So here we are. I put out the call to a wide variety of folks, and this is the group that responded. We used a Google Doc, and the discussion grew rhizomatically more than linearly, so you'll see that we sometimes refer to things said later in the roundtable. (This makes for a richer discussion, I think, but it may be a little jarring if you expect a linear conversation.)
PARTICIPANTS
Matthew Cheney has published fiction and nonfiction in a wide variety of venues, including One Story, Locus, Weird Tales, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He wrote the introductions to Wesleyan University Press’s editions of Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, and The American Shore (forthcoming). Currently, he is a student in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire.
Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories and the YA novel Bereft.
Geoffrey H. Goodwin is a journalist, author, and rogue academic with a Bachelor’s in Literary Theory (Syracuse University) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Naropa University). Geoffrey writes fiction; has taught composition and creative writing in a wide range of settings; has interviewed speculative writers and artists for Bookslut, Tor.com, Sirenia Digest, The Mumpsimus, and during Ann Vandermeer’s helming of Weird Tales; and has worked in seven different stores that have sold comic books.
Keguro Macharia is a recovering academic, a lazy blogger, and an itinerant tweeter. Sometimes, he writes things on gukira.wordpress.com or tweets as @Keguro_
Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared everywhere from Asimov’s Science Fiction to The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes.
Njihia Mbitiru is a screenwriter. He lives in Nairobi.
Lavelle Porter is an adjunct professor of English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation The Over-Education of the Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education and the Black Intellectual will be completed this spring. Finally. He’s on Twitter @alavelleporter.
Ethan Robinson blogs, mostly about science fiction, at maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com, a position he will no doubt shortly be parlaying into literary fame.
Eric Schaller is a biologist, writer, and artist, living in New Hampshire and co-editor of The Revelator.
THE ROUNDTABLE
Matthew Cheney
How has Delany influenced your own work or views on writing and literature?
detail of the cover of Dhalgren (Bantam, 1975) |
Geoffrey H. Goodwin:
If one looks at his criticism, fiction, memoirs, and cultural relevance--not to mention everything else he’s accomplished--he’s incomparable. Sure, I remember how he offered the particle theory, where we read and read and then emit a particle on our own when we write, inspired by how we bombarded ourselves; or how he made sure to place the Marquis de Sade’s books within his young daughter’s reach because he wanted her to make her own choices about literature, and there were lessons and exercises in the workshop that were profound--but I also think of Chip as someone with whom I got to trade stories about Allen Ginsberg for stories about Philip K. Dick and Clive Barker. He’s a constellation in a tiny pantheon of living geniuses.
Nick Mamatas
I guess I appreciate Delany more as a reader than anything else. He doesn’t influence my writing, or my views. There are aspects of agreements, but I haven’t changed my mind about anything to coincide with Delany’s views. I always assign his book on writing—I’ve probably sold an extra fifty copies so far—not because I agree with everything in it, but because everything in it is worth tangling with.
Ethan Robinson
Keguro Macharia
I’ll lift Matt’s second prompt below--on beginnings--and track back to the Locus conversation, which started with “beginnings”: when did you first encounter Delany? Which is also a question about SF as a genre that (to my mind) obsesses about beginnings and endings (ecocides, genocides, monsters, hybrids, extinguishment, survival). Which is also to borrow from Lavelle about AIDS and Delany and, more broadly, the forms of extinguishment and disposability his work speaks to and, in doing so, enables us to speak about--this is the importance of Hogg as an early work. I first encountered Delany in the Patrick Merla anthology (Boys Like Us) that Lavelle mentions below. I don’t remember reading him then and, in fact, I suspect that I did not know how to read him at the time--I wanted a simple(r) narrative than he was willing to offer, a cleaner story that stayed “inside the lines,” affirmed identity, made the pleasures of identification simple, the practices of belonging uncomplicated. (Although Matt wants us to be polite, I’ll add that I read much of this impulse in the Locus discussion.)
I re-encountered Delany through Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, just before I joined grad school. At the time, I was interested in formal innovation, and Times Square modeled the kind of writing and thinking I found necessary as a form of world building. I came to the novels later--Stars in My Pocket, Hogg, Mad Man, the Nevèrÿon series, at much the same time as I was reading Delany’s many essay collections. Delany helped me see form--why form matters, how form matters, to whom form matters, why formalism matters--as a project of world-building, world-remaking, inextricable from embodiment, desire, fantasy, and speculation.
Njihia Mbitiru
I have absolutely no idea, yet, about his influence on me. Others have spoken with great perspicacity--as well as humor (Brett Cox in the Locus roundtable being one)--about Delany’s influence. I suspect I’m still working through mine and therefore limited in what I can say about it. The first bit of Delany’s writing I encountered was The Towers of Toron, the first in the Fall of the Towers Trilogy. I was twenty-one, if I recall correctly. That was twelve years ago now. I’ve become an avid re-reader of his work, which has made me a re-reader of many other writers I onced-over. And because of this I would very much like to hazard that I am now a better reader, but this also remains to be seen: the simple fact is that proof of such is in writing, whose excellence, much as we strive toward our own finally idiosyncratic sense of it, is also a public affair.
Matt: just to touch on what you’ve said about the narrative of certain of his writings--the later ones, beginning with Dhalgren (written in his late 20s and early 30s, you’ll recall! so that it’s hard to think of this as ‘late Delany’): I also resist and reject this narrative ( I’m not quite at resentment, but give me time). I find it completely non-sensical. Better and more honest to say, as a reader, that the game he’s hunting as a novelist in Dhalgren, Triton, the Neveryon series up into his present work doesn’t hold your interest. It’s a long way away from that to ‘difficult’. Only a very narrow reading of SF writing would support an assessment of Delany as ‘difficult’, if we’re talking about prose style (though I suspect that’s not what is meant, which begs the question: what do people mean exactly when they use the term ‘difficult’?). There’s so much at a SF readers’ disposal in terms of range and sophistication, or if you like, the absence of it, as there is in any other genre. I enjoy and appreciate Delany’s writing in no small part because it calls attention to precisely this.
Eric Schaller
Delany’s writings have influenced me more in my approach to life and thought than in writing itself. Some may dislike John Gardner’s concept and application of ‘moral fiction’ to literature, but I have always found Delany’s work moral in its suggestion of how to live a good life. In this respect, as a philosophy, I could abbreviate it as ‘compassionate individualism’: the importance of discovering and following your own path, the diversity of such paths within a population, and how to maintain your personal dignity without selfishly depriving others of theirs. The dedication in Heavenly Breakfast ("This book is dedicated to everyone who ever did anything no matter how sane or crazy whether it worked or not to give themselves a better life"), when I read it in college brought tears to my eyes, and still does.
Through Delany’s writings, I like to think that I became more intentionally aware. My discovery that Delany was gay—not necessarily obvious from his earlier novels, which featured plenty of male-female couples, or from his earlier biographical information which sometimes mentioned a marriage—more specifically the worlds revealed in his non-fictional/autobiographical works such as The Motion of Light in Water, the contemporary sections from “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” and, more recently, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue personified concerns that I would never experience directly. I donate to GMHC because of these works.
There seems to be a narrative among science fiction fans, and particularly SF fans of a certain age, that there is The Good Delany of the pre-Dhalgren books, Hugo and Nebula Awards, etc. ... and then there is The Problematic Delany of Dhalgren and later. It’s a narrative of loss and disappointment, frequently accompanied by the question, “What happened?!” Because I was born in the year Dhalgren was, at least officially, published (it bears a January 1975 publication date, though it actually hit shelves a little earlier), and didn’t start reading Delany until either late 1987 or sometime in 1988, when the last Nevèrÿon book, The Bridge of Lost Desire (Return to Nevèrÿon) was published, my awareness of his career has always included what older, more traditional SF readers considered the “difficult” writings. It’s probably not surprising that I resist, reject, and resent this narrative.
The book I’ve spent the most time with recently, because I’m working on a conference paper about it, is Dark Reflections, which is really beautiful and much more complexly structured than it seems at first, and which should be accessible to just about any audience, since it’s not at all pornographic and the complexity of the structure is subtle, making a basic reading relatively easy. Also, the book’s a great companion to About Writing, which it echoes often. (There’s some good discussion of the “accessibility” of Dark Reflections, particularly for heterosexual men, in Delany’s 2007 interview with Carl Freedman in Conversations with Samuel R. Delany.) But for various reasons, some having to do with events in the publishing industry, Dark Reflections does not seem to have been widely read, and is currently only in print as an e-book. It deserves a wide audience, though.
So my questions for the roundtable are: What other, more useful, stories of Delany’s career could we tell? Is the Good Delany/Problematic Delany narrative useful in some way that I’m missing, some way that I can’t see because it just makes me so angry?
Ethan Robinson
Craig Laurance Gidney
My first introduction to Delany was, interestingly enough, Dhalgren. My older brother had a copy of the book when it first came out in the ‘70s and I appropriated it. I read the book in bits and pieces during my teenaged years, and it formed my taste for esoteric and trippy SF. When people spoke about how difficult the book was, I had a hard time understanding them, maybe because I absorbed the idea of the non-linear and counter-factual texts so young. Everything of his I read is through the locus of Dhalgren. The earlier stuff is great to me because I can see the progression of themes that were refined in his later work.
Eric Schaller
I don’t think I read a novel of Delany’s until the summer after graduating high school. I was working in New York City at Sloan Kettering and the novel was Dhalgren. There had been the joke published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction about the three things that mankind would never reach (“The core of the sun, the speed of light, and page 30 of Dhalgren”), but this if anything incited my interest in the novel. I was of the right age and in the right place to have the novel assume a central station in my life. But it is also one of those novels that I have returned to and re-read over the years, each time taking something new away from it. For instance, Delany having written that The Fall of the Towers was inspired by a painting of that title which did not show towers but rather reactions to their fall, I noticed a similar approach was often used in Dhalgren: the reactions of characters described before you understood to what they were reacting.
As an undergraduate at Michigan State, I sought out every Delany book I could find. And to my mind then, and still, there were differences in the approach to writing found in his early works to what I found in Dhalgren and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. The closest I can come to that difference is to say that in the earlier work Delany seemed to be thinking at a sentence to sentence level. With the later work, it seemed that he inhabited whole paragraphs at once; an individual sentence might not seem that powerful or poetic alone, but within the context of the paragraph it sang.
Geoffrey H. Goodwin
Nick Mamatas
I actually prefer his porn to his SF for the most part. It’s difficult to write transgressive, dirty, occasionally simply wrong stuff with such sympathy and warmth, but Delany manages it. He is an utterly unique writer in th
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Title: The Chaos
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Date: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2012
Reviewer: Craig Laurance Gidney
In many ways, Sojourner “Scotch” is a typical teenager. She must navigate between her “good girl” persona when at home with her strict parents and her saucier persona at school, where she is a member of a hip hop dance crew. She has broken up with her boyfriend, and her (former) best friend is sniffing around him. And in many ways, Scotch’s problems are unique. She is the light-skinned daughter of a mixed race couple, so she has to deal with the “what are you?” questions all the time. Her older brother has just come back from juvie after being busted by her parents for having marijuana. And a couple more things: Scotch has a weird skin condition, where black, sticky splotches appear on her skin, and she’s been seeing floating horse heads swooping around everywhere. Scotch thinks she’s going mad, and keeps this information tightly under wraps.
All that changes one night when the world goes topsy-turvy. A volcano sprouts up in the middle of Lake Ontario. Pterosaurs and Sasquatches appear on the street. People begin to sprout weird things over their bodies, like flowers. And everyone can see the “Horseless Headmen.” Folkoric creatures stalk the street—most notably, the Russian witch Baba Yaga. As madcap as all this seems, there is a darker aspect to this surrealistic disaster. Deaths have been reported, and several countries declare war against one another. And Scotch’s brother is missing—disappeared into thin air.
Hopkinson does not provide an explanation for the sudden influx of insanity into the world, which is dubbed The Chaos. There is some speculation about it being the manifestation of people’s madnesses, but that is just briefly touched upon. Instead, the narrative focuses on Scotch and her immediate problems. In addition to the dangers of this newly transformed world, Scotch must find her missing brother while dealing with her gradual transformation into a living Tar Baby.
Scotch is the narrator of the tale, and her style is peppery and colloquial. As a result, The Chaos shares its literary lineage with “mad romp” books as Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth. Humor and horror go hand in hand in that sort of fiction, and that’s the case here. Some of Scotch’s Jamaican background comes vividly to life, in the form of remembered Brer Rabbit stories and an eerie creature that serves as an antagonist, called the Rolling Calf. The Toronto that she lives in is multi-ethnic and her milieu is very tolerant of differences—there are gay characters and subplots in the novel. As is the case with many “mad romp” books, the plot is episodic and loosey-goosey.
After so many dark YA books that feature dystopias and bleak futures, The Chaos is a rollicking, frolicking breath of fresh air. Hopkinson lets her imagination run wild. While the book is about finding ones identity and touches on some serious issues, it is mostly a rollercoaster ride into the Id, full of thrills and chills.
———
Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories and the recently released Bereft. Gidney writes both contemporary, young adult and genre fiction. Recipient of the 1996 Susan C. Petrey Scholarship to the Clarion West writer’s workshop, Gidney has published works in the fantasy/science fiction, gay and young adult categories.
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Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories and the soon to be released Bereft (publication pushed back to February.)
This short bio from his Amazon page describes his talents.
Craig Laurance Gidney writes both contemporary, young adult and genre fiction. Recipient of the 1996 Susan C. Petrey Scholarship to the Clarion West writer’s workshop, Gidney has published works in the fantasy/science fiction, gay and young adult categories.
These works include “A Bird of Ice,” (from the anthology So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction (Lethe Press)) which was on the short list for the 2008 Gaylactic Spectrum Award; “The Safety of Thorns,” which received special notice by editor Ellen Datlow in her 2006 Year’s Best Fantasy Horror summary; “Mauve’s Quilt” (from the anthology the young adult fantasy anthology Magic in the Mirrorstone (Wizards of the Coast)); and “Bereft,” included in the anthology From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth (Tiny Satchel Press).
Gidney’s first collection, Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories was nominated for the 2009 Lambda Literary Award in the Science. Fiction/Fantasy and Horror category.
And, here’s a chance to begin to know him personally!
Where did you grow up?
I am a native of Washington, DC.
Do you have any pets?
One tuxedo kitty, Cassie. She watched me write the book from her various perches.
What do you enjoy watching on television?
I do. I watch American Horror Story, some trash TV, and cartoons—particularly Simpsons, and Bob’s Burgers.
Meat or vegetables?
Both. I can’t quit meat!
Are there any books that stand out in your memory from your childhood?
The Secret Garden, A Wrinkle In Time, Bridge to Terabithia, the novels of Virginia Hamilton. Each of them opened my mind in a new way, and kindled my imagination.
What book(s) are you in the middle of reading right now?
The Devil In Silver, by Victor LaValle–a thriller about the mental health industry.
It seems that you are a short story/short fiction writer. What challenges you most in writing these?
The most challenging thing about being a short fiction writer is to make every word and image count. You have to create a world, an atmosphere and character in a limited amount of time. I love short fiction that has the density of a novel, but is brief. I often find that many of ‘failed’ short fiction is often the first chapter of a novel.
What drew you to write young adult fiction?
I’ve always read YA—they are kind of like my ‘popcorn’ books. I also think that YA books deal with pretty heavy and topical subjects. It’s an interesting audience to write for, as well.
Could you speak to the need for queer young adult literature written by authors of color?
I think that young adults—ages 13-18—need to see representations of themselves in fiction. I know that reading queer literature when I was young was a life altering event. And reading books by authors of color was the same. I was a very lonely teenager, with a deep dark secret. Reading Samuel Delany or James Baldwin helped me; they made me realize that I wasn’t alone.
In one of your interviews, you mentioned that your stories all begin with an image. What image inspired Bereft?
The image of a white mask over a black face inspired me. It’s the cover of a book by Franz Fanon—Black Skin, White Masks. My older brother had the book and I remember being spooked by it. When I sat down to write about Rafael Fannen, that image came to mind. A motif of masks runs throughout the book.
What is Bereft about?
It’s the story of a boy who wins a scholarship to a prestigious religious school. He must deal with the culture shock—he’s from a different class and neighborhood than the other kids, He’s also learning about himself and his sexuality. In addition, his life at home is less than stable. The book is written in a third person limited style—you get to see and hear and feel everything Rafe feels.
Is there a teacher, coach or librarian you’d love to have read Bereft? Why?
I would love my writing teachers to read Bereft—it would show them how much I’ve learned from them. I had to use various techniques to write the book, and I have them to thank for showing me how to construct a sustained work.
When did you know you were meant to be a writer?
Frankly, I was good at nothing else. I was always creating characters and stories in my head, and writing them down just seemed like a natural extension of that.
Did you make a resolution for 2013?
To finish at least one of the novels that are brewing in my brain!
Craig, thanks so much for the interview and I wish you much success!
Filed under: Authors, male monday Tagged: Craig Laurance Gidney, Male Monday
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Here is my review of The Chaos, by Nalo Hopkinson, on Edi Campbell’s blog.