Category: writing

Distracted Reading

personby Madeleine Robins
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I just read a book that took me forever to finish. As it was one of the many, many books I have to read as a World Fantasy Award judge the slowness of the read was a problem. Well aware of the stack of “to be reads” teetering in my room, I kept wanting to move faster. But I couldn’t. Why? It’s not a bad book, the prose is readable, most of the characters are interesting, the setting, based on an African culture, is intriguing and lovingly detailed. Sounds great.

But there was a pronunciation guide at the front of the book.

I am a whole word reader: what this means in practice is that I will note a word without hearing it (trying to learn to read using phonics slowed me down so much when I was a kid that I thought I was developmentally challenged). Even with names with multiple diacritics (signaling intonation, stress, and pronunciation) I sort of note the shape of the word and zip on past. Unless there is a pronunciation guide at the front of the book. For some damned reason, paging past that guide meant that thereafter, every time I encountered a name, I was compelled to page back to the pronunciation guide and see if I was reading the name correctly–even with the names with no diacritics. Nine times out of ten I was correct. The thing is, to get to the story and keep everyone straight, I didn’t need that pronunciation guide. So why is it there?

I generally find maps, lists of characters, explanations of social hierarchies, glossaries, and other world building stuff to be distractions. If they exist, I think they should be at the back of the book (yes, even those pages long lists of characters in Dostoevsky which I think must be provided lest the Western reader get tangled up in patronymics). I also tend to think, in modern fantasy, that these things signal, either that the author has not done a good enough job massaging the world-building into the text, or that the author is so in love with their world-building that they want everyone to see what they’ve created.

I recognize that impulse, believe me, I do. 9/10ths of the worldbuilding work I do when I’m writing second-world fantasy never makes it to the page, and yet it is work I’m proud of, and why can’t I show it off? But I don’t think it helps most books, and in some cases it actively hinders it.

In the case of this book, I think there may have been another reason for all this front matter. The author is writing for a Western audience that may not be (probably isn’t) well versed in her culture. In using a pronunciation guide she’s offering that audience an opportunity to learn her language, to get it right, to hear the names as if she was pronouncing them.

The problem is that, by doing this, the author privileged her desire that the reader get it right, over the reader’s (which is to say my) desire to stay in the story and get pulled along with it.

The presence of the pronunciation guide at the front of the book made it impossible for me not to check each time a name showed up. Why couldn’t I ignore the guide? I am not certain–maybe because for me it turned the book from a story to get involved in into a lesson. I realized the further I went, the more invested I was in sounding out the names–even names I was familiar with. I don’t think that’s what this writer intended.

Don’t get between me and your story, please. I’m distractible enough.

 

 

Some Thoughts on Cultural Exclusion

personby Gillian Polack
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This is a post from my blog, from 9 years ago. I’ve very mildly edited it. There are two reasons for sharing it with you.

The first is that I have an intermittent fever and that my body feels as if someone is attacking it with a sledgehammer. The illness will be gone in a couple of days, but today I’m not up to much.

The second is that sometimes it helps to see the paths our current problems have travelled. I’ve been dealing with some of the current issues all my life, and yet those who have not tell me it’s all Israel’s fault and our society has nothing to do with the discrimination it carries nor the hate embedded deeply. This is a snapshot of my Australia in 2017, when Australia was adapting some of the positions that dominate today. Most of those who saw me as painted now exclude me because I’m Jewish, for instance. Almost the whole Left (where I used to belong) tells me what I am and ushes me aside or, in some cases, do things that are much worse.  I was never given the academic support to sort everything out properly (I came close), but I have moved a lot further towards understanding. I may talk more about this when I explain my books. I’ve already been explaining what those 9 years have led to, for Jews – today you see one single aspect of how it came to be.

Next week I will try to return to talking about my own books, including the one that led to this post. First, however, I need to be less ill.

 

Right now, the results of my research force me to reassess the world around me. This reassessment shows remarkably clear indications of how perfectly nice and thoughtful people help set up a complex culture from which bigots can source hate. Now that I know a bit more about where it comes from, I need to take a pause in my research and digest it.

I’ve written a summary of key aspects of my latest findings for those who want, and that summary has tentatively been accepted for publication. Watch social media, for I will announce it when it emerges. Beyond those findings, the project might have to wait for years. This post is a bit about the project and a bit about why it’s delayed. And how I’m living the life… but not in the way anyone expected.

Quite simply, if I get the right kind of job then I can do the full academic shebang and hit the subject hard and sort it out. I know what I’m doing and how to turn it into a book. If I don’t get the right kind of job, then slow and gentle is all I can manage, with occasional reports like this one and very occasional conference papers. I’ll be able to teach from it, and each course will be exciting and amazingly useful. That’s all, though. No book. Very few articles.

For those who have seen my work so far and have said “But this is important”, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that kind of research in my current situation. Income matters. At the very least, some of my results will appear in my fiction, for my fiction continues without money. More slowly than if I had money, but it continues.

This knowledge is based on experience. Putting other peoples’ intellectual wishes first has not helped me get enough money to live on, so I now put my own needs first in my big life decisions.

There’s another reason for putting my own needs first in those big life decisions. My research has pointed to a bunch of narratives that set up society to exclude perfectly good people and to nurture bigots. I’m right now observing how it hits the disabled and the cultural and religious minority and gender minorities. I’ve now realised how much my own life in Canberra is affected by this.

It’s complicated, but there are two main outcomes.

The first is that many Canberrans exclude me by making decisions for me regarding what activities they expect from me in my life. Some of the reasons are probably excellent. I don’t know. I don’t know what those reasons are. I am to them sufficiently lower in status to not need an explanation or consultation.

The second is related. One of the most annoying aspects of being minority right now is that earned status is difficult to retain unless one is the token representative of that minority. So in Canberra (but certainly not in all other places) I often have to negotiate work as if I were new to the workforce. And I’m one of the lucky people in my lack of seniority, for who else at my level of the hierarchy has two PhDs and whose short list of publications is four pages long? (there is no long list – I dumped it when my short non-fiction hit the 500 mark, which was while ago) And I have friends, who help. And patrons. And I’ve managed to get to several conferences this year, despite living on around $20,000 annually.

Usually these two factors lead to both exclusion and silencing. I keep pointing out that other people who are excluded are silenced more effectively. I can be left off this list or that, but I still get invitations to write and I still have things to say. This is one of my privileges. (and now I’ve used loads of current jargon – such virtue!)

Taking things back to my research for a moment, I’m talking about these issues today because I found a gap in my knowing. I need to find out if that same gap is present elsewhere, especially in my interpretation of how wider culture affects story. I need to look at who is allowed in a group and who isn’t in novels and other long stories.

I noticed something interesting in The 100 today. Skin colour counts in US tales. This isn’t new. This isn’t what I noticed. What I noticed is that focussing on US definitions of racism and silencing and exclusion to assess who got killed under what circumstances made me miss something else.

In our fiction, our central characters have certain types of personalities. It’s as if they come from a range of action or emotional figurines. We take them out of the box and play with them. Those who lack those characteristics are painted figures on the back of the box. They don’t get full lives. Most people define themselves as the figurines when they place themselves in story, as people with full lives. What I think I’m seeing is how people define those who are merely figures. And I’m seeing the circumstances when I am a figure, left behind when the figurine is brought out to play but considered to be part of the backdrop. I’m not seen as excluded because of my painted role, but my role is limited to being in the backdrop of the lives of others.

Like all of us, I carry my own prejudices and see other people as active in my life (figurines) or as backdrop (painted figures). My personal need is to find out who I see as painted figures and give them the dignity of full lives if I’ve excluded them due to prejudices I bear. I also have to accept that a lot of people who were once close to me have, in the change of culture, shifted me to the painted figure category. They want me on the back of their box to illuminate their life, but they don’t want to have dinner with me. I need to accept that some of this is due to prejudice.

As ever, this is a simplification. I needed a quick and dirty overview so that I could start to think how we do what we do.

I wanted to use the circles shutting people out that are described in Joan G Robinson’s When Marnie Was There. Anna was excluded by these invisible circles and, re-reading the book today, they felt very familiar. The subjective feeling of being excluded by invisible circles, however, rests on whatever draws those circles. In my childhood, it was a primary school child whose name I mentioned the other day to my oldest friend. She laughed and remembered, with equal irony.

This is our old way of seeing it. It works when we move from circles to circles and when we see individuals as having to deal with being alone but assign them equal status as human beings. It’s well encoded and very well described. This means that it’s a part of what’s happening culturally right now. A part. Not the whole thing. For culture is changing. We need to encode the changes. That’s what I’m doing here, but it’s a rough sketch. I need something better than toy figurines and the drawing on the box.

This means it’s back to novels. We encode cultures in the nice straightforward framework of the novel. This means that I can find out a lot about what’s happening around me by looking closely at how we depict ourselves and what we write into a story without knowing. The most worrying discovery so far is the one I explained in my Helsinki paper. The Helsinki paper isn’t for publication yet. This isn’t because it’s bad research. It’s because that paper encapsulated the moment when I realised just how big the thing is that I’m doing and how large its ramifications.

I wish I had that fulltime academic job. I wish that researching this didn’t have to come at the end of the month, after everything else. I only do the amount I do because I’m efficient at it. I can’t spend large amounts of time in archives and libraries right now for I simply need to spend that time earning grocery money. That’s my lifestyle problem.

My scholarly problem right now is that, with this strange lifestyle, I’m carrying too much baggage. I can’t do the research partly because I need income, but the lower status lifestyle gets in my intellectual way. The life carries emotions with it. Every time I’m excluded I feel them come to the surface, for I need to explain them.

Those emotions are why I’m not making as much sense as I’d like tonight. I’m in the middle of big things, intellectually, and my life echoes them.

 

 

Baggage

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m about to embark on a big essay. As a prequel to it, however, I want to introduce you to a book.

A-many years ago, when I was young and charming, I edited an Australian anthology called Baggage. It’s still in print, published by Wildside in the US. The Australian original was taken out of print when the collapse of Borders in Australia imploded the publisher. Every piece Eneit Press published was special (maybe excepting my novel – I cannot judge my own writing) and the loss of the press shut many doors for readers.

Why is Baggage so important to me today? I asked writers for stories of science fiction or fantasy that discussed the cultural baggage we all carry. I had an initial list of the perfect people to make the best anthology. It had two parts, since I couldn’t ask everyone at once. I emailed the writers on the first part of my initial first (obviously) and all but one of them agreed. The rest of the wonderful authors I had on my list don’t even know they were on my list, which I find sad. I still want to read stories by them. Every single story I was given by those writers is a treasure and thought-provoking and none of them overlap and they created such a fine anthology that I’ve been nervous about trying another.

These are not Jewish stories. For those most part, these are not Jewish writers. Yet the collection is one that will help anyone trying to understand about the current wave of antisemitism. How? It demonstrates, through story, some of the massive differences in the cultural baggage we each bear. What we carry, how we carry it, how much of a burden it can be and how different people see it quite, quite differently. It achieves all this through very well told story. Which means, if you don’t want to jump straight into theory and definitions and cultural analysis, you don’t have to. You can read some of the best short stories I’ve ever edited.

Then I’ll bring in the heavy stuff, either here or on my own blog. In this difficult few years, however, we don’t always need to confront. Sometimes we can simply read and enjoy and find our own paths from what we read. This is why I’m giving you a prologue, which is Baggage.

 

Reading The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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cover of the book The Body DigitalMy morning reading book for the past several weeks has been The Body Digital, by Vanessa Chang. It’s a powerful book and I’m still integrating it into my own thinking.

Part of my practice is to copy some of the sentences that really strike me when reading. I do this rather than taking notes, though sometimes I add a few notes as well.

I’ve chosen a few that are related to writing to share here today. That will give you some flavor of the book, though it’s only a small part of what Chang is doing.

It can be easy to forget that writing is an embodied technology.

There are three powerful thoughts in those few words.

First of all, it’s easy to forget these things about writing because we take it for granted. We don’t think about it much, unless we’re sitting down to do some of it. It’s a fact of life in our world.

Secondly, it’s embodied – we use our bodies to do it. Now right now I’m writing on a keyboard, which is my preferred way to write, but even that requires physical movement.

Writing by hand requires other kinds of movement, and dictation to produce written words a third kind. All of those are physical.

Chang goes on to say:

While much of writing’s profound impact lies in its massive capacity to store and transmit ideas, its ancestry in handmade marks makes it the twin of drawing.

I’ll get to the first part of that in a minute, but the idea that writing is much like drawing – which preceded it – amplifies the fact that it’s an act of our bodies. I keep thinking about Japanese and Chinese writing and particularly about how people do calligraphy with words in those languages, creating their own understanding of the word through the way they do the lines.

Much of the traditional poetry in those languages is also done as art. It’s a physical act – you could dance it, really – but it also stirs the mind, makes you think about ideas. Continue reading “Reading The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang”…

Things Happen

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late!

This is because Australia is antisemitism central again and I’ve been dealing. You don’t need yet another post on Australia’s problems, so let me tell you the story of a book.

Some years ago, I wrote a novel. A publisher signed it up but said “This should be a duology.” I rewrote the first book and added the sequel. Then they went bust.

Shortly after, another publisher fell in love with the duology but said, “I want the rest of the story.” I did the rewrite and the last volume and it became a trilogy. The COVID hit and the publisher ran into so much trouble. I’m still with them for other books, but we agreed I should find a new publisher for the trilogy.

A US publisher has taken on the first volume. If it sells well, then the trilogy will finally emerge. I so hope it sells well. I’ve been quiet about it because this book was having so much bad luck. Not as much bad luck as my cursed novel, but still, much bad luck.

However, we are finally in a “Watch this space” moment. The cover artist has Ideas and the editor is getting back to me very soon.

When there is an official announcement, I promise to share it. In the meantime, it’s about time I talked about my other published work. I might do a series of posts, to remind myself of novels written and books published.

That gives you two reasons to watch this space.

Language and Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The Japanese edition of The Fall of Language in the Age of English
This is the Japanese edition. I am reading the English translation, not this version.

One of the (many) reasons to browse bookstores is that you stumble across books that you never heard of and would not have known to look for because it would never have occurred to you that you wanted to read a book about that particular thing until you stumbled across it.

Right now my morning book is one that fits that description. It’s called The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by Japanese writer Minae Mizumura (translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). I’m sure I bought it at East Bay Booksellers, because they sell a lot of small press and academic books and are a very likely place to run across the books you didn’t know you wanted until you picked them up.

I’m not 100% sure I bought it there because I’ve had it awhile and just got around to reading it. (Yes, I do that all the time. Doesn’t everybody?) It is a perfect book for my daily reading practice, which requires books that are best read a few pages at a time because they give you something to chew on.

(I should note that this daily practice of reading for about 15 minutes in the morning is far from the only reading I do. It is in a way of reading akin to meditation, which is very different from diving into the world of a novel.)

This book is about writing in national languages (and what constitutes a national language) when so much of the world’s written work is written and published in English, which is a universal language in much the same way that Latin was a few centuries back. But it makes its points slowly, clearly discussing important points along the way.

The whole book is fascinating, but here’s the concept that got to me on a personal and gut level as a writer:

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.

This, I think, is the essence of being a writer, the combination of having something you want to convey – be it a story, a philosophical approach, an understanding of the world – and struggling to find the right words for expressing it.

(The term “fine literature” makes me, as a science fiction writer, uneasy, since it is often used to exclude many pieces of writing I consider very fine indeed, but I define it more broadly as work that aspires to more than basic communication.)

This is in no way the same as learning how to apply the rules of grammar, though understanding them is one of the underpinnings of writing. It does, however, require a deep and abiding familiarity with the written language you use.

You certainly cannot write effectively in a language unless you have read in it deeply and thoroughly. Continue reading “Language and Writing”…

Reprint: How Writing Builds Resilience

personby Deborah J. Ross
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As a writer, I find this to be doubly true for fiction. Except for the part about writing by hand. I think it’s fine to compose stories, especially novels, on a keyboard.

Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges

Writing is a way of thinking and doing.
AscentXmedia/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Emily Ronay Johnston, University of California, Merced

Ordinary and universal, the act of writing changes the brain. From dashing off a heated text message to composing an op-ed, writing allows you to, at once, name your pain and create distance from it. Writing can shift your mental state from overwhelm and despair to grounded clarity — a shift that reflects resilience.

Psychology, the media and the wellness industry shape public perceptions of resilience: Social scientists study it, journalists celebrate it, and wellness brands sell it.

They all tell a similar story: Resilience is an individual quality that people can strengthen with effort. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as an ongoing process of personal growth through life’s challenges. News headlines routinely praise individuals who refuse to give up or find silver linings in times of hardship. The wellness industry promotes relentless self-improvement as the path to resilience.

In my work as a professor of writing studies, I research how people use writing to navigate trauma and practice resilience. I have witnessed thousands of students turn to the written word to work through emotions and find a sense of belonging. Their writing habits suggest that writing fosters resilience. Insights from psychology and neuroscience can help explain how.

Writing rewires the brain

In the 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker developed a therapeutic technique called expressive writing to help patients process trauma and psychological challenges. With this technique, continuously journaling about something painful helps create mental distance from the experience and eases its cognitive load.

In other words, externalizing emotional distress through writing fosters safety. Expressive writing turns pain into a metaphorical book on a shelf, ready to be reopened with intention. It signals the brain, “You don’t need to carry this anymore.”

Person sitting at a table writing in a notebook
Sometimes you can write your way through difficult emotions.
Grace Cary/Moment via Getty Images

Translating emotions and thoughts into words on paper is a complex mental task. It involves retrieving memories and planning what to do with them, engaging brain areas associated with memory and decision-making. It also involves putting those memories into language, activating the brain’s visual and motor systems.

Writing things down supports memory consolidation — the brain’s conversion of short-term memories into long-term ones. The process of integration makes it possible for people to reframe painful experiences and manage their emotions. In essence, writing can help free the mind to be in the here and now.

Taking action through writing

The state of presence that writing can elicit is not just an abstract feeling; it reflects complex activity in the nervous system.

Brain imaging studies show that putting feelings into words helps regulate emotions. Labeling emotions — whether through expletives and emojis or carefully chosen words — has multiple benefits. It calms the amygdala, a cluster of neurons that detects threat and triggers the fear response: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. It also engages the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that supports goal-setting and problem-solving.

In other words, the simple act of naming your emotions can help you shift from reaction to response. Instead of identifying with your feelings and mistaking them for facts, writing can help you simply become aware of what’s arising and prepare for deliberate action.

Even mundane writing tasks like making a to-do list stimulate parts of the brain involved in reasoning and decision-making, helping you regain focus.

Making meaning through writing

Choosing to write is also choosing to make meaning. Studies suggest that having a sense of agency is both a prerequisite for, and an outcome of, writing.

Researchers have long documented how writing is a cognitive activity — one that people use to communicate, yes, but also to understand the human experience. As many in the field of writing studies recognize, writing is a form of thinking — a practice that people never stop learning. With that, writing has the potential to continually reshape the mind. Writing not only expresses but actively creates identity.

Writing also regulates your psychological state. And the words you write are themselves proof of regulation — the evidence of resilience.

Popular coverage of human resilience often presents it as extraordinary endurance. News coverage of natural disasters implies that the more severe the trauma, the greater the personal growth. Pop psychology often equates resilience with unwavering optimism. Such representations can obscure ordinary forms of adaptation. Strategies people already use to cope with everyday life — from rage-texting to drafting a resignation letter — signify transformation.

Building resilience through writing

These research-backed tips can help you develop a writing practice conducive to resilience:

1. Write by hand whenever possible. In contrast to typing or tapping on a device, handwriting requires greater cognitive coordination. It slows your thinking, allowing you to process information, form connections and make meaning.

2. Write daily. Start small and make it regular. Even jotting brief notes about your day — what happened, what you’re feeling, what you’re planning or intending — can help you get thoughts out of your head and ease rumination.

3. Write before reacting. When strong feelings surge, write them down first. Keep a notebook within reach and make it a habit to write it before you say it. Doing so can support reflective thinking, helping you act with purpose and clarity.

4. Write a letter you never send. Don’t just write down your feelings — address them to the person or situation that’s troubling you. Even writing a letter to yourself can provide a safe space for release without the pressure of someone else’s reaction.

5. Treat writing as a process. Any time you draft something and ask for feedback on it, you practice stepping back to consider alternative perspectives. Applying that feedback through revision can strengthen self-awareness and build confidence.

Resilience may be as ordinary as the journal entries people scribble, the emails they exchange, the task lists they create — even the essays students pound out for professors.

The act of writing is adaptation in progress.The Conversation

Emily Ronay Johnston, Assistant Teaching Professor of Global Arts, Media and Writing Studies, University of California, Merced

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: How Writing Builds Resilience”…

History and fiction and time out from hate

personby Gillian Polack
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I found my missing post. Here it is!

I logged in, expecting to tell you how the hate in Australia (which began as antisemitism and is now extending) is so tightly focused that your best friend might be bullied and you might not see it. When I’m alone, that bullying eats up a chunk of my day each and every day. This last week, however, it was less than a minute of each day and it was not every day. I was able to talk work with colleagues. When I sat down here, it struck me that I don’t often talk about that side of my life.

I used to. I used to be the kind of irrepressible historian who got excited for everyone. I’m still that historian. I don’t get to talk about it so often, is all.

Instead of dwelling on the bad side of life, then, let me find one page of notes from one day of the conference (one in forty-five pages of notes from the conference) so that you can enjoy history with me. We all need time out from hate, after all and every single US reader here had a lot more trouble to handle in the every day.

Some of you know that one of my novels (Poison and Light) is about how future humans use the past to hide from a present they found uncomfortable. Right now, a group of Australian scholars is examining how people in Early Modern England (and elsewhere, but the papers I heard were on Early Modern England) use history to imagine the future. The discussion was wide-ranging. They talked about witches and about ghosts, about predicting disaster and about what happened when the disaster failed to occur, about pamphlets and politics and poetry. It was the perfect panel for fiction writers and an exceptionally strong example of why fiction writers should get to know Medievalists and Early Modern scholars. Every other minute I thought of a writer who should have been there, asking questions about the ghosts and about the politics. The worlds they explain and the concepts they explore help us understand what we write and help us write it the best we can.

How does this understanding work in practice? My notes have an outline describing how the chair (and the head of the research project, who of course I talked to afterwards and of course we’ve planned to meet to talk about the science fiction side of things) breaks down the concepts of Imagining the Future into categories that can be explained.

She spoke about writing that give models of temporality: utopias, dystopias, and the mundane. Think about how these categories fit modern science fiction. Poison and Light is half-dystopia and half mundane, because all of my fiction talks about the lives of individuals and so the mundane is important to them. China Mieville (to my mind) writes dystopias and so does Sheri S Tepper.

But who writes utopias? I can think of earlier writers, like Sir Julius Vogel. Help me out! Who is writing now and has written a utopia that brings history into the future? We were given the theory of Star Trek, because it claims to be in a perfected future (at least for humans) but the reality of Star Trek is not utopian. Star Wars is, however, dystopian. It’s much easier to find examples when one looks to television. But I want to talk about novels!

She then moved to scales of temporality, whether the novel is set near (Earth!) or far away (Poison and Light again, since it’s in a solar system far far away – I may have attended the conference as an historian, but during this panel I felt so seen as a writer). With TV, my mind goes straight to the Jon Pertwee years of Doctor Who and compares them with (of course) Star Wars … again.

Why is the near and far important? Because so much of historical writing is used to discuss this apocalypse, or that. How far is apocalypse from our everyday? Much further, if it’s not on Earth. And here Poison and Light fails. It’s set far away, but Earth faces apocalypse while the people on New Ceres pretend they live in the eighteenth century. (I’m seeing this now with the lucky souls who are not enmired in hate – they are the people on New Ceres, while most of us are, alas, on Earth.)

I keep thinking that this whole project can help me understand my own New Ceres universe. I’m writing a second novel set on Earth next year, where the 14th century and the 17th century and how we deal with post-apocalypse join the party. My project echoes the ideas of people hundreds of years ago as humanity faces a bleak present. Where some people find refuge in fancy dress, others find refuge in explaining the world through ghosts and looking at neighbours as if they themselves are the catastrophe.

The last category asks whose future it is. Is it personal and everyday? Is it national? Is it a global future (my New Ceres again), a human one… or is it post-human.

The experts were historians and literary historians and most of the examples (by a long, long way most of the examples) belong to our past. The categories were however, really handy for questioning and understanding science fiction. And now you know why I will not give up that side of my life. I have learned so much in such a short time, and my fiction benefits.

Every time universities lose these experts, we lose the benefit of their thought and learning… and our everyday suffers.

Let me go away and think about what our lives would be like if we didn’t have these little injections of learning to help us tell better stories. No, let me not. Let me go away and write more fiction, celebrating the worlds of both historians and writers.

Limitation as a Virtue

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Alex Washoe, a writer I follow on Facebook, posted this quote the other day:

Your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.

– Johnny Cash

It got me to thinking, which was her purpose in posting. It’s certainly something that applies to all kinds of artists.

There are many different kinds of limitations. I recently finished the book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren, who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. The book is much more than an explanation of cool methods developed to address various disabilities (created both individually and as systems); it also gets into discussions of social and philosophical complexities.

For example, she discusses the experience of Audre Lorde, who had a mastectomy and declined to use a prosthetic, only to discover the expectation that she should wear one to make other people comfortable even if it was not comfortable for her. Hendren observes:

Her post-op prescription for prosthetics was never solely about functionality; it carried a social meaning.

And a discussion of humans as tool users – one of the most basic things we do – leads her to muse “your everyday life offers non-stop evidence that the body-plus may actually be the human’s truest state.”

Because I’d recently read the book, my first reaction to the word limitations was to think of those that come with every human body. Even if you aren’t disabled, there are things your body won’t do that someone else’s does easily.

Some people are very physically flexible; others will never be no matter how much stretching they may do. Certain activities require certain body types – ballet dancers are a good example, one made most stark by the fact that so many of them are retired by the time they are forty because even with the perfect body they are doing things that cannot be sustained into old age.

However, a lot of people who have a passion for dance have found ways around that, ways that incorporate their limitations. There are dancers who perform in wheelchairs, dancers that have curvy bodies and big hips, dancers who are not remotely young. Their limitations are part of their style.

A singer might have a voice others find pleasing, but still have a limited range, which affects the songs they sing and the way they sing them. That is style. In fact, there are some singers whose voice is not necessarily pleasing to all – Bob Dylan comes to mind – who make a virtue of that necessity. Continue reading “Limitation as a Virtue”…

Who We Write About

personby Gillian Polack
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I just posted about one of my novels, Borderlanders, on Facebook. Let me share that post, and let me add to it.

Memories…
This was the book wanted by readers on FB. I noted (on FB, obviously) that my academic stuff had given me a way of writing a novel with a chronically ill protagonist where the protagonist remains the hero, is not cured, is not killed, and is not replaced. I was going to teach this method to others, but first COVID intervened and then antisemitism. I don’t get to teach much, these days. I may have to write another novel, having said this, because I learned so much in writing the novel that I could now write a much better one.
What’s very strange is, during these 5 years, more people I know have the illness my character had, due to long COVID. I’ve had it since I was in my twenties, but I’m one of the fortunate ones for whom it goes into abeyance. Right now, I’m trying to coax it back to sleep. Not everyone has that luxury, which is another reason why I should write another novel. Not yet, though. While it’s awake, every moment of every day is not straightforward, and I am behind on all my fiction.

This mysterious illness was known as chronic fatigue in Australia in the late 1980s, but these days it’s called ME and the fatigue is just a symptom. We know a lot more about it. One thing we know is why walking up the street can be so impossible. For some of us it can set the illness back, and for others it can destroy life entirely. This is why I consider myself so fortunate. I may have to not do much for a few months, but after that time I can do a little more and then a little more. This is just as well, because it’s only one of several illnesses I have and I have this daft desire not to be bedridden or die young.

For me, the most annoying symptom is when my executive function is not working. I lose time (sometimes weeks) and can’t do simple things. Oddly, I can still write books.

I always tell folks, do not assume someone can or cannot do a thing when they are ill. Ask them. And ask them each and every day if you must, because the small everyday can change. Some days I can walk up the street and back and I can write 6,000 words. Other days I can hardly get out of bed.

The illness is not just part of our everyday, it becomes part of who we are, for better or for worse.

I would like to see a superhero who has ME. It would be such a wonderful thing, watching them change the world… on days they can do more than toddle. And seeing how other people respond to the wild level of change they see when a powerful person has to watch what they do every minute would provide a great sub-text to a movie. It’s quite a different set of options than those for someone who cannot walk without assistance, or someone completely confined to bed who uses their amazing telepathic abilities to run the world.

There are so many amazing stories in the lives of the people we mostly prefer not to see. I now want to see a whole sequence of superhero movies or a TV series that focuses on those lives. There is a different sort of heroicism when one is not visible and has to fight just to get through the everyday, especially when they do astonishing things. Most of those astonishing things are attributed to someone else, because, of course, the invisible and half-seen can’t possibly be the heroes we dream of. Except, of course, they are. I get through my illnesses because of those people. Some of them are role models and some of them help when others don’t even begin to see that I might not be able to ask for help when things are bad.

One thing about this non-extent show: costumes would be far too problematic for some of the hidden heroes. So would heroic stances and being randomly interviewed by reporters. It would be such a different and fascinating set of stories.

In real life, I’ve met these invisible people in essential services. From a desk or from home they make a lot of the everyday possible for so many other folk.

One day, I will write that second book.