Portable Childhoods
Page 23
They are not children’s stories.
I go down my own personal rabbit hole to a time when I truly and deeply believed that if I looked in the right place at the right time, I’d find treasure. Something that, if not actually magic, was at least out of the ordinary, unanticipated. I needed to believe that there were hidden staircases and mysterious trunks in attics, a secret passage in the damp brick basement of the old drugstore on the corner.
Science fiction is, I’ve read, a literature of setting. For some, that means other planets, other worlds, other dimensions. For me, it’s the past, but a slightly alternate past, a reality that existed—at least in my imagination—just below the surface of everyday life.
On weekends, my mom and dad would load me into the car and we’d go for a drive into the Ohio countryside, past farms and through little towns. At just about the moment when I was about to ask, “Are we there yet?”, we’d round a curve and there would be a covered bridge. They are splendid, anachronistic structures, out of place and time. They were my primal experience with the wonder of the unexpected; my first words were cubba bee-gee! I never knew which turn in the road would reveal one.
It’s a feeling I haven’t been able to shake.
My stories have been described as fantasy, dark fantasy, science fiction, not science fiction, children’s, mainstream, and/or horror. (Often in different reviews of the same story.) I am a round peg in genre’s polyhedral hole; I write about childhood, and it’s an odd landscape, with contradictions around every corner.
It’s a time of play and imagination, freedom from responsibility. But it’s also a time of someone else’s rules and supervision, both for safety and surveillance. Everything—and everyone—might be dangerous. Don’t swallow your gum, cross Main Street, talk to strangers. Bad things could happen.
That’s the flip side of the unexpected.
I was in first grade when my youngest sister, Sally, was born. She has Down Syndrome, was and is, mentally retarded. She’s funny and affectionate and looks very much like me, except shorter and vaguely Oriental. But in black-and-white photos from 1961, I look frightened, holding this new baby. She is alien, irredeemably and profoundly “other.” First contact.
Write what you know.
And so I write about fear and wonder, and discovering who you are and where you belong.
Many of my stories appear to have happy endings.
Ellen Klages
San Francisco
December 2006