Olympia SciFiFest

9 October 2009 | 3 Comments

It all happens in Olympia WA on October 24 at the Olympia Timberland Library.

Nicola and I kick things off at 5:30 with readings and Q&A. Science Fiction Museum curator Jacob McMurray (who designed Nicola’s beautiful memoir) hosts a showing of video interviews with SF authors. Blöödhag plays literary heavy-metal music and then MCs a fashion show.

See those words “All Ages” on this poster? Ignore those words (grin). Of course all are welcome, but it’s billed in the library events calendar as an adult show, and if you’ve read my work or Nicola’s, you know we’re not exactly kittens-and-bunnies (or rocket-ships-and-rayguns) storytellers.

Should be fun. Join us if you can!

scififest
 

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, news, reading 

Books of life

26 August 2009 | 3 Comments

Writer, artist, fire lookout and friend of this blog Jean Rukkila wrote this lovely piece about books we can’t find online — the books that we make ourselves.

The first blank book I filled for public consumption began at the locals’ end of the bar in Crown King, Ariz. When I lived up that dirt road I’d noticed how the fellows kept their personal cue sticks in the care of the bartender. “Hey Bob,” I asked the owner, “Can I keep a blank book and watercolors with you?”
 
– Jean Rukkila, from “Not available online: a place for books that breathe”

Jean and I have never met, but as I type this, I’m enjoying imagining her at a lunch counter or a corner table in a bar, or high above the forest watching for the smoke to rise… with a book that she is making of the life that she’s part of, that is part of her. It’s especially the notion of sketches and words together that I love so much. I’m no artist (I have negative drawing talent, seriously, ask Nicola…) and it can be so frustrating, because images can say things that I cannot say with words. I think this is why I’m so drawn to screenwriting — because the end result is words and pictures of people doing, being, living.

As I said, reading Jean’s article makes me see her: or maybe it’s myself I’m imagining, magically gifted with hands that can draw the important things around me — my versions of men playing pool, gurgling ducks, a full glass of beer on a hot afternoon.

Jean, I hope I’ll see one of your books one day. And as much as I am a willing traveler in this land of pixels, I’m glad, like you, that some things aren’t available online.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading 

The President’s nightstand is full of books

24 August 2009 | 6 Comments

From USA TODAY‘s The Oval:

The five — count ‘em, five — books that the president toted along on his vacation amount to a whopping 2,352 pages of reading. Obama packed two novels, two non-fiction tomes and one thriller, all of them hits with the reviewers. In case you’d like to read along with the commander-in-chief, here’s the list:
 
The Way Home, a crime thriller set in Washington, D.C., by George Pelecanos. USA TODAY reviewer Carol Memmott called it “well-written and touching.”
 
Lush Life, a novel set in New York City, by Richard Price. Memmott said it “shows all the shades of grey in our urban landscapes.”
 
Hot, Flat and Crowded, an examination of today’s green revolution, by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that made the USA TODAY best-seller list.
 
John Adams, David McCullough’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the second president.
 
Plainsong, a best-selling novel by Kent Haruf. Reviewing the television show that the novel inspired, USA TODAY’s Robert Bianco described it as a story in which families are tested by difficult circumstances but prevail out of “sheer decency.”

I gotta say, someday I would love to find out that a President had read my book! Must be a pretty cool feeling.

And I’m biased, of course, but I worry a lot about people in power who never read; who don’t see the use in story. How do they learn about other experiences, other perspectives, other possible lives? And if they don’t learn that, how can they lead well?

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading 

Resting

29 June 2009 | 6 Comments

Here’s another in the series of excerpts from With Malice Toward Some:

Oct 7th
The days melt away like cough drops on the tongue. I brush my hair and take a long walk and type out Henry’s notes and stand for a while in the garden composing my face to look like a Landed Gent, and ping! the day is gone. The Devonshire countryside grows upon me like an obsession; I sometimes suspect that somebody has given me a philtre. Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife. Whenever you have definitely made up your mind to send her to a home for morons, she turns her heart-stopping profile and you are unstrung and victimized again. The garden still spurts roses and snapdragons and Michaelmas daisies, which I cut and arrange at great length in bowls and vases. This pursuit I estimate to be about the sheerest waste of time I have ever indulged in. The flowers wilt and only have to be done all over again. Henry, being a native New Yorker, looks pained if his attention is called to flowers. And the flowers in the garden are virtually forcing the house right off the property as it is, without my introducing them into the drawing room to bore from within. But it is principally because it is so fruitless that I like to do it. It makes every day feel like Saturday afternoon.
 
– from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

I’m thinking a lot about the difference between relaxation and rest. I’m a champion relaxer: I know how to kick back, share a bottle of wine and talk for hours; spend an hour on the deck with a book; fall so deep into a movie that I forget where I am; sit on a park bench and stare at Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond while crows and seagulls spiral up and down from the beach. I know how to enjoy these moments.

But I don’t know how to rest. I spend my life doing: it’s my response to responsibility (whoa! just made the linguistic connection…), to stress, to challenge, to learning. To life, really. I’m good at doing; but it turns out I have very little skill at stopping. I relax, but in a little back corner of my mind I am already figuring out the next process, making the next mental list, preparing to do the next thing.

I’m lucky; the busy-ness of my life is not the treadmill variety. I like my life; but it is full, and I have a lot to do, and somewhere along the line I learned that my culture won’t give me a lot of slack for “wasting” time. For just spending a hundred Saturday-afternoon-days in a row arranging flowers or sitting under an umbrella on the beach at Musha Cay — those cuffy thing moments that I find I am yearning for more and more these days. I want to do fruitless things just because they are lovely to do. I want the beautiful surroundings just because they are beautiful, and then I want to simply sit and be in them with no responsibility to anyone, not even myself. I want to unhook from all of that results-oriented list-bound doing.

I’m good at being. But always I am being in motion. Now a part of me just wants to be still.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading 

More Peg Halsey

17 June 2009 | 4 Comments

In today’s excerpt of With Malice Toward Some, Peg and her husband Henry have settled in a village called Yeobridge, close to Exeter where Henry is teaching for a year. They have been getting to know the local gentry, and are now at dinner at the home of Mr. & Mrs. Vinnicombe, where Mr. V is about to surprise Peg:

Oct 26th
…When we had finished the music, he suggested whiskey-and-soda, not to Henry only, but to me, moi qui vous parle. In middle-class England a woman is offered a drink with the same degree of frequency with which she is offered deadly nightshade, and at English dinners, when it gets on for ten o’clock and you are numb with cold and half hysterical from hearing about English weather, the gentlemen all have whiskey-and-soda and the ladies, God bless them, have tea! A woman who wants hard liquor at an English dinner has to ask for it, and then her host (nice and warm himself, of course, in woolen clothes, long sleeves and the radiation from a quantity of port) glances questioningly at her husband, as who should say, “She’s a little minx, but I don’t believe a tiny bit would hurt her.” It is a discouraging state of affairs, for (quite aside from the cold storage dining) probably no class of people in the world could do more handily with a little of the stimulation and release of alcohol than well-bred Englishwomen. However, a visiting American does better to refrain from proselytizing, to do her drinking in large batches (if possible) on the maid’s day out, and on other occasions to remain silent and stoically let the pleurisy fall where it may.
 
– from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

And here’s a bit, from the summer, about a holiday in Stratford:

June 28th
…The countryside around Stratford is green and plenteous and full of repose. Cushioned with trees and padded with hedgerows, it runs up into little mattress slopes which fade imperceptibly away again. In the villages, the thatched houses rest on their gardens like cuff-links on jeweler’s cotton. An aimless walk through this engaging landscape, on which we started out this morning, ended by taking the whole day. We turned down whatever paths looked promising; crossed empty, sunlit fields that were rough underfoot and hard going, for all their smooth-looking grass; and followed wavy lanes which perpetually unfurled new arrangements of trees and cows. Occasionally we passed farmhouses, sheltered with barns and looking like people who have the covers pulled up to their chins…
 
– from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

I am thinking a lot about the difference between rest and relaxation, and picked that passage because it sounds so beautifully restful to me. But today I am not resting: I am organizing, thinking, cooking food for friends who need it, and looking forward to dinner out with my sweetie; an early anniversary celebration because next week is very busy, including a Neighborhood Shindig on the street outside our house, about which I am sure I will have much to say and for which I know I have much to do. At least I will be allowed to drink, moi qui vous parle…

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading 

With Malice Toward Some

8 June 2009 | 13 Comments

Today I want to introduce an old friend of mine — the book, not the writer, whom sadly I never met. Margaret Halsey published With Malice Toward Some in 1938, based on letters that Halsey (an American) wrote to her family when she and her husband lived in England.

The book is a fond, acerbic, bemused and sometimes who-are-these-people look at the English of the late 1930′s. I’ve probably read this book a dozen times, and I still laugh out loud. I like that it is often pointed but never mean-spirited: I hate the irony of our current days in which something must be hurtful in order to establish the writer as a person of “wit.” There’s enough real contempt and diminishment of others in the world, why should anyone make a career out of it?

And Halsey’s a good writer: concise, observant, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and the ability (that I especially prize in writers) to be particular; to create moments that feel alive and immediate seventy years later. She fell in love with the English countryside and many of the people. She hated the food, marveled at the social customs, and found herself constantly surprised by the reality of a culture whose differences were far greater than she had expected. The Peg Halsey of this book is a vibrant, funny woman, curious and open and adventurous. She’s alive in her world, and it’s fun to be there with her.

My plan over the next little while is to occasionally share some of Halsey’s pithier moments with you, just because I like them and hope they will please you. It’s no bad thing to start a Monday with a smile.

June 7th
While Henry has gone to buy chocolate bars and reading matter, I am sitting in the waiting room of the Southampton station of the Southern Railway. My eyes, I am afraid, are going to fall right out of their sockets before the end of the day — I have been looking at everything so strenuously. It took a long while to get off the boat, and involved a great deal of standing in line and filling out cards and blanks. There is something about filling out printed forms which arouses lawless impulses in me and makes me want to do things that will have the file clerks sitting up with a jerk, like putting in
 
RELIGION……Druid…..
 
Today, when one of my blanks said OCCUPATION, I wrote down none, though I suspected this would not do. A severe but courteous official confirmed this impression. So I crossed it out and wrote parasite, which, not to be too delicate about it, is what I am. This made the official relax a little and he himself put housewife in what space there was left. “Be a prince,” I said, “Make it typhoid carrier.” But he only smiled and blotted out parasite so that it would not show.
 
– from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

And this one’s for Nicola, who had remarkably similar experiences from the other direction when she first visited America. Ask her sometime about the salad dressing. Or the vinegar.

June 8th
Today Henry and I and some of the faculty from the college lunched at an Exeter restaurant. It was a bad lunch, half cold and wholly watery, and in order to keep body and soul together, I asked for a glass of milk. The waitress was staggered.
 
“Milk?” she said incredulously.
 
“Why, yes,” I replied, almost equally incredulously. “A glass of milk.”
 
She wheeled off in the direction of the kitchen. In three minutes she was back again.
 
“Please,” she asked, “do you want this milk hot or cold?”
 
I blinked a little and said I wanted it cold. The Englishmen who were with us looked amused. “You Americans,” one of them said, with a spacious tolerance. We resumed our conversation, and in a short space the waitress made a third appearance. She had a hounded expression.
 
“Do you,” she inquired desperately, “want this milk in a cup or a glass?”
 
“Just roll it up in a napkin,” I answered thoughtlessly, and then was sorry, seeing how embarrassed and confused she was. I started to make amends, but she suddenly bolted and I never saw her again. Another waitress came to take the dessert order, and the milk project was tacitly abandoned.
 
– from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading 

Night Train

28 April 2009 | 18 Comments

I’ve been reading Martin Amis’ Night Train.

Nicola has been telling me about this book for years, and it always ended up in the well, maybe someday shelf in my brain. Until last week, when I picked it at random from its actual shelf in my office and read the first two paragraphs:

I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement — or an unusual construction. But it’s a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also.
 
What I am setting out here is an account of the worst case I have ever handled. The worst case — for me, that is. When you’re a police, “worst” is an elastic concept. You can’t really get a fix on “worst.” The boundaries are pushed out every other day. “Worst?” we’ll ask. “There no such thing as worst.” But for Detective Mike Hoolihan, this was the worst case.
 
– Night Train by Martin Amis

And now I’ve read it and am kicking myself for waiting so long. Kick, kick, kick.

Some people really hated this book and did some kicking (of it, and Amis) in print reviews when it came out in 1997. They said it didn’t capture the American voice. They dismissed it as a faulty police procedural. They called it clumsy noir. They said it was pretentious.

And you know what? I’ll betcha dollars to donuts that most of those folks had never read a speculative fiction book (excepting possibly Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which they would doubtless have characterized as literary fiction in a bold futuristic setting and besides, Peggy Atwood’s a genius!). Well, I’ve read a ton of speculative fiction, and no, Night Train isn’t spec fic: it’s her fascinating sister, slipstream. It’s a literary psychological study that has paused to shrug into a noir coat and put on a crooked smile just before delivering that first fast punch to your brain.

I get so tired of the precious twee writing that passes for literary fiction most of the time, the kind that essentially points neon fingers at itself: My writer is such a fabulous writer, look how pretty she made me! Pretty and empty. Pretty much all about nothing at all. This is my beef with many of the major players; they are, to use one of Nicola’s favorite Americanisms, all hat and no cattle. But the ones who aren’t, the ones who bring home the goods — well, what difference does it make what kind of package those goods come wrapped in? A sweaty wife-beater stained with gun oil, a bloody startrooper uniform or clothes that look just like yours. What difference does it make?

How much more fun is it to see a really good writer doing the literary equivalent of cross-dressing? Dipping out of whatever genre bucket he wants to get the job done. Breaking the rules in the ways that only the best can do successfully. And oh, the energy and biting-on-tinfoil exuberance of this book, right up to the end, which ending is devastating, by the way. Socked me right between the eyes.

It’s not a book for anyone looking to spend a cheerful hour. But it’s a great book, a compelling story, a fierce distinctive sad human character, and an energy that burns. I really liked it.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading 

Wilhelm and Murdoch

11 March 2009 | 1 Comment

[Kelley's note: I'm combining two questions into a single response here. ]

I know Kate Wilhelm was a co-founder of Clarion, but I know her best as a prolific and wonderful writer. I have read all of her stories about Charlie Meikeljon and Constance Leidl, some of her science fiction, and the novel Death Qualified, which is based on chaos theory. I know you have probably read her stuff.

And have you ever read anything by Iris Murdoch? I discovered her work by reading her biography by Peter Conradi. She mingles her peculiar perspective of fantasy with hard reality in a way I really enjoy. Readers love her because she wrote a lot of books, some better than others.

Please tell me what you think. Thanks.

Barbara

Kate was one of our instructors at Clarion ’88 — the one whose presence most excited me going in, the one I most wanted to like my work. I looked up to her.

So you may imagine that I was like a bunny in the headlights walking into the private conference with her and Damon. And there Kate told me, “You’re a writer.” I still remember how that made me felt.

She also taught me a lot about how editors (and, it turns out, screenplay readers) approach submissions: when she critiqued our Clarion stories, she drew a red line at the place where she disengaged from the story for whatever reason. A lot of those red lines were on the first page…

So yes, I’ve read her work (grin). I highly recommend the Constance and Charlie stories — wonderful characters, and I love the elements of sf and mysticism behind the mainstream mystery murder setups. I also very much like Death Qualified for that same approach.

And I love that her characters are grownups. Charlie and Constance are in their 50′s, I believe, and they are smart, capable, in love, truly married (with all the understanding and empathy and head-shaking not-again frustration of long and successful relationships), funny… characters whose stories always end too early for me, because I like spending time with them. That’s one of Kate’s real strengths as a writer, in my opinion — both in her series books and her standalones.

Have you read her collection of novellas Listen Listen? Absolutely fantastic. There’s one of my favorite Charlie and Constance stories (“With Thimbles, with Forks, and Hope”) plus the fabulous story “The Winter Beach.”

Here’s her bibliography. Start anywhere, they’re all good.

Iris Murdoch — wow, you caught me off guard with this. I read some of her work many years ago, so long that I can’t remember titles or details. I wish I had something intelligent to say about her, but instead I will thank you for bringing her back onto my radar. I will definitely read something — can you recommend a book to begin with?

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, reading 

The Haunting of Hill House

12 October 2008 | 8 Comments

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

* * * *

Eleanor Vance was thirty-two years old… The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends. This was owing largely to the eleven years she had spent caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking. She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.

* * * *

It was the first genuinely shining day of summer, a time of year which brought Eleanor always to aching memories of her early childhood, when it had seemed to be summer all the time; she could not remember a winter before her father’s death on a cold wet day. She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by. Yet this morning, driving the little car which she and her sister owned together, apprehensive lest they might still realize that she had come after all and just taken it away, going docilely along the street, following the lines of traffic, stopping when she was bidden and turning when she could, she smiled out at the sunlight slanting along the street and thought, I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step.
 
– from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Eleanor is going to Hill House. What do you suppose will happen when she gets there?

If you have not read this book then I envy you, as I do anyone experiencing a good story for the first time. Read it. It’s short and powerful, frightening not with blood or gore but only through the slow revelations of the fears and madness that people carry inside.

And do see the fabulous 1963 movie The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris as Eleanor. But do not see the stinky terrible deeply stupid horrible bad 1999 remake, ick ick ick.

I’ve always loved Jackson’s work; she was an awesome writer, spare and specific and very good at capturing the superficial interactions of people with all the tar bubbling underneath. She’s a writer that new writers can learn from — about economy, how to report things about a character without stooping to the dreaded “telling,” how to show the nuances of sexual tension or fear or rebellion without pounding it into the reader’s head.

So I was delighted back in 1998 to be invited by Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of OMNI, to take part in a round robin story with Graham Joyce, Ed Bryant and Kathe Koja. The conceit of round robin is that each writer takes a turn with the story, writing a short entry (500 -700 words) as quickly as possible, then passing it along to the next person.

We decided our story should be an hommage to Shirley Jackson, and that’s how we started it, although I think it drifted fairly quickly (grin). It was a fascinating experience working with these folks. I enjoyed coming home from my work at Wizards of the Coast, grabbing a beer on my way downstairs to my basement office, turning on the computer, reading whatever entry had been handed off to me, and then…. just beginning. Exhilarating stuff. Here it is, if you’d like to read it. But, straight up, Jackson is better (grin).

I am going, I am going, I have finally taken a step — who among us does not know that feeling? It’s a pull like leaning over the roof edge of a very tall building. It’s the thrill when everything you know disappears in the rearview mirror and you are clean and new, you could be anyone, and nothing you’ve left behind can touch you. It’s only what’s ahead that will shape you now. Or at least, that’s what we want so badly to believe. Jackson knows better; and Eleanor will find out that we always bring ourselves on these journeys.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, quotes, reading 

Get busy

3 September 2008 | 4 Comments

The best novella I know is “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King. It was made into a brilliant movie, but the novella is even better.

It’s about hope. I talk a lot about hope, mostly in ambivalent ways. But perhaps I am coming to some conclusions. Perhaps there are different kinds of hope, like mushrooms, some that are truffles and some that will kill you dead.

“Shawshank” is the most comprehensive, brutal, joyful examination I’ve ever read of the different kinds of hope. The hope like a rattlesnake you keep insisting makes a really good pet until it bites you hard and then coils away looking for its next meal. The hope that is indistinguishable from fear. The hope that relies on magical thinking, if only… And there is the hope that is the first cousin of will, that sees you to the end of a long hard road.

When I was learning to swim, the instructor would step back ten feet from where I clung to the edge of the pool, and hold out his arms, and smile: swim to me, he would say, and I would throw myself out and gasp and thrash and paddle like hell, and he would step back and back and back, and I had to keep going. But he was always there at the end. That is perhaps the only hope that has ever really done me any good, the hope that makes me willing to keep swimming because there will be something at the end that is risk rewarded, that is safety and triumph and relief and a new kind of knowledge of myself and the world. Not if only, but rather if I do…

Dear Red,
 
If you’re reading this, then you’re out. One way or another, you’re out. And if you’ve followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little further. I think you remember the name of the town, don’t you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. Meanwhile, have a drink on me — and do think it over. I will be keeping an eye out for you. Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well.
 
I didn’t read that letter in the field [... ] I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old men’s dinners drifting up the stairwell to me — Beefaroni, Rice-a-Roni, Noodle Roni. You can be that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni.
 
I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my arms and cried. With the letter there were twenty new fifty-dollar bills.
 
And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice again — parole violation is my crime. No one’s going to throw up any roadblocks to catch a criminal wanted on that charge, I guess — wondering what I should do now.
 
I have this manuscript. I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctor’s bag that holds everything I own. I have nineteen fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes.
 
Wondering what I should do.
 
But there’s really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.
 
–from “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King
 

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, quotes, reading 

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