule. This was that, if a story can be told in a non sf way, then do it that way. He forgot that if you want to be a science fiction/fantasy writer then everything goes into that mold.
I always break Damon’s second rule, so I guess you guys can break both of them if you want to.
I also have a problem with those stories where strange things, not foreshadowed, keep popping up. If anything can happen at any time, where’s the suspense? As Damon Knight wrote, it’s like that old joke about waiting for the second shoe to drop. (Somebody living above somebody else is going to bed and takes of his shoe and drops it on the floor. Then he realizes he’s made a big thump for the guy below him so he very carefully puts down the second shoe. Pretty soon the guy below him knocks on the door and says, “For God’s sake drop the other shoe.”) In my classes I always say: But be sure to drop the first shoe so the reader can be waiting for the second. First shoes are as important as second shoes. I consider writing to be dropping a lot of first shoes.
After Ed died my writing changed completely. And my reasons for doing it. My children were scattered all over the place, my husband was dead …. I needed a family. I created kids, teenagers, and a husband to live with. I lived in my two westerns, Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill, in a way I never had lived in my writing before. At that time those characters were much more real to me than my friends. I didn’t go anywhere. I just wrote.
Another big change in my life back then pertains to Ledoyt, Leaping Man Hill, and also The Mount. One of my daughters said something important to me right after Ed died. She said go and do something you never did before. She couldn’t come with me but she sent me to a ranch.
At first I kept telling her: But I don’t like horses anymore. After I’d been there I kept saying: It’s the lore I like. All the stuff those ranchers know. How they go out as if ships, with everything to repair anything tied on their saddles. And I had never lived on a farm/ranch before. I had no idea. And I guess by now I finally say I do like horses.
In my novel Ledoyt I went back to being twelve-years-old in all ways. I drew for Ledoyt exactly as I used to draw in my note books in junior high. I loved the research so much I couldn’t leave it out… so the recipes, and medical information of the times, etc., are in it. That was my first real novel. My earlier novel Carmen Dog is like a series of short stories, except, as in The Perils of Pauline, each short story gets her in more trouble at the end. I was so confused about writing a real novel; when writing Ledoyt I remember lining up all the scenes and sections in a long row across the floor trying to decide the order. But after Ledoyt, Leaping Man Hill just went zipping along. (Some people like the mess of Ledoyt better.)
Later at my summer place in California, I took several classes in prey-animal psychology, which actually were classes on the psychology of everything. About how we, being predators and having predators such as cats and dogs around us all the time, understand predators, but know very little about prey animals.
I used what I learned in this class for writing Ledoyt, but also especially in my novel The Mount. Especially the differences between prey and predator. I thought it would be fun to write about a prey riding on a predator instead of the other way around. Us, who can’t smell and can’t hear very well, and can only see straight out in front, being ridden by a creature who can see in a circle, and hear and smell better than we can.
Another fun thing about those classes was that only the ranchers came to them. People with lots of horses and lots of cows and big hats they never took off.
I don’t think I ever would have written if I hadn’t gotten married. I came from a big, bouncy, noisy family. Always laughing and talking and arguing. (My dad was one who thought to argue was to love.) I was so lonely when I first got married with just the two of us, I didn’t know what to do. I kept on with art work for a while, but after meeting the sf people through Ed, I wanted to join them.
I was a daydreamer, but what kid isn’t? My parents let me alone. They didn’t worry about my bad grades or whether my homework was done. They let me be. That wasn’t just because I was a mere girl. They didn’t worry about the boys either. They always thought we’d wise up one of these days all by ourselves and everybody did—but with me, it took a long, long time.
I didn’t begin writing until I was thirty and had had my first child. (I had three, so I had to struggle to get any writing time at all. Most of the time I went around feeling as if I couldn’t breathe.) I never really had writing time until my husband moved to California to teach at Cal Arts. For nine or so years we had a bicoastal relationship. Both of us got a lot more work done that way.
This conference must be full of mothers? Maybe having as hard a time as I had. I wondered what my kids felt like with a mother struggling to write all the time, so I asked them.
One daughter wrote back: “Having a Mom and Dad who were doing their art in the house made making art normal and casual and an integral part of life. It made us kids do art
also.”
Another daughter wrote: “Getting put to bed and hearing the sound of the typewriter and knowing your mom was right there, was reassuring.” (She said, We didn’t know till later Mom was putting us to bed earlier than other kids.)
My son wrote: “I remember being proud and inspired by my mother …. I would never have tried to write if it hadn’t been for her.” His note was full of how unfair it was that Ed got to do his art with no hassle and that I had to struggle for every minute. My son would fit right in here.
I want to set the record straight about me writing in a playpen. It isn’t explained properly… and never has been, ever. OK, you put your desk in the corner of a room. You take apart one corner of a playpen and open it out. Remove the floor. Attach the corners to the walls on each side of the desk. The area will be three times again as big as a playpen. The kids are fenced out and can’t reach your papers. Mostly mine were hanging over the fence talking to me. My kids did not yell and rage outside it, as has been written. After all, I had learned to mother from that Frenchwoman who looked after us. I wasn’t quite as good as she was, but almost. The kids came first. They were happy. I was the one who wasn’t. I was suffocating there. But now I have all the time to write I want.
Except when I have to write a speech.
I Live With You Page 20