Category: nonfiction

Something new

personby Gillian Polack
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This Monday, today, October 31 (if I say it often enough, I’ll believe it – where I am it is a blowy November day and a famous horse race is in the offing) is the introduction to something new. Starting next week, as they come to hand, I’ll be posting long interviews with writers. By ‘long’ I mean that the first one will extend over four weeks.

My other Monday posts will appear in between interviews and interviews may follow each other rapidly or be months apart. But there will be interviews.

Why?

Around me, so many readers are asking “Why haven’t we heard of this writer?” One of the reasons is because fewer writers are given as much time by bloggers and podcasts and critics. I was looking at my own visibility in the US and realised how little of me is known to readers of Locus, which is the leading magazine for science fiction and fantasy – I don’t fit their profile for an author. Many, may writers don’t fit these profiles. Because so many of us are less visible, writers don’t develop as many profound loyalties to writers who fit the profile of important magazines and critics, or who are not on the right lists and win the right prizes. It’s harder to discover those unique voices and to seek out writers who are not in our own country or published by our favourite imprints. It’s harder, to be honest, to see writers. I want to see writers. Who they are, how they talk, and I want to enjoy time with them. That’s what these interviews are about: time. Time to argue, to be fascinated, to chase to find a book, to stop and think, to laugh. Time to see just how interesting writers can be.

Years ago I did group interviews for BiblioBuffet, a literary e-journal. These interviews among my most popular work from those days and are still discovered by new readers. Those readers occasionally report back to me about them. They tell me how good the interviews are, because of their length and their substance.  I looked at my early interviews again recently, to determine their persistent appeal. I think it’s because when a group of writers get together, we have conversations. We go in unexpected directions and give readers insights into work. There is no PR template.  It’s exciting to not know where an interview is headed, or how a writer responds to questions and how the whole thing can become immensely wise or devolve into silliness on the same page.

The first interview will appear, magically, throughout November and maybe into early December After that, it will be as they’re finished. I don’t restrict length, or push for a given novel to be publicised. This isn’t about publicity, after all. It’s about writers. These writers. About how fascinating writers can be and how not a single one of us thinks the way we expect they will.

The first interview is from Amy Sterling Casil (one of the members of this Treehouse) with Ron Collins and Mike Libling. It’s all ready to go, which means I can tell you with the power of advance knowledge… it’s so much fun! Such a good start to this new series.

Process

personby Madeleine Robins
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I love learning how to do stuff. When I was a kid I had weaving lessons the way that my peers had piano or violin lessons. I taught myself to sew when I was a teenager. Taught myself to knit. And when I see a recipe for something I’ve never made — particularly if it’s a fairly basic thing (like cheese) or a really complex thing (baklava! beef Wellington!) my thumbs start twitching. It’s not that I need home made cheese — I’m pretty much the only cheese eater in my house — but the urge to know how to do it is nearly overwhelming.

This is the reason I have found myself doing things as foolish as refinishing my own hardwood floors or stripping wall paper: it’s not that I’m an insane DIY-er; I’m learning the process (also learning that I never want to do it again). By the same token, I’ve taken stage combat and fencing classes (never real martial arts, mind you, but I can use a quarterstaff, a rapier, a broadsword, or pretend to beat you to a pulp) so I’d know. And don’t get me started on assembling Ikea furniture.  It’s like crack: look! This goes there! Cool!

What licenses me to do these things? Being a writer. A few months ago I was talking to a group of Girl Scouts about my career, and someone asked me what the best part of being a writer was. I don’t know what the girls were expecting, but when I said “research!” they looked as if I’d said “spinach!” But other than being a scientist or a beta tester, I know of no other profession that encourages — requires — that I find out how things work.  That can mean plumbing the depths of biology or astronomy, or reading (as I currently am) about women’s legal status in medieval Italy. It can mean reading, or it can mean, for me, getting out a hammer and nails and building a chair, just to see if I can, and so I’ll know the smell and the noises and the feel of wood under my hands.

In the end, writing is all about the process too. With each project, book or story, I find out different things about how I write and what I –and the project– need.  Getting to learn new processes is just an extra! added! bonus!

 

©2011 This post was originally published on the Book View Café Blog

The Virtues of an Audience

personby Madeleine Robins
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I was a theatre major. Not writing, not history, none of the things that might have proved useful in my then-unthought-of career as a writer. I hoped to act (but unfortunately, was not particularly talented in that arena, and not conventionally adorable enough for my lack of talent to be overlooked) but what it turned out I was really good at was stage management. Stage management includes keeping track of all the people and things that go into a production: the schedules, the movement of actors on stage, very often the lighting and props and sound cues. In many of the cases where I was stage manager, it also meant keeping track of the director’s unspoken needs, the personal lives of performers, and how all the bits and pieces go from point A to point B (in one production of Moonchildren this included figuring out how to remove 7 dozen glass milk bottles from the set in a 60-second scene blackout).

It turns out that my secret superpower is cat-herding. Continue reading “The Virtues of an Audience”…

The Day the Shuttle Didn’t Fly

personby Madeleine Robins
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In 1990, when I was 4+ months pregnant with my older daughter, my husband and I went to Disney World. Our reasoning was that this might be our last opportunity to act like the irresponsible kids we were (even in our 30s) rather than the responsible parental figures we were about to become. This showed how much we knew about parenthood, but it was still a good trip. While we were there, we learned that there was going to be a shuttle launch from the Kennedy Space Center at Oh-God-Too-Early AM the next day, and immediately decided we had to drive there from Orlando and see the launch.

The drive seemed to take forever, although it’s only about 60 miles. I think we left Orlando at 4am, and got to Cape Canaveral closer to 6am than our planned 5am. Then we had to find out where to go. Fortunately, there were signs–most of them hand-drawn by other people who were as weird about this stuff as we are. We were deep in unknown territory, and while you can’t drive through Orlando without being pointed to every possible entertainment, Port Canaveral–or the town on the far side of the Banana River from which your basic drop-in-tourists viewed launches–provided a lot less guidance for your wandering NASA fan. But we found a place where many cars were parked, and pulled over and walked across what I remember as a fairly long, slightly swampy trail to a field where there were perhaps 60 or 70 other people standing around, attention on the distance, where the shuttle and gantry gleamed fitfully in the morning light.

Then what?

We waited. For a while. And another while. Continue reading “The Day the Shuttle Didn’t Fly”…

Multivitamins and the Mind of Older Folks

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I was a participant in the COSMOS trial (it was fun!) examining possible benefits for older folks from cocoa flavonoids and an ordinary multivitamin (they used Centrum Silver). While the cocoa extract had no effect on cognition, the multivitamin did–it actually improved cognition! (Cardiovascular events and cancer results are reported elsewhere). Here’s the summary:

Vitamins, minerals, and other bioactives in foods are important for normal brain function, and deficiencies in older adults may increase risk for cognitive decline. Dietary supplements are often recommended for cognitive protection, but supporting evidence is mixed. COSMOS investigators partnered with colleagues at Wake Forest University to test whether daily use of cocoa extract or a multivitamin for 3 years can reduce the risk of cognitive decline. The COSMOS-Mind sub-study enrolled 2,262 COSMOS participants aged 65 and older who completed annual telephone interviews to assess memory and thinking abilities. The investigators found that cocoa extract did not affect cognition. On the other hand, daily multivitamin use improved cognitive function. That is, participants assigned to the multivitamin group had higher cognitive test scores after 3 years than the participants assigned to the multivitamin-placebo group. The investigators estimated that taking the daily multivitamin slowed cognitive aging by approximately 60%, or the equivalent of 1.8 years over the 3 years of the study, but this finding requires confirmation in future research. “COSMOS-Mind provides the first evidence from a large randomized trial to show that regular use of a typical daily multivitamin may improve memory and thinking abilities in older adults,” noted COSMOS Co-Director Dr. Howard Sesso, who leads COSMOS with Dr. JoAnn Manson. However, the story continues to unfold as other investigators complete separate studies in COSMOS that dig more deeply into the effects of both cocoa extract and a multivitamin on different aspects of cognition and other aging-related outcomes.
The whole study is here.

An Interesting Monday

personby Gillian Polack
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I planned to blog on my yesterday, but the world caught up with me. It’s still Monday in the US, however, so I thought I’d talk on what caught up with me and prevented me writing on my Monday. Not everything. Honestly, you don’t need the details of a migraine and some of the more interesting (and quite unsavoury) symptoms. Just let me say that for some of us, migraines affect the stomach as much as the head and that there were many things I was unable to do yesterday.

Three big things made my Monday unforgettable. One of them would have been quite enough. Let me talk about them in chronological order.

First, a very fine meeting. I chatted with the actor doing my audiobooks. I didn’t know enough about audiobooks (and was too ill) for the actor who read Langue[dot]doc 1305. I heard the first fifteen minutes and asked if he had any questions and we had an email exchange and that was about it. I will always regret not being there for an actor who was new to this work.

This time, because the new reader-of-my-books is American and my accents are seldom US, and she’s reading the Australian settings and locals know best how to pronounce words like Garema, Manuka and even Canberra, we’re talking about my books more.

It was a wonderful meeting. It took a big chunk of my work day, but was so worth it. She had sorted out how to say Manuka and Canberra earlier, so yesterday was only Garema, which means, mostly, we talked about accent. She’s not reading my novels in an Australian accent, but a more British one.

Australian accents are kinda impossible for people from the US and not that easy for most other actors outside Australia and New Zealand. Some sounds, however, are closer to US English than to the Cockney that Australian sounds like to many, and we talked those through. Australians pronounce ‘h’, for instance.

It was a fascinating conversation. I now know a lot more about why our accent is so imponderable for so many US listeners. I also know now that my English is, in some vowel sounds, halfway between the US and the UK.

The second thing was learning of the death of Maureen Kinkaid Speller. This is a terrible thing. We needed at least two more decades with her in the midst of fandom, educating us, supporting us, and telling us of the adventures of her beautiful cats. In 2018 we talked about not being able to see each other. I’d planned to spend as much time with her as she could stomach, talking about books and both of our research. Those visits all were postponed by COVID. I have a hole in my life where those conversations should have been and a gaping maw in the place Maureen herself inhabited.

I’m not alone in this. I suspect Maureen never knew just how important she was to so many people, even those like me who she only saw from time to time.

I knew her online a little and then discovered the full wonder of her mind and her sense of humour when she interviewed me (about Life Through Cellophane/Ms Cellophane) for London fandom over a decade ago. Her kindness that day, when I’d just got off the plane from Australia and was entirely jetlagged and had no idea I was ill and… her kindness and her insights into my work meant a lot to me, and capacity to get me through that interview and make it a good one despite my condition was amazing. That was the day I planned many more long conversations.

Yesterday I discovered that I’m not the only person who found her a quiet pillar of light. So many of us…

The other death the whole world has known about for a little while, but the funeral is now done. Much pomp and ceremony. Many hours of TV. I only watched some of it, because of the migraine and because of the time – I wasn’t going to stay awake all night, even for something this historically important.

The thing is…Australia is now ruled by a king. Furthermore, that same king was the man we asked politely not to be our Governor-General decades ago. Australia is, to be blunt, both respectful and also a bit sarcastic about our head of state and about the head of the most important religious denomination here.

This raises so many questions about what kind of democracy we have and want. The last elections showed what kind we want, but the role of the Governor-General was questioned this month when Hurley did political things that he was not supposed to. He asked for (and got) $18 million to establish a leadership institute. That money has now been rescinded, but it leaves the question that we all felt in the 70s… if the Governor-General plays politics, wouldn’t we rather have a president than a queen (now a king)?

The monarchy has played a very quiet, gentle role in most of Australia’s independent history, and every time a Governor-General tries to change that, we get angsty. David Hurley established his little leadership scheme and distressed many of us. John Kerr dismissed the prime minister and distressed more of us. While most people still voted for the opposition, this didn’t mean they were happy with Kerr. He couldn’t be seen in public for most of the rest of his life without incurring some really nasty comments and at least once, thrown tomatoes.

There is a third death, but it was all over last week. The mention of Whitlam’s dismissal and John Kerr reminds me of it. Sir David Smith, the man who kept the Governor-Generalship going, despite Kerr. He was secretary to the Governor-General, and bore brutal public nicknames while still maintaining friendships with all parties. He quietly kept Australia going through that crisis in the 70s. Sir David was such a good man and so important in so many ways, that an ex-Prime Minister came to his private memorial service.

I knew him, for a number of reasons. In fact, I met Whitlam through him. Ask me and I’ll tell you that story one day. It involves a pink shirt.

So much of the critical aspects of Australian politics happen quietly. We are more like Britain than the US. When I was in training to be a policy wonk, we were given “Yes, Minister” as training material. The nature of most things political, especially these two important deaths, is the flavour of the week and yes, Maureen and I have spoken politics and I wanted to talk politics with her some more. More than any of the others we’ve lost, I shall miss Maureen Kinkaid Speller.

Family History and the Queen

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My grandmother was the only person I knew growing up who didn’t love the English or their Queen. She usually made this clear by slightly snide remarks, an oddity because she was generally very nice to people.

I didn’t understand this until many years later, when my father told me that while my grandmother was a teenager in the second decade of the 20th century, her grandfather lived with her family at the hotel they ran in Christoval, Texas. He was going blind by then, so she used to read to him from books he was fond of as well as from the newspapers.

So I imagine that in the spring of 1916, she read to him about the Easter Uprising in Ireland against the British.

I should mention that her grandfather, Florence McCarthy, was born in County Cork, Ireland, and immigrated to the United States as a young man in the 1850s. I don’t know why he came, except that he had a brother in New York, but while it might have been for economic reasons, it might also have been political ones.

In any case, based on my grandmother’s attitude about the English, I venture to say his politics were on the Irish side of the Uprising.

My grandmother, in fact, always saw herself as Irish even though she never visited the place. I don’t think she left the U.S. except for a trip or two to Mexico. But she was always more Irish in her own mind than she was Texan. Continue reading “Family History and the Queen”…

Very Clean

personby Madeleine Robins
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I was ten when A Hard Day’s Night came out. It played for about a year at the Village Cinema, four blocks from my house in Greenwich Village. The Village Cinema was a little art house, and while my mother was not against dropping the kids at the movies (I was 10, my brother was 8) especially during the summer when it was hot and there was air conditioning, she preferred to do it at the Waverly or the Loews Sheraton (both larger, with a larger, more supervisory staff to make sure we wouldn’t be spirited away). I think she found the Village Cinema–what was called an “art house” in those days, a little skeevy. In any case, neither my mother nor my father was enthused by the idea of taking us themselves and spending two hours watching what they anticipated would be a standard teen-pop-star movie.

Enter my Aunt Julie. Julie is my mother’s younger sister. She not only didn’t balk at taking us to the movie, she was delighted. By the time she came to visit we were in Massachusetts for the summer, so the three of us went to the Mahaiwe, the local theatre in Great Barrington, to see it. The rest, as far as we were concerned, was history. The three of us came home afterwards singing and quoting lines (“I now declare this bridge open…”) and within a week or two my mother, at least, gave in to the siren call of upbeat music and my aunt’s enthusiastic recommendation, and she began quoting from it as well. My grandmother called to ask me what the refrain of “he’s very clean,” referring to Paul’s grandfather, was all about. I saw Hard Day’s Night a good dozen times over the next year, and whole chunks of the dialogue moved into our household vernacular. Continue reading “Very Clean”…

What’s New With Voyager 1?

personby Deborah J. Ross
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 Voyager 1 is no Longer Sending Home Garbled Data!

This aging and still-valuable spacecraft has been exploring the outer parts of the solar system since its launch in 1977, along with its twin sibling, Voyager 2. They each traveled slightly different trajectories. Both went past Jupiter and Saturn, but Voyager 2 continued on to Uranus and Neptune. They’re both now outside the solar system, sending back data about the regions of space they’re exploring.

Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter in March 1979, and Saturn in November 1980. After its close approaches to those two gas giants, it started a trajectory out of the solar system and entered interstellar space in 2013. That’s when it ceased to detect the solar wind and scientists began to see an increase in particles consistent with those in interstellar space.

These days, Voyager 1 is more than 157.3 astronomical units from Earth and moving out at well over 61,000 km/hour. It’s busy collecting data about the interstellar medium and radiation from distant objects. If all goes well, the spacecraft should continue sending back data for nearly a decade. After that, it should fall silent as it travels beyond the Oort Cloud and out to the stars.

Earlier this year, however, the teams attached to the Voyager 1 mission noticed that the spacecraft was sending weird readouts about its attitude articulation and control system (called AACS, for short). Essentially, the AACS was sending telemetry data all right, but it was routing it to the wrong computer, one that had failed years ago. This corrupted the data, which led to the strangely garbled messages the ground-based crew received.

Once the engineers figured out that the old, dead computer might have been part of the problem, they had a way forward. They simply told the AACS to switch over sending to the correct computer system. The good news was that it didn’t affect science data-gathering and transmission. The best news came this week: team engineers have fixed the issue with the AACS and the data are flowing normally again.

The ongoing issue with AACS didn’t set off any fault protection systems onboard the spacecraft. If it had, Voyager 1 would have gone into “safe mode” while engineers tried to figure out what happened. During the period of garbled signals, AACS continued working, which indicated that the problem was either upstream or downstream of the unit. The fact that data were garbled provided a good clue to related computer issues.

This adapted article appeared in Universe Today. Click through for the full thing.

Caveat 9-Year-Old

personby Madeleine Robins
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When I was a kid my brother and I collected comic books in great quantity. Collected and read and re-read and read the letters columns and the ads, entirely uncritically. Until I learned better.

In those bygone days a company called Wilson Chemical advertised heavily in comic books, persuading kids they could WIN PRIZES and MAKE MONEY by selling Wilson Chemical’s Cloverine Salve (which was, as near as I can tell, petroleum jelly). There were pictures of all the fabulous prizes you could win, and very often there were little quizzes. It was implied that if you gave all the right answers to a quiz you would win some gimcrack item that caught your eye.

I love idiot quizzes. Still. The only thing that keeps me from clicking on the link to yet another “What Kind of Coffee Drinker Are You?” or “What’s Your Love Language?” quiz is sad experience and a little understanding of how the Internet works.

When I was nine I was singularly lacking in experience (and there was no Internet). I liked knowing the answers to stupid quizzes, and maybe I even wanted the pressed tin ring that was my prize for saying “Betsy Ross” instead of “Martha Washington.

So I filled out the form and mailed it in. Two weeks later I got a bulky package from Wilson Chemical with 12 cans of Cloverine Salve and a pressed tin ring that was even less impressive than I expected. I had no idea that I had entered into a business dealing; I put the package on the shelf and went and did other things. Until I started getting threatening letters from the Wilson Chemical Company and, shamefacedly, brought the whole concern to my father.

This could not have been the first time a kid had sent away for a prize and been nonplussed by what she received. The company knew it was advertising to children (there was a place on the form to put your age) and had been doing this for years. But my father rose to a level of magnificent outrage–and I recently found a carbon copy of his letter to Mr. George C. Wilson III of Wilson Chemical Company.

“I am returning to you under separate cover the package of White Cloverine Salve you so cleverly tricked my nine year old daughter int receiving.

I would have thought that this kind of shabby, old-fashioned medicine-man kind of obscure cure peddling would have been outlawed long ago…

…You are asking children to take advantage of their own and their parents good standing in their neighborhood … it seems to me to be nothing more than a business based on a folksy, neighborly blackmail….

From the careful phrasing of the stickers on your catalog I would assume that I am not the only irate parent who has returned the unsolicited package to you. The one package I am returning might previously have been sent to five or a dozen children in other families in this country. Each child would, as mine did, open the carton and the top can of your jelly to see what was there.

And yet you wish your product to be used as a medication to be applied to irritations, burns, and the minor cuts of shaving. You have no way of knowing if my child is now carrying an infection that can be efficiently carried to the neighbor of your next “agent,” and what better way to apply it, than directly into the minor irritations, burns, and cuts…

[He finishes] I will expect the cost of mailing this package back to you refunded to me and I sincerely hope never to receive any of your products in my home again.”

There is also a copy of the letter Mr. George C. Wilson III sent in reply, with a good deal of pearl-clutching about the notion that cans of Cloverine Salve might be sent out, opened, returned, sent out again, returned, ad nauseam. He didn’t actually say that they weren’t. He enclosed a copy of the form I submitted, “requesting us to ship on order of Cloverine Salve out to her on trust.” In the fine print, below the “Check Only Four of the Six Famous Americans” boxes above.

So I learned that 1) I should always read the fine print and avoid quizzes, and 2) that my father had my back. When roused to anger, Dad really was a poet of sorts.