I doubt if I'll ever find an answer to that question — I'll be glad if anyone (including me) keeps asking it, though.
On my way to finding an answer, my novella, "Bronte's Egg," won a Nebula Award. It was also nominated for a Hugo and a Sturgeon Award, and it's currently available in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2004, a truly outstanding anthology edited by Vonda N. McIntyre (yes, I would still say that even if it didn't contain my novella). "Bronte" also received a Hugo nomination and came in second for a Sturgeon Award.
My poem, "Rich and Pam Go to Fermilab and Later See a Dead Man" was nominated for a Rhysling Award, and if you didn't catch it on the Strange Horizons website you can read it in The 2004 Rhysling Anthology, available from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.
My lastest published work is in the October/November issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It's a novelette called "In Tibor's Cardboard Castle," that continues the story of the "saurs" — those bioengineered former toys who live in an old house out past the reaches of the closest megalopolis — that I started in "The Measure of All Things."
Last year I had a poem, "A Few Kind Words for A. E. Van Vogt," included in Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 8, and two more in Snow Monkey vol. 5, no. 6 (thank you, Kathryn Rantala).
Both "The Measure of All Things" and "Bronte's Egg" have been translated into Hebrew and have appeared in the Israeli sf magazine The Tenth Dimension.
Pretty impressive, huh?
Well, not really.
I know plenty of writers whose work impresses me beyond my dreams of doing even something half as good as their work. Some of these writers have been well recognized in their fields. Some of them have yet to be given the honors they deserve. Some of them publish frequently. Some of them, for their own quirky reasons, don't think they're "good enough" to write professionally and limit their great work to correspondence, 'zines and weblogs (that's you, Mary!) though they can blow me out of the water and hardly work up a sweat.
I'm also fortunate to be married to one of those writers whose poetry I deeply admire: Pam Miller. You can check this out at her web page. That's Pam, next to me in the photo above.
I've had some modest successes, but they're more than I would have thought, even until recently, I could hope for.
Where did it all start?
In the least likely place: Chicago; in the least likely neighborhood: out west of Midway Airport.
It was a very meat and potatoes kind of neighborhood, very white and very "imagination free." I remember asking one of my friends, the kid next door, if he had any aspirations for what he wanted to be when he grew up (I don't remember exactly how I phrased it but I know I didn't use the word "aspiration"). He said no, he didn't think about things like that. And when I inquired further what he thought he would do when he was an adult he said, "I don't know. Maybe I'll drive a truck."
In the neighborhood of Garfield Ridge, that counted as being "highly motivated."
The smart kids were given the hope that one day they might sit an office all day in a white shirt and tie. They would never own the office or be promoted into upper management, but they might have their own desk and a phone. The girls were given the hope that one day they might get married to one of the guys in the white shirts.
This is not the sort of environment that engenders science fiction writers. Or perhaps it is.
I have to thank all the corner drugstores of those days, where I was lured by the colorful, gaudy covers of paperbacks, monster magazines and comic books. The first "adult" books I read in my youth were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.
Libraries in my neighborhood were not very friendly places to me. The librarians acted (and often looked like) prison guards. Their job, in the civil service scheme of things, was to make sure that no volume (at least no volume that might enrich the heart and soul of a little boy) would escape. Every time I tried to take out a book that was above my "grade level" I was interrogated as if I was a bearded anarchist about to violate the Mann Act. "Are you planning to transport this book across state lines for immoral purposes?"
I took my business elsewhere.
Everything I ever needed to know I learned from Castle of Frankenstein magazine. And what that magazine didn't teach me I learned from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I first purchased at a little newsstand in the Palmer House Hotel in Colorado Springs August 1, 1965 (now, why would I remember that date? Perhaps because that magazine went up with me to Pike's Peak, snow-capped in the middle of summer — the mountain, not the magazine. Two experiences of "wonder" in the same day!). vI have to thank all the neighborhood movie houses, like the Brighton and the Marquette: where I saw, among many other films, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad — and after seeing that cyclops on the beach my life was never, ever going to be the same.
My parents took me to the Field Museum — at that time called the Chicago Museum of Natural History — where I saw their mounted fossil skelton of an Albertosaurus — again, it changed me (some would say warped me) completely.
Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. And... dinosaurs! I became a dinosaur nerd — one of my first nicknames in kindergarten was "Dinosaur Boy."
TV played a role too: Twilight Zone, Thriller, The Outer Limits — I needn't add Star Trek: you knew that already. A show called Thrillerama followed Shock Theater and preceded Svenghoolie (local horror movie host circa early 1970s) and provided some of my first glimpses at the Universal classics and not-so-classic horror and sf films they helped to spawn. And I was awed when NBC Saturday Night at the Movies first televised The Day the Earth Stood Still.
My brother and I created little one-copy magazines and comic books with titles like Ghoul, Monster Screenland and Paleontology Illustrated. We knew nothing about mimeographs or fandom — we made these magazines just for ourselves. Most of the "good" work was done by my brother, Chris, who was an excellent artist and had the best printing hand . . . and the hardest work ethic. I was the lazy dreamer who came up with the neat ideas but who wrote with a gnarled, ugly printing style and couldn't draw to save my life. Chris is the one who taught me, by example, what hard work and persistence could do — and what mere inspiration, brilliant as it might be (though in my case it never was) could not accomplish.
The odd wonderful band of friends of who got together and created Hack Films. Our output created such "lost classics" as Six, The Fight Film, Mind Expansion and Scourge of the Grote Men. Chris, my cousin Bob, Chuck, Tom, Ed. Even if all I learned was that it was a lot cheaper to write a story on paper than to film it, we had a lot fun and learned a lot more than how to splice film.
The Clark Theater was Chicago's unofficial cinematheque. I spent many, many hours watching the cinematic equivalent of the Great Books of the Western World in that dingy, dark wonderland — the model for Daniel Pinkwater's Snark Theater (yes, I was a latter-day "Snarkout Boy").
My parents, in their own way, did much to inspire me — even if it didn't seem that way at the time. I wasn't the kind of kid who could be considered "easy to raise" (are there any who are?). They did the best they could with an "impossible" child.
Royal portable manual typewriters, spiral-bound notebooks, Ken Nordine on the radio in the late 1960s — a copy of Writer's Digest with an interview of Ray Bradbury that I stumbled upon in the Rexall where I usually bought my monster magazines. Even in the blandest and most sterile of urban landscapes one could find little inspirations and suggestions that life could be otherwise — other than what it seemed to be.
That life could be otherwise — that was what kept me going. That's what still keeps me going. It's the motto of the science fiction writer, no matter how that "otherwise" is defined and envisioned.
Looked upon that way, what else could I be but a science fiction writer? Where else could one feel so alienated that wishing life to be otherwise could be so necessary and so natural?
Only in a city whose official motto is "I will" and whose unofficial motto is "Where's mine?" (as per Mike Royko). Only in a neighborhood where the highest compliment you could pay a local rock band was that their cover version of "Midnight Confession" sounded just like the record. (and for painters, that their work looked "just like the album cover," or "just like" something — but never "just like" itself. All quality was determined by derivation. "Originality" was an indeterminate factor — how can it be good if you can't tell what it resembles and what its model is? And writing? Well, no one read much anyway, and if they did they kept it secret, like masturbation).
Chicago is not the end of world. Fritz Leiber lived here. So did C. M. Kornbluth. For many years, Amazing Stories and Weird Tales were edited here. Philip K. Dick was born here. Some of the best writers in their respective genres live here or in the city's outskirts right now. Outside my genre of choice, the short list includes Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Carroll, Saul Bellow — this city can't help producing writers and yet it's never been easy to become a writer in Chicago. And maybe that's not a bad thing. You have to really want it. If you're going to produce something great you have to be prepared for this city to turn away its gaze as if you've just dropped your trousers. I think Algren got it right (if I got Algren right): you can love this city but it won't love you back. But if you're looking for this city's love you may as well get into the concrete business anyway (a concrete tycoon died here not long ago and his funeral procession included about thirty cement trucks, all the way to Resurrection Cemetery).
I have "followed my bliss," but have only been able to do so in fits and starts. As much as I admire the prolific writers of the pulp era, my own output, on a good day, is plodding at best. My "day job" isn't much more than what a kid from the southwest side of Chicago could imagine for himself or herself (with the inclusion of desktop computers that we could never have imagined) — excluding the necessity of wearing a white shirt and tie. I love my "night job," teaching short story and poetry writing for Oakton Community College's continuing education division, but I have a hard time following my own good advice. I do what I can for other writers, reading and critiquing their work, trying to give them the sort of lessons I could have used when I was starting out. But there are still plenty of days when I'm not sure I've really progressed all that far from the kid who spent so much time dreaming "another place" that was anywhere but where he was then.
But, for better or worse, we take where we've been wherever we go, even when we try to leave it behind. It follows us like a stray dog.
I've been around for roughly half a century — in the greater scale of time, not very long. There's a long way to go, wherever it is I'm going to, whoever the heck I am.
I'm glad to have made it to this far.
It could have been otherwise.
— Richard Chwedyk
August 2004
Capricon — I just stopped in to do a panel on "Who Writes Wonder Wonderfully?" The day before, I took a few minutes and put together an exhaustive list of authors and books — and then referred to it no more than a couple times during the panel. My panel mates were Jeffrey Liss, Richard and Leah Zeldes Smith and Beverly Friend, who may also have made up their own extensive lists, none of which were more than touched upon. We had a lively audience and they kept us on our toes.
The main concern could be articulated this way: "Nothing I've read recently really enthuses me the way the way (fill in the blank) did when I first started reading sf. Is there anyone out there who's still doing the kind of thing that made me love sf when I first started reading it?"
If we came to any conclusions it was that whatever we read at the "golden age" (age 12, usually) is what we love, and it's hard to find anything that will give us the same "rush." It's not the fault of the writers or the publishers; it's the fault of time, and time does not stand still for our tastes and our passions.
We did manage to come up with a few names of authors who are turning out the stuff that might excite a new generation. For fantasy it wasn't hard to come up with names like Rowling and Pullman (I added Jeff Ford); in sf it was a little tougher: Jack McDevitt, Catherine Asaro, a score of others — I wanted to squeeze in some books like Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer and such. My suggestion was for everyone to go out and check the magazines: that's where you'll find the "good new stuff" that's out there. That's been true for ages and is still true. Too bad more people don't have the habit of reading the magazines. It might cut down on the necessity of having panels like this, although it's still fun to share the names of writers whose work you've discovered.
As for that exhaustive list: it's awfully tempting for me to turn that list into a little essay on the "reading education" of one very non-average reader — don't get me started. I'll link you to it if and when I ever do have it.
I also stopped in to listen to a panel on short story writing with Kathryn Sullivan, Robert Boyd and Gene Wolfe. Again I was impressed with the performance of the audience in asking good questions and their having an estimable knowledge of the topic under discussion. And Gene Wolfe shared some great stories about his experiences doing writing workshops.
It had been some years since I last attended a Capricon, and I was reminded how sharp and well-read the attendees are. A small but interesting art show. I'm delighted to see the variety of techniques increasing and the subject matter expanding. The dealer's room had a great selection of books, new and used, and other assorted "stuff." I walked out of there with a much lighter wallet but some wonderful additions to my library.
Wonderful time for several reasons. I had a great drive up there this time (last year I got caught in an ice and wind storm which played with my little Corolla as if it were a hockey puck on Interstate 90). It gave me an opportunity to meet Joe and Gay Haldeman, which was a complete delight. The panels for the most part were great fun and very informative.
I also got a chance to say hello to my Madison friends, Jim and Ruth Nichols, who also took part in the opening ceremonies skit. And I can't forget Jeannie Bergman, whose poetry never ceases to delight and inform me
Perhaps the most fun I had was at the Poetry Jam. I don't know who originally had the idea (I know it wasn't me), but Programming dropped it into my lap by making me the "host." All I knew was that we were supposed to write a poem in twenty minutes. So I thought: let's make this a little interesting. I printed up a bunch of words on cards and then on another set of cards I put a number of quotes from sf and related fiction. Everyone participating in the jam (which was open to everyone) got two word cards and one card with an sf quote. The poem they had to write needed a place, a person, the two words used somewhere in the poem and the quote could be used as a theme, or cited somewhere, or stripped for spare parts in borrowed phrases.
In spite of our not having a room assignment until five minutes after the thing was supposed to start, we had about fifteen people attend, eleven of whom "jammed" and came up with poems. All but mine were really great (I think I used up my creativity coming up with the words and quotes). James Roberts, Eric Olson, Joe Haldeman (and Gay too!), Jim and Ruth Nichols, Jeannie Bergman — I can't remember all the names, but you all did great work! I asked everyone, when they filled out their "How did you like the con?" questionnaires to mention the Poetry Jam so that we can try it again next year.
And I have to thank the audience members on the "Fifty Years of Godzilla" panel for turning me on to the KaijuBigBattel.com site: a gloriously inventive website guaranteed to waste hours of my time, but very fun.
Me, trying to look respectable at the Nebulas in Seattle.
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Nebula Weekend — My first trip to Seattle! Great weather and of course I didn't even scratch the surface of the city, but I know where I want to go next time. I missed Ivar's and Archie McPhee's, but I got to see the new library and a good outside-looksee at the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Museum (I'm expecting that for the next ten years all "futuristic" vistas in media sf and book covers will look like Frank Gehry designed them — you read it here first!).
The book signing was great fun, thanks to my being sat down next to Eileen Gunn and Leslie What — which also meant that a lot of folks came by to say hello. Someone from Locus took a photo which made it into the June issue (I'm the one in the lower right corner who looks like he's sucking a linty sourball while everyone else is smiling).
At the banquet and awards ceremonies...
Did I really say that novelettes and short stories are "wimpy" while novels "just go on and on"? Well . . . sorta something like that. I did say that "Novellas rule!" but I was just inspired by Connie Willis' introduction to the novelette award where she claimed that the size of novelettes was "just right," and Leslie What's assertion that there were no good jokes about short stories (there aren't many good jokes about novellas either, at least not any I could repeat in front of an audience). I really wanted to be brief (I knew there were parties waiting upstairs for all these formalities to be over and done with) but it didn't seem right to simply read through the nominees for novella after the clever preambles for the other awards. Alas, the only muse I could appeal to at the last minute seemed to have been formerly employed by the World Wrestling Federation.
I was also distracted by the "techie" who kept adjusting my microphone (his name is Harlan Ellison — you may have heard from him) — I thought that something may have been wrong with the mike, but I suspect he was just making sure the thing was adjusted for him when he came up to accept the novella Nebula for Neil Gaiman. In the current parlance, his getting the award for Coraline was "a slam dunk," though I always hold my breath for the surprising upset.
The "upset," I guess, for some, was Elizabeth Moon winning for The Speed of Dark — but a welcome upset! I was at a table with a number of Texas women (and Frank Catalano and wife, and my friend John Vester) The Texas women could not have been more pleased that the eminent fellow Texan won and they whooped it up accordingly.
After the awards, I ran into Kim Mohan, former editor of Amazing Stories, who I haven't seen in years. Earlier in the day, I met Dave Grosse, who's the editor for the new Amazing Stories. Amazing was the first magazine to which I thought seriously about sending a story. It was also the magazine to which I made my first professional sale. It was great seeing Kim again, and knowing that people are seriously pursuing the revival of this historic publication.
The launch party for the Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 was a great success. The free copies graciously supplied by the publisher went almost as quickly as the cake (with the cover reproduced in butter cream). In fact, the copies disappeared faster than the cake(!!!???!!) Well, we're "book people" after all, and it was a big, big cake.
I managed to write the wrong date on most of the copies of the book I signed, but perhaps that will make it more "collectible," like an upside-down airplane on a postage stamp. I don't think I can blame jetlag for my goof.
Vonda McIntyre did a wonderful job setting up the party. Astrid Bear and her extraordinary minions helped make the whole weekend enjoyable and memorable (and thank you, BlöödHag, for throwing out that copy of Asimov's Foundation at the end of your set. I really needed a new second-hand copy of that). Chicago is going to have a hard time matching up, but since it's my home town I really hope we're up to the task (and Jeffrey Liss has already enlisted me to help out with Programming).
WisCon has always been an interesting and fun event for me, and every year I find it becoming more and more of a reunion with friends and acquaintances I've made. WisCon seems to welcome more folks "into the fold," so to speak, and more kinds of folk. This is not just in terms of what WisCon is known for, i.e. topics concerning gender and diversity, but in the number of very active younger participants (fandom ain't graying at this 'do), and fans of science fiction who've had difficulty feeling comfortable at other kinds of cons. And a number of academics who would normally limit their conference attendance to such things as ICFA, the SFRA conference and maybe, maybe World Fantasy Con are now considering it important to attend WisCon and Potlatch.
Thursday night I had a brief reunion with Leslie What, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Eileen Gunn in the hotel bar. The bar was the gathering point for all the early/late arrivals (Ellen Klages was also there and couple of guys from Tachyon Books, Nisi Shawl, Amy Thompson — and several more). And we were unofficially joined by a young man who was a professor of "The History of Television" who kept trying to provoke arguments of one sort or another. I think, since he was a Brit, currently residing in Australia, he was a bit lonely for the kind of intellectual barroom brawling that's more prevalent in the U.K. "Why do you write science fiction? All that stuff's rubbish, isn't it?" I tried to point out that, as a professor of the History of Television, he wasn't standing on particularly unassailable territory himself. Eileen invited him to a party that was hosted by Tachyon-Aquaduct Friday evening so he could see what all this "feminism in science fiction" was about (and since Leslie's Olympic Games was one of the books being launched at the party, he would also have had a chance to get his photo taken with a Greek god).
Friday I did a writing workshop with a number of talented writers and the Writer's Respite people arranged for a lunch afterwards in the hotel restaurant. The addition of the lunch was a nice touch — not just because I was hungry. I really like talking to the writer/participants in a more sociable setting than the workshop dissection table.
Friday evening I did a panel called "Dialogue: Back to Basics." Andrea Hairston was the moderator, and she did an outstanding job of it. She rescued me several times when I managed to get my foot squarely into my mouth. L. Gabriella Reed and Liz Gorinsky had a lot more useful things to say than I did.
Saturday, I ran into Steven Silver and Pat McCoy — so we talked about WindyCon and, as usual, what everyone has been reading (or, in my case, not reading). Steven does a much better job of keeping up with the latest books than I can ever hope to. We also talked about one of his daughters, Robin, who made on the cover of one of the newspapers I worked for.
The Saturday panel, "Can SF Poetry Become Respectable?" gave me a chance to meet co-panelists Alan DeNiro, David Lunde, Lawrence Schimel and Margaret Ann Magle (who I remember from the writing workshops I put together at Chicon 2000). The audience, as often happens at WisCon panels, was more impressive than the folks up behind the beskirted tables, with a number of Rhysling winners (like John Rezmerski) and local poet/performer Jim Nichols. It was great discussion, threatening to break into chaos at several points — but good chaos — and never quite breaking down (hell, we're poets! We can't help subverting an affair even when it's our own). I think we could have gone on for another hour.
In the Dealer's Room I ran into David Hartwell ("How's the book coming?" he asked. To distract him I subscribed to the New York Review of Science Fiction), picked up a copy of one of Dave Lunde's poetry collections and, finally, a copy of Sister Noon (to show you how far behind I am in my reading). I also took the opportunity to re-up for OdysseyCon and received my OddCon coffee mug (it has a really neat drawing of "The Gates of Moo-dor" — LoTR cows — by Georgie Schnobrich.
That night I had dinner with Jim and Ruth Nichols and a couple of other folks whose names I've unjustly forgotten (except Bhim, whose deadpan dry humor I admire from near and afar). Jim and I went off on a Frank Zappa tangent — enough so that I reminded myself to bring some Zappa CDs with me next time to play on the trip up from Chicago.
Unfortunately, I think by Saturday night I was 'up' for too long, running on fumes and adrenalin, and fell a little under the weather, so I didn't make any of the parties that evening. I did spend quite a bit of time at the Tiptree Auction and threw in a few bucks when the chicken head came around (I'll let someone else explain the significance of the chicken head at the auction).
Sunday, I had lunch with Sandra Ulbrich, her "significant other" and Tom Ferch, husband of the late Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch. We've been talking about various ways to honor Kathleen's memory: a collection of her stories, a WisCon panel on mentoring named after her (i.e. The Karen Axness panel, which has been part of WisCon programming for over a decade) and anything we can do to help push the publication of her novel.
It was the first time I ever got to meet Tom, who is a truly sweet person and who has been working on what is perhaps the most touching and appropriate memorial for Kathleen: a backyard observatory. They had been talking about it just before she got ill the last time, and it seems like such a perfect thing to do.
Sunday afternoon, I was part of an excellent panel called "Scene: Back to Basics." Ellen Kushner, Sue Blom and Joan Vinge kept me out of trouble and had some really great advice for the journeyperson writers in the audience —
— that audience. Again. Stop me before I say this one more time: THANK YOU for not asking the same old questions and making the same old comments that you hear at other cons. WisCon is like graduate school (i.e. the place where things start to get really interesting — or at least it did for me).
I had dinner that evening with my ol' workshop pal Gerri Balter, and we were joined by a young fan who was attending her first WisCon. We mostly shared stories about how and where we grew up. Well, in my case, I mostly shared stories with them about how my parents grew up, since my childhood is something of a bore unless you're into science fiction and monster magazines --Wait a minute! We are into science fiction and monster magazines! I'm in the right place place again! (though I still think I've had a boring life compared with most of the people I meet... )
After that, we went upstairs for the dessert bar and Guest of Honor speeches. I sat at a table with David Levine, Rob Stauffer and Becky Maines (who'd been around all weekend but with whom I hadn't gotten a chance to talk with until Sunday). I got the biggest kick out of Eleanor Arnason's speech, but also enjoyed Patricia McKillip's memoir-cum-GoH speech, and getting to see the Tiptree Tiara pass from John Kessel (with his daughter proudly in tow) to Matt Ruff, who wears the crown well.
Okay, you dragged it out of me — here's another great thing about WisCon and the Tiptree — they attract a number of writers who aren't particularly known for "fannish" behavior, or who don't usually enjoy heading out to accept awards. The WisCon/Tiptree people make the awards fun and get the authors to do silly things and HAVE A GREAT TIME! I don't think Matt Ruff expected the "Set This House in Order" song he received. And I'm guessing that he still hasn't gotten over it.
I shared my Sunday night reading slot with the incredible Lyda Morehouse, the underappreciated Judith Moffett and a new star on the horizon (usually only in view south of the equator) Grace Dugan, who had just done Clarion South and was in the States to conquer more Clarions. I have to especially thank Lyda for staying for the rest of our readings, since she was supposed to be hosting a party at the same time. Like the other readings, we had an overall title to work with: "Customs of the Country," which we worried over on e-mail for a while, but decided in the end to just go ahead and read what we wanted to read.
Remarkably, what we wanted to read really seemed to fit that title in ways we had never expected. And what we each indiviudally read seemed to complement each other, though not necessarily on any one theme or category. It came off as if we had worked this all out carefully, but it was pure serendipity and quite wondrous.
In the audience, to my surprise, was the young woman Gerri and I had had dinner with. She said afterwards, "I didn't know you were the guy who wrote 'The Measure of All Things' I loved that story!"
That kind of thing has been happening a lot recently. I still can't get over it.
During Monday "Sign-Out," a sort of mass-signing a la the Nebula Weekend and the World Fantasy Convention, I got to sit with one of the secret treasures of sf writing: John M. Ford. Mostly I was listening — because John knows everything (or at least everything about anything I'm interested in) from the exact time James Bond started to prefer his martinis shaken instead of stirred, to the actor most suited to playing Han Solo had Star Wars been made in the 1940s (Robert Taylor). We were sitting at a table off and away from the "big draws" of the signing, but a few people came by to get us to sign their program books (and I brought a few F&SF back issue freebies with "Bronte's Egg" and "The Measure of All Things" for anyone who wanted them).
All of this is to say that this WisCon was probably the best time I ever had at a con. The weather could have been better, but it really did little to dampen anyone's spirits. I couldn't have asked for more fun with a better group of people.
And to top it all off, I learned from Sandra Ulbrich that Dotty Dumpling's Dowry, one of the "great" hamburger joints of Madison whose original location was torn down to make room for the city's expanded arts center, is alive and well down on University Avenue!
I attended the first night reception and opening panel of Chicago writers. I was originally supposed to be on the panel but things got changed around at the last minute. Betty Anne Hull moderated. The panelists were Gene Wolfe, Frederik Pohl, Bill Johnson and Jody Lynn Nye. As one might imagine, the discussion was interesting and entertaining and touched all the bases one would expect with these participants at this particular venue (Why Chicago? Why science fiction and fantasy? What work of yours would you most like to see "taught" in a sf classroom).
The reception beforehand was the most fun for me. Margaret McBride, whom I met at WisCon, was there, and I found out what she'd seen of Chicago during her stay. Jody Lynn Nye stopped to talk, and we were joined by a pair of graduate students who are starting at Kent State in the fall. I was especially impressed that one of them was planning to split his major between science fiction and medieval literature (having done my graduate work on Chaucer's Squire's Tale myself). David Hartwell, who seems to be everywhere these days, stopped by to take our picture. Betty Anne Hull stopped by and as usual, was charming and delightful and joy to talk to. Alas, I had to leave right after the panel, so I didn't get a chance to tell Connie Willis, their GoH, that I really didn't think novelettes were wimpy.
Really I don't!
— Richard Chwedyk
April 2004
It's early in October in 2003, and it threatens to be a beautiful autumn in my home town of Chicago. We don't get beautiful autumns too often in this city, and autumn is one of my favorite times of year.
It's October and the Cubs are still playing baseball. Perhaps it's the Singularity. Or just the Apocalypse.
But it's been a good year for me too.
My novella, "Bronte's Egg," won a Nebula. It was also nominated for a Hugo and a Sturgeon Award, and it will appear in the forthcoming Nebula Awards Showcase 2004.
I had a poem included in Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 8. Another poem appeared on the Strange Horizons webzine and I just received my contributor's copy of Snow Monkey vol. 5, no. 6 (thank you, Kathryn Rantala) with two more of my poems.
Add to that — this web page.
That's a very good year!
And depending on how the Cubs do, Christmas may come early this year, or (since the Cubs making the World Series is one of the signs that The Apocalypse is at hand) not at all.
— Richard Chwedyk
October 7, 2003
Yes, there was a lot of bad news — everywhere. There were illnesses in the family and personal setbacks, national tragedies, epidemics, senseless wars and the spreading belief in this country that "Dumb is the new smart."
A lot of folks are going to look back at 2003 with more than a modicum of bitterness and regret; topped off, perhaps, with a sense of relief that it's all past us, at last.
Me? I did okay.
My novella, "Bronte's Egg," won a Nebula. It was also nominated for a Hugo and a Sturgeon Award, and it will appear in the forthcoming Nebula Awards Showcase 2004.
I had a poem included in Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 8. Another poem appeared on the Strange Horizons webzine and I received my contributor's copy of Snow Monkey vol. 5, no. 6 (thank you, Kathryn Rantala) with two more of my poems.
Add to that — this web page, which wouldn't exist without the great help and hard work of Vonda N. McIntyre. Thanks again!
As for the coming year, it's always my goal, even if not always achieved, to do better than I did in the previous year. I see no reason to mess with that goal now.
Happy winter holiday of your choice, and best wishes to you and yours for the coming year.
— Richard Chwedyk
December, 2003
What have I done to lead up to it?
Going way, way back, I was born in Chicago in the mid-1950s, less than a mile or so away from what was then billed as "The World's Busiest," Midway Airport. By 1962 it was the World's Emptiest. Our neighborhood was The Land That Time (and space) Forgot. We had poor libraries and mediocre schools, no theaters and no cultural centers of any sort. But we did have Rexalls, and other drugstores with magazine stalls and paperback racks. That's where I discovered science fiction — when I wasn't watching The Day the Earth Stood Still on TV or The Time Machine, in second-run, at the Marquette Theater, two neighborhoods east of us.
I wanted to write before I even knew the letters of the alphabet, and filled arithmetic pads with a crabbed scrawl I hoped were words and at least looked like a book to me. I'm not sure if my technique has improved much over the years but at least I can now make out most of the words that I scribble, whether on paper or on a computer screen.
I also no longer draw my own illustrations — with the exception of a few drawings I did for fun while writing a story called "The Cthulhu Orthodontist." I guess my technique hasn't changed much after all.
I had one of those childhoods very familiar to writers: even my friends thought I was insane for thinking I could make it as a writer, or as much of anything else. Our most prominent role models were corrupt (and later indicted) aldermen. My father's sage advice, when I asked him what he thought I should do with my life: "Everybody always needs accountants."
Somehow, I avoided suicide, but did not avoid writing reams of angst-ridden, turgid poems about it.
And I did not avoid a string of dull, mind-numbing day-jobs, but in the interim I did manage to get a degree from Columbia College (English/Writing '79) and Northwestern University (MA in English, '88).
I also managed to get married to wonderful poet and remarkable woman, Pamela Miller, who is already three books ahead of me and has managed to attain a foothold in the so-called "real world" that has so far evaded me.
I taught Freshman Rhetoric and Composition at Triton College for a couple of semesters, and I currently teach a Continuing Ed course in short story writing for Oakton Community College.
My current mind-numbing day job is at a chain of community newspapers, on "The Desk" (formerly the Copy Desk), trying to get our stories and photos to fit into the Procrustean bed of "edit holes." I pour copy into edit holes like a contractor pouring concrete into wooden forms, but you're not allowed to write your initials in it after you're done
I've also taken part in a number of writing workshops at worldcons and local conventions. It took me almost thirty years to work up the courage to go to an sf convention. I knew of fandom from about the age of 10 or 11 (thanks to the fanzine reviews in Castle of Frankenstein magazine, but I was afraid to take part in it because it seemed that fans knew everything, and I would be instantly humiliated if I tried to write a "letter of comment." I did get the courage to write a movie review column for a fanzine about the time I reached 17, but that venue quickly died and I was back to peering through the windows of fandom, never stepping inside.
It was thanks to an sf convention that — after years of being told by college writing teachers that I shouldn't "waste my time" with the genre — I made my first "adult" effort to write an sf story. The story won a prize sponsored by the local sf group that runs Windycon, and two years later (since I still hadn't made a professional sale) I won the prize again. That second story sold to Amazing Stories.
Ayjay Budrys was one of the judges of that first contest. I asked him to sign my copy of one of his books, and he wrote beneath his signature, "Welcome to the club." I've been trying, in my own slow way, to hold on to that membership ever since.
My output is slow — incredibly slow. Other writers finish a ten-book series while I'm still hashing out and wrestling with an incidental character in an 8,000 word story.
I pick my subjects carefully. I can't run out a story after reading about some new finding in Science News or New Scientist. By the time I could get such a story to an editor, he or she has already published about sixteen stories on the same idea. So there aren't that many "new" ideas in my stories. I just comb through the old ones and try to figure out what they missed, and add something of my own experience and outlook. However, it's fun to discover an article, like one I read not long ago in Scientific American, which proposes that the universe may be a kind of "hologram," (see Jacob D. Bekenstein, "Information in the Holographic Universe," in the August 2003 issue) and compare it to a scene in a story of mine called "Last One Close the Door," where the narrator explains that the universe is like the light projected onto the surface of a flat movie screen — not quite the same thing but at least in the ball park (or if that mixes a metaphor, let's say it's in the same theater).
Also, I try to write stories that will appeal to both readers and non-readers of science fiction. One of the nicest aspects of the response I've received for "The Measure of All Things" and "Bronte's Egg" is that die-hard sf readers have told me how much they enjoyed the stories, as well as folks who almost never (at least knowingly) read in the genre.
That doesn't mean I'm trying to sneak in through the back door of literary respectability (I, like most readers, have no idea what the word "slipstream" means, though the folks put in that category are writing some wonderful sf and fantasy). I am, proudly and unapologetically, a science fiction writer. This is what I love, among all the other things that I love, and I think that many other readers who "can't get into" science fiction would love it too if they gave themselves a fair chance.
All we can do is write the best work we can — even if it takes a year to write a 9,000 word story — and hope it's something that readers will enjoy as well.
Which reminds me — I better get back to that 9,000 word story. I promised it to someone as a Christmas present — in 2002!
— Richard Chwedyk
December 18, 2003