The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

As we approach the 2008 Workshop, I thought it might be helpful to troll for perspectives on the value of the Clarion experience, and how to think of it.  Two particularly interesting perspectives come from alumni Nicola Griffith and Richard Paul Russo.  They parallel each other, with Nicola providing the short version and Richard a longer, more detailed version of the same thought.

Nicola’s quote comes from her website, in an interview that she labels “Colorado” dated “sometime in 1998.”  As part of discussing her background, she notes, “Clarion didn’t teach me how to write–the only way to learn to write is to write–but it showed me how it might be to be a writer.”

In a May 2000 email interview with Richard Paul Russo, Nick Gevers at Infinity Plus, noting that Russo had described Clarion as a “turning point,” asked, “Was it crucial for personal reasons, or because the course imparted good technical literary counsel? Or both?”  The response:

Primarily personal, though you could say both, given a broad enough definition of “technical literary counsel.” It has always been difficult for me to articulate what I learned and discovered at Clarion, because it has more to do with the approach to writing than it does with concrete “rules” or “guidelines” of the craft itself, though those are important as well. I did gain some technical knowledge about the craft of writing, but the most critical thing I came away from Clarion with was an understanding and acceptance of what it would really take — personally — to become a good writer. An understanding of both the personal honesty and the true commitment that were necessary.

I learned that having a facility for language and beautiful writing were not enough if there was no story underneath it all. And I learned that not just any story will do — I need to dig deep inside and find a story that matters to me on some level, that I am convinced is worth telling. Because if the writer doesn’t believe the story is worth telling, the story will not be convincing to the reader. Additionally, I came to appreciate the need for being open to criticism while at the same time having enough self-assurance to stick to my guns when I feel specific criticism is misguided — a fine balance, but a crucial one to strive for. Most of all, I learned that not only do individual stories need to be approached with seriousness and honesty, but writing as a whole — as a career or vocation — needs to be approached with the same sense of honesty and purpose, discipline and dedication.

How, exactly, I learned all this at Clarion is unclear. It was more experiential than anything. After Clarion, I stopped writing completely for over a year. I was assimilating the experience, assessing my own life, my motivations and desires, thinking about writing in general terms. When I began to write again, my stories were significantly better — not just in technique, but in some overall sense. In the years before Clarion, I’d had a large number of stories rejected, and one mediocre story published. In the years since Clarion, I have sold nearly every story I have written (though some were drastically revised and re-submitted before I sold them). That’s also when I began writing novels, and I’ve published every novel I’ve written as well.

A few items of interest from the 2007 Nebula Awards:

• Nebula Award winners with Clarion links include Karen Joy Fowler, president of the Clarion Foundation and author of Wit’s End, for her short story, “Always”; and alum Ted Chiang, for his novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.  Two out of five isn’t bad, I guess.
• Another contribution to the ’are we mainstream or are we not?’ debate surrounding sf and fantasy came when literary mainstream author Michael Chabon won the Novel award for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
• Ted Chiang’s win reminded me of a December 2003 interview available here, in which he had the following to say about Clarion’s effect on his writing: ”Clarion encouraged me to keep on writing. Before I was accepted to the workshop, I hadn’t received any encouragement about my writing, and I was on the verge of giving up. Clarion was the first time anyone told me they liked my work. Clarion also introduced me to the SF community. Before I attended, I hadn’t known anyone who read SF, let alone wanted to write it, so meeting my fellow students there was like discovering a family I’d never known I’d had.”
• And lastly, the runup to the Nebulas, held in Austin, TX this year, included a very nice Dallas Times piece on science fiction in Texas, home to 71 members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  Robert E. Howard was perhaps the most famous and most quirky of the state’s sf progeny, but now only one among many.  Most of those, it notes, are clustered around Austin, the state capital — not overly surprising, if you’ve seen the rest of Texas.

My recent Race in Space post included a brief discussion of diasporas, a topic that science fiction and fantasy deal with in tremendously interesting ways.  I subsequently came across an article by Michael Fullilove of Australia’s Lowy Institute for International Policy reminding me of the broader implications of diaspora populations and their increasing importance in a globalized world:

Diasporas – communities that live outside, but maintain links with, their homelands – have been with the world at least since the Jews were exiled to Babylonia. But in recent years they have become larger, thicker and stronger…
Diasporans are becoming more interested in their origins and organising themselves more effectively; homelands are revising their opinions of their diasporas and stepping up their engagement efforts; meanwhile, host countries are worrying about fifth columns and foreign lobbies.
This trend is the result of five factors, all of them connected with globalisation: the growth in international migration; the revolution in transport and communications technology, which is quickening the pace of diasporans’ interactions with their homelands; a reaction against global homogenised culture; the end of the cold war, which increased the salience of ethnicity and nationalism and created new space in which diasporas can operate; and policy changes by national governments on issues such as dual citizenship, which license people to lead transnational lives.

Fullilove’s article is a summary of a longer paper available in full here.  An interesting area of research, and a very interesting policy institute, funded thanks to a gift from Frank Lowy of Westfield mall fame.

Oh, I’m very excited.  Nancy Etchemendy, the treasurer for the Clarion Foundation and an all-round wonderful person, is writing a sequel to her delightful novel, The Power of Un, as part of an upcoming trip to Antarctica.  A 1982 alum of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, Nancy’s writing the novel and publishing it online at her web site, Unarctica, while she’s traveling through the region.  She’s already got the story started, beginning here, in the form of lead character Gib Finney’s blog of the planning and the voyage.  As described in Nancy’s About This Blog post, in her own voice:

… my official job is to write at least one children’s book about the expeditions. I wanted to make this book as interesting as possible for my favorite audience, kids 8-12 years old. I wanted to tell the story of the expedition in a way that might get my young readers as excited about Antarctica as I am, but I wasn’t sure what that way might be. While I was thinking all this over, I received a packet of letters from a class of fifth graders who had just finished reading my book, The Power of Un. All of them loved the book and wanted a sequel. The mental equivalent of an aurora australis went off in my head. Why not tell the story of my Antarctic expedition through The Power of Un’s adventurous protagonist, Gib Finney? And why not make it into a blog, so I could write a little piece each day as exciting things happened that I knew I would never be able to imagine ahead of time! And, hey, why not make it possible for kids to talk to me about the story (and the expedition) while I’m writing and living it?

I’m not sure how you write a novel on the fly — I never could figure out how Charles Dickens was able to keep all his characters in place in his mind, publishing as he wrote, and bring them all together in the final chapter.  It will be fun to watch Nancy doing the same thing — with the added excitement of having kids able to write Nancy (or is it Gib?) during the voyage to ask questions, something Dickens didn’t have to worry about.

I have this image in my head of crowds of people waiting on the New York docks for the latest issue of the magazine serializing Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, crying out as the ship approached, “Is Little Nell dead?”  This time, though, they’ll be checking their laptops or cell phones every morning before heading to school, checking out Gib’s latest post.

By the way, as if that’s not enough, Nancy’s concurrently going to be writing a blog for teens and adults, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  The goal of that one is “to provide interesting and informative reading for teens and adults, and classroom opportunities and science facts for teachers.”  Students can also pose questions for that site, via the Comments option. 

 The whole adventure (outlined in a press kit here)  is funded through the National Science Foundation, as part of the agency’s mission to promote science to kids and teens, along with some additional funding from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.   They’ll be sailing on the NSF’s icebreaker, the Nathaniel B. Parker.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the two UC San Diego participants on the voyage: John Helly, Director of the Laboratory for Environmental and Earth Science at our San Diego Supercomputer Center; and Maria Vernet, who studies polar phytoplankton at our Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO).  A 2007 voyage of the researchers, sans Nancy, is detailed in this SIO press release.

I don’t know about you, but the lines between science fiction and mainstream fiction get blurrier and blurrier for me.  A couple of examples:

• Karen Joy Fowler’s recently released Wit’s End, seen through the eyes of the interesting folks over at io9: “While there are no aliens here, or artificial intelligences who come to life, Wit’s End manages to skirt the edges of science fiction themes beautifully, hinting at the ways our lives have become the stuff of science fiction without us noticing. “
• The “Battlestar Galactica” post over at Wired’s “Underwire” blog, discussing Galactica as “an allegory for the American Revolution.”  This just a few weeks after The Economist’s “Lexington” column addressed “The Cult of [John] Adams,” and the reason that David McCullough’s biography and the recent HBO miniseries adapting it are so popular: “Americans are drawn to these men not only for the obvious reason that they founded the country, but because they debated questions that still plague America — from the balance between the Executive and the legislature to the separation of church and state — and they often did so with more intellectual clarity and philosophical depth than today’s politicians.”  So, if I get this right, we love “Battlestar” not just because it’s great storytelling, but also because it provides thorough and thoughtful debate on the key issues facing society, the kind of debate that we’re not getting from our ‘mainstream’ politicians.

Makes sense to me. 

Today’s PopMatters has a post by Mae-lee Chai on Adilifu Nama’s Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, on the slim presence of blacks in the genre:

How one quarter of the Earth’s population suddenly disappears in the future is not an issue generally addressed in any of these films. How then, does one write a book about black people in a genre that for the most part has deliberately excluded them? The answer: by examining the erasure as well as the limited depictions of black people in science fiction.

The review begins with an anecdote that Nama’s friends, upon learning of his planned study, would tell him it was “going to be a short book.”  According to Chai, however, the depth that the book covers — and what it leaves out, including the treatment of black women, other races, children — indicates that Nama’s volume is only a starting point on a long journey to reconsider race and science fiction.  Octavia Butler once described one of her novels as follows:

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn’t really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Nama’s work implies that most filmmakers in sf and fantasy have focused on imagining ‘the experience of their (white) world’ in a different time and place without noticing who they were leaving out.  Then again, the relatively smaller numbers of prominent black filmmakers, let alone sf and fantasy filmmakers, begs the question of what one would expect to come first, the filmmakers or the films.

This summer’s Clarion workshop presents an interesting opportunity to discuss issues of race in literature.  We’re hoping to bring Nalo Hopkinson together with some of our Literature Department faculty specializing in African diaspora literature — like Fatima El-Tayeb, Camille Forbes, Dennis Childs or Sara Johnson – together with Clarion students for a conversation.  Just another way we hope that the Clarion workshop’s new UC San Diego home can serve as a resource to the students and broaden the community dialogue.

One of UC San Diego’s most interesting faculty members is Teddy Cruz, a Visual Arts professor specializing in urban architecture who is rethinking the very nature of the urban environment.  For writers thinking about imagined worlds, Teddy’s an exemplar of the ways that reimagining our current society can make for a better future.

Teddy – whose work can best be understood in its political context, as in his Political Equator II project – was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile a couple of years back, and his work in Hudson, NY, the subject of a more recent article in that paper.  Last week’s issue of San Diego CityBeat described some of Teddy’s work in an article on the future of Barrio Logan, an inner-city neighborhood of San Diego facing much-needed redevelopment:

“It’s about complexity,” he said. “This is an opportunity to think of incubator spaces, to rethink the street itself, how it is appropriated by informal economies, farmers markets. There is a series of histories in these neighborhoods, how the structure is used, how community-based agencies are active in producing social culture.”

Cruz has garnered an international reputation for his work implementing this idea, which he refers to as “pixelation.” Much as a computer image comprises many dots of different colors, a neighborhood comprises many small structures that form a coherent whole. In urban planning terms, that means avoiding exactly the types of projects already underway in Barrio Logan, be they affordable housing or luxury apartments. Three years ago, Cruz persuaded some of his architect friends to purchase nine lots south of the Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan. The plan was to create a new kind of community-based urban architecture.

“For me it’s been very compelling to imagine that housing or density can be evaluated as the amount of social exchanges per acre,” he said.

Teddy, recently added to the board of the Center City Development Corporation by San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, further explains the concept of pixelation in a recent interview with online news source Voice of San Diego.  Teddy’s firm, estudio teddy cruz and its projects like Mi Pueblo — in collaboration with the community development organization Casa Familiar – presents a major opportunity to rethink the ongoing redensification of America’s cities.

The Economist has a fabulous “Special Report” on mobile telecoms in the April 12, 2008 issue, “Nomads at Last.”  It’s about the rise of connectivity as virtually every form of IT and communication goes mobile:

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel…. Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The link above brings you to the first of seven articles in the report; you have to go through them one by one to read the entire report (note the The Economist: Web 2.o=free content).  The whole thing sounds a lot like the visions of Vernor Vinge, especially in “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” reviewed here on Ray Kurzweil’s website.  But it divides the analysis well; pay particular attention to the sixth story in, “A World of Witnesses,” on the democratic pressures that ubiquitous cameras and other digital artifacts will bring.  Great stuff.

Yet another of last year’s Clarion faculty has had a book reviewed in the slimmed-down Books section of the San Diego Union-Tribune.  This time, it’s Walter Jon Williams’ newest novel, Implied Spaces, reviewed in Jim Hopper’s ‘Eccentric Orbits’ column:

Suspend your disbelief. It’s not hard here in the multiple worlds of Walter Jon Williams’ newest novel. Begin with a traveling swordsman, accompanied by a talking cat, walking across a high arid desert. Aristide, the swordsman, nudges the travelers stranded at a caravanserai past their fear of the bandits lurking ahead. A trek and a battle ensue; Aristide’s sword Tecmessa, edged with the huge energies of a wormhole, is instrumental in beating the bandits and their human-sacrificing priests.

Nice review.  For more on the book, including links to other positive reviews, check out Walter’s blog. 

Long before biotech and wireless became the dominant industries in San Diego, defense spending was what drove the region’s technology industries.  A story in this week’s San Diego Reader details the kinds of flotsam and jetsam left behind when those companies left town, in an inland area near Scripps Ranch and Poway once home to Camp Elliott.  One example is the massive Atlas rocket test pads left behind by manufacturer Convair:

“…the pads weren’t flat circles at all but enormous concrete towers, at least 50 feet high, embedded into the canyon slopes, with curved walls extending from the front. During static testing, the Atlas missiles, sans warheads, would be secured within these grey straitjackets and the liquid fuel engines ignited; Atlas remained earthbound, but its flaming exhaust would blast through the front opening, the Venturi effect channeling the angry energy into the brush below. But that was many decades ago; by the time B.R. visited, the chaparral had long since reasserted its dominance. The edifices stood — but stood in mute repose, strangled by a thicket of riotous, unauthorized growth.

Granted, the “pads” were starkly picturesque. But, more challenging, and thus more rewarding — at least from the standpoint of the urban explorer — was the complex where Atlas’s masters held sway, the maze of underground bunkers and tunnels, five levels compressed like rebar layer-cake, sub-basement beneath sub-basement. There, B.R. and the others, who went by handles like “Bozo” and “Strontium,” descended by half-rotten rope ladders and vertical ventilation shafts into a vermin-infested time capsule, circa 1960. The place stank of mold, rat feces, and — so legend had it — the desperate sweat of a Vietnam-era Marine who’d flipped his lid and for years had carried out solitary recon missions for unknown armies. But the stench was worth it: Who else, at that moment, could say he’d wiped off 40-year-old dust from the faces of a dozen wall clocks, all stopped now, but each, in its youth, having displayed the time in every time zone that mattered in the nuclear world?

The story, like all Reader tales, is long and tedious — they so pay by the word, I’m thinking.  But the area that it maps sounds like a fascinating journey through time, a great opportunity for those researching stories dating back to the postwar and Cold War eras.