Speyer, Germany

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m doing research in Speyer. It’s partly for a novel, which I’ll tell you about in a moment. It’s also partly because I really, really want to know how Jews are remembered in regional culture and into Jewish life in Speyer, Mainz, Worms from the 11th-18th centuries. These three towns gave us the set of Jewish cultures that are dominant in the world right now. Ashkenazi Judaism comes from Germany (Ashkenaz) and it spread from there. We know that some of the early Jews in that region came from Italy and of them, one of the most important families had a family tradition that they were forced to Rome when the Second Temple fell. That strong link between Jerusalem and Jews over a thousand years later explains some of the traditions my family possess. That bit’s easy, and well-studied. Also well-studied are the expulsions and the massacres and the Jew-hate. The Holocaust didn’t begin everything… it was the worst by an impossible amount, not the only.

I don’t want to explore the hate. We carry too much hate with us right now and there is more to human life than hate. I’ll learn more about the lost cultures of the Jews of Speyer and Mainz and Worms, and how their work gave so many people so much. I’ll do that because I have German ancestry right up to about 1830. I need to know more, even if it isn’t quite the right part of Germany. Jews were important to Speyer, and so I want to know how Speyer sees its Jews. This is the other side of the coin to Reading. How are the Middle Ages remembered? How are the Jews of Speyer remembered? This is contemporary history. In our time, now, how do people interpret their own past, before the modern horrors changed everything?

And the novel? I can’t writ it until next year, after my current big research project is finished. I will be gathering material for it, however. I want to know the lives of the Medieval Jews and the Early Modern Jews in Speyer. I will create a town in the same future as my novel Poison and Light, and it will be a novel with two groups of Jews (from Speyer) and one group of Christians (from St Ives). At the moment that’s what it will be. Novels often change as the research opens more pathways. I’m writing this novel.

The Written Word

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In a letter on reading and literature, Pope Francis observes:

Literature is often considered merely a form of entertainment, a “minor art” that need not belong to the education of future priests and their preparation for pastoral ministry. With few exceptions, literature is considered non-essential. I consider it important to insist that such an approach is unhealthy. It can lead to the serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of future priests, who will be deprived of that privileged access which literature grants to the very heart of human culture and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual.

While the Pope is focusing on the education of priests, much of what he says is relevant to everyone.

I have always considered literature to be one of the most important of the arts and of scholarly disciplines. This is not because I’m a writer, though the depths I found in reading are certainly a good part of why I became a writer.

I recall any number of moments from my youth – and from last week – when I read something that made me think about the world differently from the way I had before. A lot of works that have given me this awareness were fiction, but that sort of truth has also come from poetry and essays and some transcendent nonfiction.

It’s usually fiction that hits most deeply, though, and those deep moments do not come only from books deemed “great” by those that get to define the canon.

This is why I dislike it when writers refer to themselves as “professional liars.” Literature – and I use that term broadly – is about telling deeper truth as opposed to reciting facts. (I don’t think journalism should be just about reciting facts either, though it is a different way of using facts to get at the truth.)

Truth is always more than facts. When you try to reduce it to facts you miss the point, though perhaps not as much as you miss the point when you assert blatant lies as “truth.”

I resent the jokes about English majors as well, even though I wasn’t one of them. (I am proud to have an undergraduate degree in Plan II, which was the liberal arts honors program at the University of Texas, and even prouder of the fact that I didn’t, in fact, major in anything.) I took a lot of literature courses; they just weren’t all in the English department.

I think I learned more about literature in classics classes and maybe even in French classes, bad as I was at French, than in English classes. And also just by reading. I have been reading for so long that I do not even remember how I learned to do it, but I know that I could read before I started school.

I spent a summer in Guatemala studying Spanish. After I mastered enough of the language, I began to frequent bookstores. Eventually I read Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in its original Spanish. It was lyrical in a way that the very good translation of it was not, because Spanish is just enough different from English to tell things in a different way.

That book moved me greatly in both English and Spanish. It also remains one of those books that I cannot discuss well in either language. Samuel R. Delany’s Dahlgren affected me much the same way (though only in English). My reaction was not an intellectual one, though I am sure Chip’s writing process was, in fact, methodical and intellectual. Garcia Marquez’s may have been as well.

That someone can use words and language to create a work that hits me in my guts and emotions is always amazing to me, but it does happen.

Stories matter. Literature matters. And they matter on many different levels. Continue reading “The Written Word”…

Falling in Love with Public Health

personby Madeleine Robins
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I think I was 12 when I encountered Berton Roueché. I encountered his work (considerably abridged) in the science-class version of My Weekly Reader that we received in 7th grade science. Rather than listen to the class (because who does that in 7th grade?) I read an article about a family whose members, after dinner, showed up at the local hospital with a range of frightening symptoms: blurred vision, hemispheric paralysis of the face, increasing trouble breathing, paralysis and–in a couple of cases–death. A sudden onslaught of something like this causes public health officials to sit up and take notice (as they did) lest this be a contagion and only the tip of the iceburg. In the end, they determined that home-canned mushrooms (with a ride-along by botulism) had been the culprit.* The fact that I remember this 58 years later gives you an idea of the impact the article had on me.

From 1946 Roueché began a column for The New Yorker: Annals of Medicine. Each column featured a medical mystery: what made that family so sick that several of them died? How did eleven homeless men turn up in hospitals all over New York City all in the same week, all horribly sick, and all sky blue? How did an HVAC technician who never went near livestock come down with anthrax?

These mysteries and many others were solved by public health officials, doctors who combined the shoe leather and deduction of Hollywood gumshoes with science. And because the series started in the 1940s, in the movie in my head the doctors all look like a combination of Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark, hats pushed back on their heads, ties askew, sleeves rolled up, bent over typewriters or medical records, working to solve mysteries and make sure that threats to the public are contained.

For example (and I’m working from memory here) there’s a case where a few people from different neighborhoods in Manhattan show up with typhoid. Typhoid is borne by fecal contamination–usually from apparently healthy people who don’t know they’re carriers (or a few who do: Typhoid Mary Mallon was a carrier, working as a cook. Her employers kept getting sick and Mary kept moving on from one household to another, until finally she was identified as the source. She refused to believe it, continued to work as a cook–even attacking the doctors who went to talk to her–and finally she was forcibly quarantined as a menace to public health. Mary Mallon is a whole post on her own). Because of the way typhoid is communicated, you don’t generally see one case here, one case there, with no apparent link between them. After a lot of shoe leather and asking questions the public health officials determined what had happened: a known carrier (blameless) lived in a building with bad plumbing. There was a fruit and vegetable stand on the first floor. Pipes leaked just enough so that a few apples were contaminated. People from the neighborhood–and in one case from far outside the neighborhood–bought an apple and came down with typhoid. The canvassing and legwork and deduction this took is both mind-boggling and inspiring.

Aside from the fascination of these stories (some of which were used, decades later, as the source for episodes of House M.D.) and a healthy regard for proper hand-washing, safety equipment, and home canning protocol, Berton Roueché’s essays inspired in me a life-long admiration for the professionals who work in public health. The first answer isn’t always right: as a matter of fact, I can recall at least one essay where the doctor telling the story admits that he thought he was pretty smart about figuring something out–only to realize that he hadn’t in fact figured it out at all, and had to go back to the beginning. That, I realized (sitting there in 7th grade science class) is what science is: looking for answers and, if a promising one doesn’t work, looking for the one that will solve the mystery.

A couple of years ago, as you may recall, Public Health officials had a moment in the sun–immediately followed by a lot of abuse from people who didn’t like the news they were giving. Representatives of the CDC and other Public Health organizations made mis-steps–largely because in the first year or so of the pandemic there were others breathing down their backs insisting that the news they give be Happy! News! that would distract people from body bags and long COVID. Even so, doctors and scientists and technicians were working the problem, using tools much more sophisticated than those used by the scientists Roueché wrote about. But the impulse, the chore, was the same: to solve the problem, to limit the damage, to make sure that the health of the public is being safeguarded.

What’s not to love?


__________

* You can bet that, among other things, my home canning protocol since then has been as spotless as I can make it.

Glasgow

personby Gillian Polack
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It suddenly feels passing strange to be writing this from winter in Canberra. One country from afar has a kind of logic, but a second?

I’m in Glasgow for the World Science Fiction Convention. I believe I have a workshop to give. Also so many people to see and things to do.Not much of it is tourist-y. Most of it is, in fact science fictional.

One thing I do not want to miss are the Govan Stones. I want to photograph them and ponder the really interesting relationship between the Strathclyde rulers and their friends from the north. Or from Dublin. Or from the north via Dublin. I also want to put Govan in its place as part of the Arthurian material. I know the literary side: now I get to see the Stones. The Stones are probably too young for Arthur (if he existed) but from the oldest to the youngest they cover the time when the early Arthurian stories were disseminated. These aren’t the stories most people talk about, but much earlier and rather more interesting.

My week in Glasgow is all about people. If I pass this test of my health, then I can dream of going back to Scotland and seeing more. I suspect that seeing friends entails eating interesting food. So many of my fiends are foodies. Food and friends and much, much, much science fiction and fantasy. And so many of my friends are writers, so there will be talking shop.

So Who Gets to Be a Woman?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Major sports competitions do not test participants in male events to see if they are “really” men. So why do they do it with women?

I mean, I know why they say they test women. There’s a silly panic that men are disguising themselves as women to win medals. Back in the day this was a dastardly “Communist” plan by the Soviet Union and the East Germans.

In fact, as I just discovered from this book review in The Nation, allegations about men passing as women in sports goes back even farther and has ties to Nazi Germany.

This started way before transphobia became the cause du jour and is rooted in the idea that men are so much more physically able than women that any random guy can beat world-class women athletes. You know, all those guys who are sure they could score a point or two off Serena Williams.

Funny that the women they seem to disqualify in these events are people assigned female at birth and raised as girls. Apparently some women have uncommon chromosome patterns or higher testosterone levels and some self-appointed authorities have decided they can’t possibly be women.

It’s a control mechanism, just like anti-abortion and anti-contraception laws. Or like asking women who have been raped what they were wearing and what they did to provoke the rape.

It’s a rule presented as an effort to “protect” women from men that instead victimizes women. Continue reading “So Who Gets to Be a Woman?”…

Baycon 2024 report

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Baycon is my local science fiction convention and I’ve been attending it, more or less regularly, since the 1990s. It’s moved from one hotel and city to another over the years and I have followed, “as the tail follows the dog.” My attendance came to a screeching halt in 2020 with the pandemic. The last convention I attended in person was FogCon in February of that year. We knew that a nasty virus was afoot but nobody wore masks. We “elbow-bumped” instead of hugging. If anyone got sick, I never heard. Then came the lockdown, as we called it. Conventions switched to virtual attendance. Althought I’m a somewhat slow adopted or tech, I’d become used to video chatting back in 2013, when I took care of my best friend in a different state while she was dying of cancer. My husband and I stayed in touch (via Skype, if I remember correctly). Then when my younger daughter attended medical school on the other side of the country, we visited by video chat regularly. She moved back to this area for her residency. Her final year was 2020, during which her regular service rotations were replaced by caring for dying Covid patients. Needless to say, I became quite cautious about my exposure. So even when conventions began to move from virtual-only to hybrid to in-person, I reconnected slowly. Even when I was ready to attend a convention in person (2023, which shows you how long it took me), armed with masks, hand sanitizer, and rapid tests, the universe conspired to jinx my plans. It was hard. I missed my friends and all the chance encounters and spontaneous expressions of community. All this is a prelude to my first successful return to in-person conventions.

Baycon programming had asked potential panelists to suggest topics. Two of mine were accepted, including Writing Beyond Trauma. Here’s the description I wrote:

These are perilous times for many of us. As survivors or the loved ones of survivors, how has our experience affected us as writers? How do our stories transcend and heal? Escape? Educate our audience? Are there times when the pain is so great, the words simply will not come–what do we do when we have lost our voice and how do we use writing to regain it? In this panel, we will strive to listen respectfully and to leave time between each speaker to absorb more deeply what they have said.

As a survivor of complex PTSD, I’m passionately interested in how my experiences affect my writing but also how writing provides a path to healing. But trauma refers to much more than individual experiences: it includes community and membership in larger groups (such as race or gender/sexual minority, immigrant status, incarceration history). My co-panelists included two people of color, a Native Indigenous person (Ohlone) and a survivor of cancer. Several of us had lost people we loved to violence or lived with mental illness. Others had experienced genocide directed at our communities. As moderator, I wanted to make sure the discussion was safe, respectful, and inclusive. I reached out to my co-panelists before the convention to make sure I understood which topics they wanted to be included and which they would prefer to avoid. How might we tread the line between invasion of privacy and triggers while being open? One thing I did was to keep the discussion slow, with time to listen deeply to each person’s comments. On several occasions, I asked for a moment to let what someone had said sink in. Panelists shared strategies for unblocking the inner voice when it has fallen silent due to overwhelming pain and grief. These ranged from picking up a different medium of creativity like music or crafts to “putting fears on the page” to using “baby steps” to reconnect with the flow of words. The panel was rich, compelling, and deeply moving.

The same day, I was on a panel on Creating Original Worlds. When I was a young writer, world-building checklists were highly touted. I could never do that. My characters took me on guided tours of the worlds of my stories. My fellow panelists agreed that an organic approach to world-building is not only perfectly valid but works better for many writers. I’ve had the experience of not knowing what research to do until the story demands it. I loved the phrase “reality-adjacent” to describe taking real-world history, cultures, etc., and tweaking them. Alternate history is an example, as are worlds that are familiar except for the addition of a fantastical or science-fictional element. How a writer creates worlds also depends on whether they are a “pantser” or an outliner.

In the panel on Beta Readers and Critique Groups, the panel agreed that it was as important to know what advice to ignore as what to take seriously. We also agreed that while it’s nice to ask your mother/partner/child to read your manuscript, they probably aren’t the best source of helpful feedback. When approaching a trusted reader or critique group, it’s a good idea to specify what level of feedback you’re looking for, whether overall impact, sensitivity issues, or line editing. For myself, I rarely let anyone see my first drafts—second or third is usual. I still revise a lot because my rough drafts are very, very rough. I also value the community support of writers’ groups.

My last panel was Paying Forward, Backward, and Sideways, a love letter to those who have encouraged us. We told stories of more senior writers who mentored us, how our colleagues cheered us on (and vice versa), and our responsibility to the generation of writers after us. I was reminded of a quote from Samuel Goldwyn: “When someone does something good, applaud! You will make two people happy.”

In between all this, I hung out with friends I hadn’t seen in person in four years, had a delightful time in the dealers’ room (gift-buying destination!) and got to attend a few panels. My all-time favorite was The Worst First Page, in which panelists attempted to write truly dreadful first pages. Being great writers, they failed, often with hilarious results. One particular entry was so well done, the audience enthusiastically urged the writer to submit it for publication as a humor piece.

 

 

Cambridgeshire

personby Gillian Polack
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Right now (when this post is released) I”m in Cambridgeshire. I’m staying with some friends from the science fiction community. They live in the middle of the fenland. Mostly my time with them is time out with friends, but we’re also going to see some things. By ‘some things’ I mean an old church that’s associated with one of my favourite Medieval historians: Henry of Huntingdon. Also museums. Also…fenland. I am learning to understand the fens. I’m also revising the research from a novel I never wrote because I ended up in hospital having a major heart operation. The novel that emerged from that dramatic year was The Year of the Fruit Cake. I had planned to write a novel set in the late seventeenth century. I won’t pick up that exact same novel, not with so much change din my life, but St Ives and its surrounds may be part of another novel.

I’ll spend my weekend with one of my fellow History Girls, Rosemary Hayes. She’s promised me some of my favourite places, including Lavenham in Essex and a rather brilliant museum of rural life. If all goes well (and our plans are not firm yet) while you read this, I’ll be at one of those places, or maybe at the house Lucy M Boston wrote into the Green Knowe stories. This is somewhere I’ve wanted to visit and to photograph since I first read a Green Knowe book when I was a child. Ironically, visiting it would be work-related… but still very, very special.

A Couple of Things I’ve Learned

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I learned two things in my 20s and early 30s that are useful to remember.

  1. Bad leaders can ruin an otherwise exemplary organization.
  2. All organizations need good written rules that reflect the way they actually do things.

The first one I learned when I went to work in the general counsel’s office at the National Consumer Cooperative Bank (now the National Cooperative Bank). That bank, established in the late 1970s, was the dream of the consumer cooperative movement – a funding source for food and housing co-ops (and, despite the name, for some worker co-op businesses).

The people initially hired – I started there in 1980, when it was just staffing up – included many people who, like me, had worked in the weeds establishing food and housing co-ops across the country, but it also included people who had come from other kinds of development banking. They were all very smart and committed to the project.

The initial president of the bank, Carol Greenwald, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter. (The bank was funded by federal money, though set up to eventually be independent.) I am sure she looked good on paper – a banking regulator from Massachusetts with a strong Democratic Party and general progressive background.

But she had a major flaw: she didn’t trust anyone who didn’t suck up to her. At the time, her behavior made me furious. In retrospect, I am sure some of that came from the misogyny she must have experienced as she built her career – she was older than I, meaning that the blatant sexism was even worse than I put up with and I saw plenty of it.

(The nonsense that the man Republicans want as vice president puts out about childless cat ladies was pretty much par for the course back when second wave feminism came along. It was harder to mock back then.)

But if you have a staff of people who know much more about both co-ops and development banking than you do, you need to listen to them even when they tell you you’re wrong. And she refused to.

We even started organizing a union there – in the early 80s when unions were disappearing – not because our working conditions were bad (they weren’t), but because we were a bunch of activists who knew what the purpose of the bank was supposed to be and wanted to make it happen.

The National Co-operative Bank still exists, but it did not become the transformative institution it was intended to be. The truth is that most co-ops are still small and locally funded. And yes, I blame Carol Greenwald and bad leadership for that.

The second I learned doing food co-ops and other community groups in the early 70s. Because most activist sorts – actually most people – hate law and lawyers, the general attitude was that if you had to incorporate something, just do the minimum and ignore your charter and bylaws.

That works fine until you have a dispute. And you will have a dispute – human beings are social creatures, but they rarely agree with each other all the time.

Here’s the thing: the rules of your charter or your bylaws or your partnership agreement or your contract are what is going to govern when things get out of control. So if, for example, the bylaws require a formal annual meeting with decisions made by a majority, occasional informal meetings with decisions made by consensus are not going to be accepted. (And that doesn’t even get into the myriad definitions of consensus.) Continue reading “A Couple of Things I’ve Learned”…

Toys, or The Adjacency Romance

personby Madeleine Robins
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A toy can be used in any number of ways, according to the imagination of the player.

  • I have seen kids who were not allowed to own toy guns pick up a twig and start shooting with it: Pew! Pew! Pew! (I understand the impulse to keep toy guns out of the hands of children, but I’ve never seen it attain its objective.)
  • Regardless of what Mattel might have believed, for some of us Barbie wasn’t an aspirational toy. I used my Barbies to populate the elaborate cities and houses I constructed out of blocks and other toy box flotsam, and to serve as models for my inept attempts at clothing design. 
  • A friend’s daughter repurposed the highly detailed and elaborate play kitchen her grandparents gave her to be a library, with herself as the librarian (this is a child after my own heart). 

Where am I going with this? Well, after three years I have succumbed, and spent a week watching all three seasons of Bridgerton. I had been told repeatedly that I would love it: since I started out as a writer publishing Regency romances–Bridgerton, which is set in an alternate version of the English Regency, should be right up my road, right? Kinda? Maybe? No?

Well, kinda, in the sense that Bridgerton is entertaining. But also no, because I was left wondering why, out of all the toys available to them, the show’s creators decided to play with the English Regency. Continue reading “Toys, or The Adjacency Romance”…

Reading and Bristol

personby Gillian Polack
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By the time you read this, I will be in Bristol. I’m spending a couple of days with Catherine Butler, who is the most wonderful person. We will talk literature: she’s both an academic and a fiction writer and knows enormous amounts of fascinating stuff. My first encounter with her was when she answered questions for my book History and Fiction.  That’s today, at your end. At my end I’m still in Canberra!

Between Bristol and Canberra, came Reading. I will have met several friends, and also some new people with overlapping research interests. With luck, I will have seen The Importance of Being Earnest, acted in a place where Oscar Wilde’s prison is visible… and it will be work-related. That place is a ruined abbey. I’ll be in Reading mostly to create a photographic essay about how the town depicts its Middle Ages. Photographs. Lots of them. I’m happy to share a couple with you when i return, but only if you’re interested.

If you want to know about any of the places I go to or want to know more about the writers and science fiction folks I see along the way, let me know on each of these posts.  Comment madly. Tell me what you know and love. tell me what you’d like to know more about. When I return I’ll read all your comments. If you tell me what you’re interested in, I’ll report on those parts of my journey when I get back. A series of posts to match a series of posts! If everyone is silent, then what I write about on my return will be a complete surprise.