Kim Antieau
Born in Louisiana, Kim Antieau grew up in Michigan, graduated from Eastern
Michigan University, has lived on the Oregon coast and in the Arizona
desert, and now makes her home in the Pacific Northwest with her husband,
Mario Milosevic, whom she met at Clarion. They spend much of their time
wandering in the woods around Loo Wit (Mount St. Helens) and Pahto (Mount
Adams).
Kim began writing at an early age. She wrote numerous short stories as a child, completed her first novel when she was 14 years old, and has not slowed down since. She has published three novels, Jigsaw Woman (1996), Gaia Websters (1997), and Coyote Cowgirl (2003).
Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Asimov's, F&SF, Cemetery Dance, Twilight Zone, Metahorror (1992), Pulphouse, Shadows, Best New Horror, and The Many Faces of Van Helsing (2004). A collection of her short fiction, Trudging to Eden, was published in 1994.
Kim is also an accomplished essayist, appearing in such publications as Pulphouse, SageWoman, Of a Like Mind, AlterNet, Common Dreams, and many others. Along with Mario, she edited and published Daughters of Nyx: a Magazine of Goddess Stories, Mythmaking, and Fairy Tales, which printed original tales by Patricia Monaghan, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Nisi Shawl, and many others.
Kim jumped into the world of blogging in 2003 when she launched The Furious Spinner. A good selection of her fiction and non-fiction can be found there. Her website has more information about her novels and also contains a full bibliography of her published fiction.
Eleanor Arnason was born in Manhattan and grew up in New York, Chicago,
London, Paris, Washington D.C., Honolulu, St. Paul and Minneapolis. She
received a B.A. in art history from Swarthmore College and did graduate
work at the University of Minnesota, before quitting to learn about life
outside art museums and institutions of higher learning. She made her first
professional sale in 1972 while living in the Detroit inner city. Since
then she has published five novels and over thirty works of short
fiction. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People (2001), won the James
Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and the Mythopoeic
Society Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords (1995), won a
Minnesota Book Award. Since 1994 she has devoted herself to short
fiction. Her story "Dapple" won the Spectrum Award for GLBT science
fiction and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. Other stories have been
finalists for the World Fantasy, Hugo and Nebula Awards.
She lives in Minnesota, where she makes her living as the financial manager for a small arts nonprofit. Aside from accounting and science fiction, her interests include politics, economics, bird-watching, driving down two-lane country highways and exploring the remains of the Great Lakes industrial belt.
In spite of all setbacks and adversity, she remains a lifelong fan of ordinary human decency and the international working class.
From childhood
through adolescence and into her early adult years, L. Timmel Duchamp
devoted herself mind, body, and soul to writing and performing music.
Though trauma briefly derailed her creative drive onto an academic
track, she soon found herself, at a whim, writing a scandalously
shameless roman à clef for the amusement of her friends and
colleagues. Seduced by this brief taste of the fierce and delirious
pleasures of fiction-writing, she deserted the academy and abandoned
herself to writing many more novels. Six years later, in 1986, she
wrote her first short story, "Welcome, Kid, to the Real World."
(This story, which was short-listed for the 1996 Tiptree Award,
did not see print for ten years.) Duchamp wrote three more novels
and several more short stories before she made her first sale in
1989, to Susanna Sturgis (Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy
and Science Fiction, Vol. 1) for "O's Story." Since then
she has made numerous magazine and anthology sales, of
which one has been a Sturgeon Award finalist, another a Nebula finalist,
and several others short-listed for the Tiptree Award. Several of
her stories have been nominated for the Hugo, and her collection Love's
Body, Dancing in Time (2004) has also been short-listed for the Tiptree.
Duchamp considers her years of music composition to be a continuing significant influence on her work. Like many composers in the late '60s and early '70s, with each new composition she devised new forms of notation and invented new musical structures with the understanding that form, content, and style are inseparable. Her engagement with prose forms might not appear to the casual eye to be as radical as her past engagement with musical forms, but she views the narrative process as similarly contingent on the inseparability of form, content, and style. Her thoughts about narrative, a complete bibliography of her work, and a few more of her stories can be found on her website.
I'm the only child of parents who were (among other things) a school librarian, a television engineer, civil rights activists, and fans of reading and music and good talks with interesting people. We didn't have money, but my folks always made sure I had books and time to read them, freedom to speak and people to talk to. I was lucky.
I jumped class at age 14 by leaving home to attend an elite prep school in New England; among other things, being a scholarship kid among the very rich has made me equally comfortable in dive nightclubs and five-star hotels. I have a B.A. in Theatre (acting) and the typical writer's spectrum of work experience, including a stint of guerilla theatre in a bikers' bar, syndicated radio program co-host, freelancer on television production crews, restaurant dishwasher and corporate vice president. It's been interesting.
I attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in 1988 and began writing in earnest. I published six of the stories in Dangerous Space between 1990 and 1998: the title story is new, written especially for the collection. I've been fortunate with the stories. They've done well critically—been shortlisted for the Nebula, the Tiptree, and won the $11,000 Astraea Writer's Award; been collected in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, translated here and there, and adapted for television.
My novel Solitaire (HarperCollins/Eos) was published in 2002, and was a New York Times Notable Book; a finalist for the Nebula, Endeavour and Spectrum Awards; and a Border Books Original Voices selection. A movie based on the novel is in development now with Cherry Road Films.
The novel and most of the stories in the collection were written while I worked a series of corporate jobs. When Nicola and I moved to Seattle in 1995, I landed at Wizards of the Coast, the games publisher responsible for the Magic and Pokémon trading card games, and the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. I eventually became the vice president of Project Management at Wizards, building a team of 26 people responsible for managing the development process of 250 products in more than 20 languages worth $600 million in annual revenues. It was fun, and a lot of it shows up in Solitaire.
I'm a staff writer for @U2, the world's top-rated U2 fan website. In 2005 I waited in line from 6:00 AM (several times in different cities) to be in the front row of a U2 Vertigo show. Amazing experience, worth every sore muscle the next day. Music at its best is an ecstatic experience for me, and seeing it happen from eight feet away is...well, if you want to know how it is, read the story "Dangerous Space."
What else? I love to talk, listen, eat, drink, and dance. I'm a junkie for music and film and reading, and stories strangers tell on trains. Anything with story. I look for joy. I think people's experience carries more weight than any theory in the world. I have little use for people who can't play nicely. I'm conversationally competent in American Sign Language and polite but unskilled in French. I've never taken a bungee jump, but I'm working my way up to it. I think we can almost all do things we think we can't do.
I'm very lucky to be able to write full time, and right now I'm deeper and harder in love with writing than I've ever been. More about that here and at my website, where I also maintain a conversational space called Virtual Pint. If you like to talk and listen and trade stories, come visit anytime.
Carolyn Ives Gilman has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for almost twenty years. Her first novel, Halfway Human, published by Avon/Eos in 1998, was called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF” by Locus magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as F&SF, Bending the Landscape, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, and others. Her fiction has been translated into Italian, Russian, German, Czech and Romanian. In 1992 she was a finalist for the Nebula Award for her novella, “The Honeycrafters.”
In her professional career, Gilman is a historian specializing in 18th and early 19th-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her most recent nonfiction book, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, was published in 2003 by Smithsonian Books. She has been a guest lecturer at the Library of Congress, Harvard University, and Monticello, and has been interviewed on All Things Considered (NPR), Talk of the Nation (NPR), History Detectives (PBS), and the History Channel.
Carolyn Ives Gilman lives in St. Louis and works for the Missouri Historical Society as a historian and museum curator.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a PhD in English literature. Her short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" and Nebula Award nominee "Pip and the Fairies," was published in 2006. Interfictions, a short story anthology she co-edited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Her short stories and poems have been reprinted in a number of Year's Best anthologies, including The Year's Best Fantasy, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.
Nicola Griffith was born in Yorkshire, England. Her novels [Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place (1999), and Stay (2002)] have won several grants and prizes, including the Nebula, Tiptree, and several Lambda awards. She is also the co-editor of the Bending The Landscape (1997) anthology series. She lives with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle—where she takes enormous delight in everything. (Photograph by Karen Derby)
Eileen Gunn is a Nebula-award-winning short-story writer and the editor/publisher of the Infinite Matrix website. She is a 2007 recipient of the Sense of Gender Award, given by the Japanese Association of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy. Gunn’s short-story collection, Stable Strategies and Others (2006), was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., and World Fantasy awards. Since 1988, she has served on the board of directors of the internationally known Clarion West Writers Workshop.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s. I remember thick air pollution every morning blotting out the sun and falling on light-colored orlon sweaters. I used to wheeze walking up and down the hilly streets. Pittsburgh was (is?) a segregated town. My grade school went from Italian/Sicilian American to African American overnight. The teachers went into shock and never recovered. Every time all the "colored" children came into a classroom, they looked disappointed. My mother suggested that instead of acting up when the teachers were boring or frustrated, I should write her stories. I wrote her epics and even acted them out.
The neighbor behind us from Sicily watched me and my brother after school while my parents were at work. She wouldn't speak English so we learned Italian. I loved languages, math and science, and reading books. My brother and I devoured science fiction and fantasy. My mother informed me I was going to college when I was six. Since the tuition and fees were hefty and my parents didn't have lots of monetary resources, it was understood that I would get a scholarship. You couldn't argue my mother out of something she had decided on.
My parents hoped for a scientist. In my junior year at Smith College, when I switched my major from physics to theatre, they hoped I would come to my senses and go to law school or learn some other worthy profession. I tried being a math textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin. I was the first black person in this particular division, and they didn't pay the women employees as much as the men. It was Boston in 1974-1975: race riots, landlords burning down buildings for insurance, a nun raped in the subway station. There was a class-action suit against Houghton Mifflin that we underpaid women won, but I went off to Brown University and added film study to theatre study.
After an all-girls high school and all-women's college, Brown was an illuminating experience. I took it for granted that women could, should, and would do anything. The dictionary boys tried to intimidate us with their supposed genius. They insisted I was at Brown not on my merit but because liberals felt sorry for me. Hollywood glitterati came to dazzle graduate writers and hunt for talent. One producer, impressed by my screenplay's wit and sensuality, suggested I write pornography. And then of course, I could do what I wanted.
I opted to do what I wanted first. After graduate school I started Chrysalis Theatre in Northampton, Massachusetts with a staunch group of activist/artists who believed people should go out and make the world they wanted to see. Theatre is a rehearsal of the possible. Chrysalis has produced original theatre with music, dance, and masks for almost thirty years. My plays have also been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio and Public Television. I have also translated plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan from German to English.
In addition to being Artistic Director (and a playwright, director, actor, and musician) of Chrysalis, I am a Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College where I direct, teach playwriting and screenwriting, and African, African American, German, and Caribbean theatre literature. I have received many playwriting and directing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Playwrights, a Rockefeller/NEA Grant for New Works, an NEA grant to work as dramaturge/director with playwright Pearl Cleage, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting. Since 1997, my plays Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust, and Hummingbird Flying Backward, have been science fiction plays. Archangels of Funk, a SF theatre jam, won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for 2003.
My parents were happy that I didn't starve doing the theatre/artist thing.
I decided to write science fiction and fantasy novels while teaching African American Women's Theatre at the Universität Hamburg in 1995. Teaching a semester at a University outside of the United States was an invaluable experience. Home and identity were thrown into sharp focus. I came to appreciate why I loved languages, story-telling, science fiction, and embodied knowledge. A language is the enormous artistic effort of generations of anonymous poets and alchemists seeking to name their world and transform the present into the future of their dreams. Learning a language is an adventure, a safari (Swahili for journey) to wild and dangerous places that intersect but also diverge from the universe of our mother tongue. This journey to fluency in a "foreign culture" is a profound exploration of the self, of the native Weltanschauung—literally "world on-looking." With each language, there is more world to look on to, more poets and alchemists offering up their wisdom and dreams, and more respect for the genius of diversity. Or there could be.
While on my German Safari I conceived of the setting, the world of Mindscape (2006), as well as the characters, and the questions I wanted to investigate.
I felt like an alien marooned in Hamburg. This wasn't simply because I'd journeyed across the ocean. My "German Family" is from Bavaria and I have absorbed their values, gestures, and prejudices. Despite its conservative rep, my Germany is Southern Germany. And according to several North Germans, given my expressive emotional range, I was so Southern that I was "practically Italian." In 1988 I forced myself to stand in line at Checkpoint Charlie to enter East Berlin. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I biked through the former East Germany near Berlin. The East-West contrast was even more profound than the North-South differences. The East was under-developed. The ruins of World War II were still fresh. A large family in a 3½ room flat welcomed a German-speaking American stranger to their one sumptuous meal in months. I let the kids sit in my lap and eat greasy hunks of pork from my plate as I answered their questions about America. The pond out the window smelled like a toxic waste dump. Germans have bike paths everywhere. They were always trying to rent me "girls'" bicycles, with the crossbar curved down to accommodate my skirts. I didn't ride "girls'" bikes in the 1950s back in Pittsburgh. The idea of "man" and "woman" was different than what was taken for granted in Northampton, MA. Indeed this was true of "black" and "white," of ethnicity—German, Yugoslavian, American, Italian, Greek, Turkish; Africans were still a Dark Continent exotic clump, but they were hard-working refugees and engineers. Sweet old ladies were always warning me to watch my bag around the former Yugoslavians who looked just like the other white people to me.
I began Mindscape in 1998 on Jekyll, a Georgia Sea Island. I worked on the book at Clarion West in 1999 and on Sapelo Island—another Sea Island—in 2000 and 2001. Mrs. Cornelia Bailey of Hog Hammock, Sapelo welcomed my writing group to her home, her history, to the world conjured by her ancestors. When the raw wounds of slavery and Jim Crow made the future look bleak, magic was necessary to make tomorrow possible. Hard-working magic. Outside of the all-black town of Hog Hammock, I never felt at home in Georgia. Tour guides in Savannah called folk who had been slaves, "the workers." The work done by these artisans and laborers was attributed to their masters, as in signs that proclaimed "Wrought iron fence and house built for Miss Ann by her loving husband, George." The color-coded class system smacked me in the face. Dark people and Eastern Europeans were doing most of the serving and heavy lifting. Thinking too much or remembering the past were sins, unless of course you wanted to wave the Confederate Flag. White and black people always deferred to the white people in our group. Black women professors might as well be aliens. Drunken white boys drove around in pick-up trucks taunting the women who dared to strut (or bike) through the streets without men. Welcome to the New South. I wanted to get back to my "white folk" in Massachusetts who could look me in the eye. Each trip to Georgia, it took enormous energy to filter rage and throw off gross generalizations that couldn't be true despite compelling anecdotal evidence.
These Georgia and German Safaris were the seeds for the story of Mindscape.
Mindscape was excerpted in Dark Matter: Reading The Bones (2004), an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction edited by Sheree R. Thomas. "Griots of the Galaxy," a short story of mine, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future (2004) an anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. I am currently working on a new novel, Exploding in Slow Motion, for which I received the 2004 Speculative Literature Foundation's Older Writer Grant.
Visit my website here.
Lesley Hall was born in the seaside resort and channel port of Folkestone,
Kent, and now lives in north London. She works as an archivist, and is also
a historian primarily interested in issues of gender and sexuality in
nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, an area in which she has
published several books and numerous articles.
She has been reading science fiction and fantasy since childhood and cannot remember a time when she was not a feminist. Her reviews have appeared in Strange Horizons and Vector, and she has had short stories published in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1996) and The Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women (1995).
Naomi Mitchison, as well as being a favourite writer of hers, is a figure who brings together a number of her interests: women writing science fiction and fantasy, British women writers of the interwar period, and post-suffrage pre-second wave feminism.
Visit Lesley's website.
Life: An Explanation
I was born in North East Manchester, a landscape of narrow valleys, many streams, willows and poplars—overlaid with a thick crust of nineteenth and twentieth century redbrick houses, mills, factories, most of the wheels already stilled before my time. The Rottweilers didn't go around in pairs in our neighbourhood, but it was back-to-back housing and cobbled alleys, and there was a window in the bedroom I shared with my younger sister, where I could hide behind the curtain, and see a shadow girl in the night on the other side of the glass, wild and free. (I've written about my childhood, and how I think it relates to my writing, you can find the long version here.) When I was grown I went to a south coast University, where I did not have a brilliant career (I didn't do a stroke of work); but I dreamed my dreams, and read some very interesting books. Later I lived in Singapore, because my husband was teaching there: grokking the culture of the region and letting the politics sail right over my head. The Jakarta Regime was subjugating East Timor, and I met Indonesians who tried to tell me how bad it was, but I was too ignorant to understand... That's where I found my thesis, or to put it another way, I began to write science fiction. (I've written about this experience too, you can find it here.) Then we came back to England, lived in frugal content, had a child, and explored France and Italy on a shoestring. For years I never had any private money in my pocket. I wouldn't take pocket-money from my husband, and I was making less than a science post-grad. And all the while, I was writing about the battle of the sexes. Where does it come from? Why does it work the way it does? What exactly happens when the wiring of sex-typic reproductive behaviour intersects with human psychology, in all its economic, poltical, cultural ramifications...? Can something fragile and unstable as sexual difference as it really is really be the cause of so much suffering, the foundation of so many books of merciless law? Is this one of the great problems of the world? Or am I just going nuts?
The story of Anna Senoz, woman scientist of genius, is not my life story, and Anna certainly isn't me. Far, far from it! (I believe Ramone, Anna's shadow-girl, is rather closer to a self-portrait...) But in ways I think of Life as the apologia, the explanation, of my science fiction. This is the other side of the story I've written, over and over again, in the books Divine Endurance (1987), Escape Plans (1986), Kairos (1988), and the Aleutian Trilogy. This is what the story of the great divide would be like, (my version) if it was stripped of the adventure fantasy, and told in terms of real life.
Email: gwyneth.jones@ntlworld.com
Websites: Bold As Love;
Gwyneth Jones
Sue Lange has always had a love of art and science. Armed with a degree in chemistry and eight-years' experience running a rock band, she stands poised to reconcile these two supposedly opposing arms of humanity's highest achievement. Always searching for connections between the left brain and the right, her fiction reflects the philosophy of one who sees little difference between physics and drama, calculus and symphony, biochemistry and soap opera, high art and crass commercialism. In her mind, all the world's a stage for string theory to play on. Her stories have appeared in Challenging Destiny, Apex Science Fiction and Horror, and Astounding Tales. Her first novel, Tritcheon Hash, was published in 2003. She resides on a farm in Pennsylvania with her partner, Gary Celima, three cats, two horses, one unridable devil pony named Pogo, and a hundred Early Girl tomato plants. Visit her blog.
Rosaleen Love is an Australian writer who enjoys playing with wild ideas from both science and feminism. She has a special love for the sea and its stories and a soft spot for tales about impossibly large sea monsters with political ambitions.
A short story writer, she has published two collections with the Women's Press, UK: The Total Devotion Machine (1989) and Evolution Annie (1993). Her work has been included in mainstream as well as science fiction anthologies in Australia, Britain, and the USA, e.g., Heroines, Millennium, The Art of the Story (2000), Coast to Coast, The Women's Press Book of New Myth and Magic (1993), Alien Shores (1994), Metaworlds (1994), She's Fantastical (1995), Women of Wonder (1995), Dreaming Down Under (1999), Women of Other Worlds (1999), Earth is but a Star (2001), Year's Best Fantasy 2003, and The Elastic Book of Numbers (2005). She is also a science writer and writes on Australian science and society with a particular interest in coral reefs. Her non-fiction book Reefscape, a series of essays on the meaning of the Great Barrier Reef, was published in 2000 by Allen and Unwin, Sydney, and in 2001 by Joseph Henry Press, USA. She is never happier than when immersed in warm reef waters.
Once she was a university teacher, first in the History and Philosophy of Science, and later in Creative Writing, at Swinburne and Victoria Universities, Melbourne. Currently she is a research associate at Latrobe and Monash Universities, Melbourne. For a while, she was even in demand as a futurist, despite her own sense of helpless ignorance about the topic. Futurists, however, are wild people who like wild ideas, and for a while, she felt quite at home in their company. More information can be found on her Web page.
Starting in 1929, Ursula Kroeber grew up in Berkeley (school year) and the Napa Valley (summer). She unexpectedly went East to college at Radcliffe, unexpectedly got a Fullbright while in grad school at Columbia, and unexpectedly fell in love with another Fullbrighter, Charles Le Guin, , and married him in Paris. Their three children were not entirely unexpected, though, like all children, immensely surprising, having turned into a cellist, an English professor, and a market researcher, and furnished four grandchildren, all of whom are surprising. The only thing she ever fully expected to do was write, which she has done.
After ten years of sending out poetry and fiction and getting a few poems published, Ursula K. Le Guin finally got a story published in a literary magazine and a story in a science-fiction magazine, almost simultaneously. The fact that the sf magazine was able to pay (thirty dollars!) influenced her to submit more stories to more sf publishers. Having established a reputation with the novels The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea, and won some prizes, she was able to branch out again and publish work both within the sf, fantasy, and kiddilit genres and outside them, and has continued to do so. This freedom suits her inclination to do the unexpected in a kind of quiet, sneaky way.
Although Left Hand was one of the first novels to put gender directly in question, the first three Earthsea books were fairly conventional about male and female roles, though reversing the skin-color convention usual in fantasy; the last three, written some two decades later, deconstruct gender and power issues also. The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home are utopian novels, the second more adventurous in technique and idea. Orsinian Tales and Searoad collect her stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker, about an invented Central European country and the Oregon coast. In the last few years she has published three fantasy novels, Gifts, Voices, and Powers, and a novel, Lavinia, developed from a character in Vergil's Aeneid. She has published seven volumes of poetry. A full bibliography, list of awards, and so on can be found at her website, ursulakleguin.com. She continues to write (mostly poetry at the moment) and to find life unexpected. (Photo by Joyce Scrivner.)
Maureen McHugh was born in 1959, at the tail end of the baby boom generation, in Ohio. She's lived in New York City and the People's Republic of China. She has written four novels, China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis, and a collection of short stories, Mothers & Other Monsters. Her first novel won the Tiptree Award in 1993. Her collection was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006. Her novels are set in the Third World, both on Earth and in space, but in the last few years, she has written more and more about the very science fictional landscape of contemporary suburban America. Recently, she was a writer on "I Love Bees" and "Last Call" -- alternate reality Internet games - a strange, surprisingly hidden new genre with a surprisingly large audience.
She has recently moved to Austin, in the Republic of Texas, which she finds almost as foreign as China.
For more, see her website
Nancy Jane Moore began making up stories when she discovered that some of the tales she wanted to read didn't exist. Her earliest stories involved female heroes and swordfights and were acted out in her grandmother's backyard with help from her little sister. But somewhere along the way Moore got sidetracked by law school. She practiced law in Texas and Washington, D.C., eventually running a nonprofit firm specializing in low-income housing before quitting to work as a legal editor.
She continued to play with fiction and in the early 1990s began to take her writing seriously. In 1997, she attended Clarion West. Moore's stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, several magazines, and on the Web. "Walking Contradiction," published in the anthology Imaginings (2003), made the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award shortlist and "Three O'Clock in the Morning," published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, garnered an honorable mention from The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.
Moore has trained in the martial arts for twenty-five years and holds a black belt in Aikido. Check out her self defense blog - Taking Care of Ourselves. She lives in Washington, D.C. More information can be found on her web page.
Rebecca Ore was born inn Louisville, KY, out of people from Kentucky and Virginia, Irish Catholic and French Protestant turned Southern Baptist on her mother's side and Welsh and Borderer on her father's. She grew up in South Carolina and fell in love with New York City from a distance, moved there in 1968 and lived on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side for seven years. Somehow, she also attended Columbia University School of General Studies while spending most of her energy in the St. Mark Poetry Project. In 1975, she moved to San Francisco for almost a year, then moved to Virginia, back and forth several places for several years, finished a Masters in English, then moved to rural Virginia for ten years, writing s.f. novels and living in her grandparent's house after they died. She's now owner of a small house in Philadelphia with a walled garden, one wall stone and brick, one wall stone against a hill, and the west wall not there as the neighbor and she share the space.
Rebecca owns a Border Terrier named Kit and grows roses and hostas. She's currently an academic gypsy and has been variously an editorial assistant for the Science Fiction Book Club, a reporter/photographer for the Patrick County Enterprise, and an assistant landscape gardener. She has just had a gun put to her head to finish a work of fiction that's five or six years overdue.
She writes about Alien Bootlegger:
Alien Bootlegger comes from driving around the mountains of southwestern Virginia, south of Roanoke, and being in hardware stores when men walked out with lengths of copper pipe that wasn't for traditional indoor plumbing. I had a tremendous sense of being the right witness for the region as it was—the mix of high-tech with the old businesses: cockfighting arenas with bleacher seats, stills in the backs of pickups run by propane, the lore of how to find safe, good moonshine. Tourists looking for illegal liquor drove the prices up, people complained. Someone in Franklin County was selling teeshirts with "Franklin County, Moonshine Capital of the United States." One of my uncle's tenants raised fighting chickens and sold a pair of used gaffs to a science fiction writer in Philadelphia, a sale I brokered.
Originally, Alien Bootlegger was supposed to be one of the Tor Doubles, but that series folded before it could be published. My editor at Tor asked me to make some changes in it. I didn't pick up the hint that I was supposed to expand it into a novel and shortened it a bit. Tor paid me a bit more and put out a short story collection in hardcover, Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories (1993), with a wonderful Wayne Barlowe cover.
When the book came out, I did the usual painful signing at local bookstores. A man in casual dress with a thin gold chain around his neck came up to the table at some mall store in Montgomery County, looked at the title and looked at me with a "you can't possibly know anything about it" look on his face. I looked back at him with "you think not. I made you" look on mine.
After a while, I figured I'd done what I could about the region and needed to remap my visual centers with urban scenes and Paul Klee at the Pennsylvania Academia, but I have a tremendous nostalgia for having that nostalgia for that present. (Photo by Noemi Armstrong.)
When Nisi Shawl was seventeen, she moved from Kalamazoo, Michigan, Celery Capitol of the Midwest, to nearby Ann Arbor. There she attended the University of Michigan's Residential College and lived in a house known as Cosmic Plateau with people who called themselves The Bozos. She paid $65 a month rent. Upon leaving the University she went to work part-time as a janitor, an au pair, a dorm cook, and an artists' model. She read Charnas, Russ, Delany, Colette, Wittig, and learned a lot. She wrote, and performed her writings publicly, at parks and cafes and museums. When their landlady kicked all the Bozos out of Cosmic Plateau, she kept writing.
Her first science fiction appearance was in the nude, as a model for one of Rick Lieber's illustrations for the Arkham House hardcover of Bruce Sterling's Crystal Express (1990). Her first science fiction publication was in Semiotext(e) #14, sharing the table of contents with William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, and John Shirley. Meeting the last two writers at a cyberpunk symposium in Detroit in 1992, Nisi was encouraged by them to apply to the Clarion West Writers Workshop, where both taught that year.
At Clarion West, Nisi learned in six weeks things that six years at the University could never have taught her. Three of the stories she wrote there have since been professionally published, and a discussion with classmates during the workshop provided the initial impetus for the essay and class that inspired Writing the Other: A Practical Guide (2005). It was also at Clarion West that she met her friend Cynthia, who became the class's co-teacher and the book's co-author. Her experience with another writers' program in the Puget Sound area (Cottages at Hedgebrook, a retreat on Whidbey Island) combined with Clarion West's Seattle location to entice Nisi into taking up permanent residence in the area. It didn't hurt that Cynthia had already settled in a neighboring suburb.
Since arriving in Seattle, Nisi has joined Clarion West's Board of Directors, created and taught several writing classes (including "Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction"), sold and resold more than a dozen short stories, lectured at Stanford University, helped found the Carl Brandon Society (an organization focusing on the presence of nonwhites in the fantastic genres), contributed to The Encyclopedia of Themes in Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Internet Review of Science Fiction, has been writing a regular book review column in The Seattle Times, and finished two novels.
She lives on a direct bus route to the beach. (Photo by Nina Kiriki Hoffman.)
I was born and raised in New Delhi, India. My siblings and I grew up bilingual, surrounded by books and immersed in the literature of two languages, Hindi and English. We also heard the old epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, from our mother and our paternal grandmother. By the time I was twelve my brother and I had discovered science fiction: we read Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury. My sister, who is eight years younger than me, started demanding original stories from me at an early age; I would painstakingly hand-write and illustrate “books” of lurid adventure for her. That was how I got my start writing.
Growing up in Delhi was interesting, although I did not know it at the time. Despite being one of the most populous cities in the world, Delhi is also home to a large variety of plant and animal life. As children we would make friends with the pariah dogs in the streets. Cows were a not uncommon sight and monkeys thronged the trees near the Parliament house. As a shy child I was more comfortable with animals than people, and at an early age I became interested in bird-watching. This led to my becoming part of a group of schoolchildren with similar interests in high-school. In twelfth grade we formed a student environment group called Kalpavriksh. It was a uniquely non-hierarchical group; we had no office bearers and yet we managed to get some things done, including protection of some of Delhi’s green areas. My own crowning experience was a trip to the Himalayas with other members of the group, in the summer holidays between twelfth grade and college. We went to study the Chipko movement, a unique grassroots environmental movement initiated and led by rural women. It was a paradigm-shifting experience as I came face to face with a completely homegrown feminism, as well as a first-hand realization of how caste and class and economic issues determine how the other 90% live.
In college I studied physics, which was a natural extension of my interest in nature. I came to the United States as a graduate student and got my PhD in theoretical particle physics. After that I returned to India, as I’d always intended, to work at a science institute in Chennai. I was there for a year before life and marriage pulled me back to American shores. Family life and a saturated job market resulted in my stepping out of academia for many years, during which I turned my attention to home-schooling my daughter and to my old love: writing. For the first time I contemplated writing for publication, and after the initial few years of mostly nice rejection letters I started getting published in anthologies and a few magazines. The fact that my daughter, like my sister so many years ago, demanded new stories nearly every day, helped to hone my writing skills, and my husband and my brother encouraged me. Four years ago I returned to teaching at a marvelous liberal arts college near Boston, an exhilarating experience, not only because I love teaching, but also because it brought me back to physics. It allows me to think about physical laws and their ramifications, and to ponder them in science fictional ways as well. Although I have less time to write, what I write is different because of this experience.
My short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Polyphony, So Long Been Dreaming (2004), Trampoline (2003), and Interfictions (2007), as well as magazines like Strange Horizons and The Third Alternative. A couple have made it to Year’s Best volumes and been on the short list for the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and the BSFA award. I’ve written two children’s books, both published in India, and the first, Younguncle Comes to Town (an ALA Notable Book) out from Viking in the U.S. last year. Apart from a novella for Aqueduct Press, I am currently working on a collection of my short fiction, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, forthcoming from Zubaan Books, New Delhi, in Fall 2007. For more, please see my website. (Photo by Sitara Chapman.)
I was born in Washington, DC but, like many native Washingtonians, my parents were not—my father was born in Oregon and my mother, in Minnesota. Formerly a children's librarian, I live in Silver Spring, Maryland, with two cats, four generations of books, and numerous bears. I am currently a poet-in-the-schools, working through the Maryland State Arts Council, and an adjunct at the University of Maryland, where I teach storytelling.
As a storyteller, I've performed widely in the mid-Atlantic region. My repertoire includes folk tales and legends as well as the work of such writers as Kipling, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, and Anne Sexton. Knowing pages and pages of literature by heart has had, I think, a good influence on my own poetry, which inclines toward blank verse as often as free. My poems have appeared in mainstream literary journals as well as in speculative venues such as Weird Tales, Talebones, Dreams of Decadence, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. Lancastrian Letters, a chapbook of imagined fifteenth-century correspondence, was published in 1997. My first book-length volume of poetry, Hero-surfing, came out in 2002 from Washington Writers' Publishing House.
I have tried, on and off, to write fiction as well, but find it more laborious than poetry. (To improve my craft, I attended Clarion in 1997, and since then have placed two stories, one in Black Gate, and another, soon to appear, in Fantastic Stories.) This story, however, came quite naturally in verse. I had told the 2nd century BCE story of "Inanna and the God of Wisdom"¹ for a few years—as a storyteller, out-loud—when it occurred to me there was a missing point of view: that of Ninshibur, the Faithful Counselor.
________________¹ Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).
I was born in the South Island of New Zealand, the landscape of which is now familiar worldwide from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. The city where I was born, Christchurch, doesn't figure in his trilogy, but in an earlier Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures (where Kate Winslet made her debut), about the murderesses Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker. Indeed I have a connection with the originals of that film: my father used to go out to Papanui Women's Prison to teach French to Pauline Parker. He said she was a very nice young woman.
The family was Australian, migrants from the British Isles, who all apparently emigrated voluntarily—although one ancestor was an absolute scoundrel, as I discovered at a family reunion. His deeds included selling one son into indentured servitude, little better than slavery, in payment of a gambling debt. He might not have been transported, but he surely improved Britain by leaving it. Nearly all the ancestors were working class, and such were the opportunities of the new land that within several generations we were solidly professional. My father taught French at University level, which meant I went to the Northern hemisphere twice by boat by the time I was eleven. My first school was a French convent, despite not being (a) Catholic, (b) speaking a word of French. "I'm afraid we're heretics," my mother told the head nun. Heretics or not, my sister Polly got the part of the Virgin Mary in the school play.
When I was eleven I wrote (but failed to complete) what would be now classed as a fantasy novel, called The Whisper Trees, about fairy mice. Prophetic though this exercise might have been, it got thoroughly sidetracked by more globetrotting, ending when my father got a job in Townsville, tropical Queensland. I hated it. The first Christmas I was there a major cyclone hit, and things did not improve subsequently. I started reading science fiction in quantity, no doubt because I wanted to escape. At that stage I wanted to be a poet and got my first publication as a teenager in the anthology Neon Signs for the Mutes (1976). It must have been a fruitful project, because, of the contributors, Paul Grabowski became a famous jazz musician, and there were three future novelists: me, Antoni Jach and fantasy writer Tony Shillitoe. But the chance of a Science Fiction workshop in Sydney, 1979, with George Turner and Terry Carr, set me off on the track of science fiction.
Which is where I've continued ever since, with diversions into children's fiction (after a children's editor sent me my first-ever fan letter), horror, crime, true crime and Victoriana. Due to a family history of late marriages and long lives, the Victorian era was only a generation or so away from me, recalled via anecdotes and artifacts, including a Victorian dollshouse. Little did I know that this (not necessarily an interest, but certainly a presence) would turn into a major research preoccupation. In the 1980s I got frustrated working as a librarian and got a job researching crime fiction for Professor Stephen Knight. Within months I had stumbled across a previously unknown early female crime writer, Mary Fortune, which led to a PhD and (nearly completed) a book on the mothers of crime fiction—a bunch of wild but prolific women.
These days I work as a reviewer, researcher (latterly in the fin-de-siécle) and squeeze in my original fiction where I can. The bibliography includes four books for teenage or younger readers, three editions of Victorian prose, and four anthologies, of which She's Fantastical (1995) was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. My one adult novel, The Scarlet Rider, combines crime, Victoriana and the fantastic. A second one is in process, involving quantum physics and werewolves. (Photo by Nicola Scott.)
Books were important to me from as far back as I can remember. Both my parents loved to read and our house had lots of books in it. There's an early picture of me, aged no more than two, sitting on my parents' bed in a scatter of paperbacks and magazines, earnestly perusing an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - upside down. I didn't learn to read until I was past six, at school. My mother has told me that when she took me (aged four) in to be assessed for kindergarten, she was sternly warned against trying to teach me to read or write at home, so she didn't, but it must have been a constant struggle against my finger-stabbing demands to know what that word said and that one, every time she read me a story, and I think it may explain why the printed word held such a powerful, magical aura in my psyche.
Almost as soon as I learned to read to myself, I was writing my own stories. By the time I was nine, my father had given me his old typewriter, on which I produced a family newspaper (The Turtle News-Carrier) and many first chapters of never-to-be-completed novels, as well as short stories, poems, and letters-to-the-editor - some of which were published in The Houston Post. Later there were letters, articles and stories for other people's fanzines, for underground and "alternative" papers, for my high school newspaper, and then Mathom, the fanzine I edited and published for The Houston Science Fiction Society. I never lived anywhere but Houston before I left in 1970 to attend Syracuse University in upstate New York. That summer I attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at Tulane in New Orleans, and then again in Seattle in 1972. I was just shy of my nineteenth birthday when I sold my first short story.
After graduation, I returned to Texas and got a job on a daily newspaper, The Austin American-Statesman. I continued to write and sell short stories, and to struggle to write a novel while I worked. In 1980, in pursuit of a romantic dream, I became a full-time writer and moved to England. Apart from a short residence in the countryside, the next ten years were spent mostly in London, and entirely as a full-time writer, with bits of journalism, reviewing, editing and teaching helping me to eke out a living. I wrote novels, including Gabriel and Lost Futures, had two collections of short stories published (A Spaceship Built of Stone and A Nest of Nightmares), and took my first big plunge into research and non-fiction with An Encyclopedia of Feminism. That was first published in 1986, so of course it is a bit of an historical artefact now, but I am still proud of the work I did on it, and only wish it had been possible to keep a regularly revised and updated version of it in print. But time marches on. In 1990, Colin Murray and I moved away from London, got married and made our home in a remote and rural part of Scotland.
Eighteen years later, we're still here, with our daughter and a dog, in a little house (overflowing with books) in the Achaglagach Forest, on the shore of West Loch Tarbert, still writing.
There are some elements of my life and personality in My Death, but at least as much is purely fictional. Some elements of Helen Ralston's life were inspired by the relationship between Laura Riding and Robert Graves, along with the story of two Scottish artists, Eric Robertson and Cecile Walton, and biographies I've read of H.D. and other early twentieth-century writers and artists. But here's a little mystery: I read the first biography of Laura Riding, by Deborah Baker, when it came out in 1994, and can remember being struck by a description of Riding's first sight of the island of Majorca, which supposedly caused her to exclaim, "I have seen my death!" This impressed me so profoundly that when I finally wrote My Death, I wanted to use the quotation - either direct from Riding, or indirectly from her biographer - as an epigraph, and I searched the biography for it. I looked long and hard, but I could not find it - I could find nothing even remotely like what I remembered reading.
Did I make it up?
Lisa Tuttle
Torinturk, Scotland
31 March 2008
Although born in Virginia, Kimberly Todd Wade spent the majority of her childhood years in Germany, Italy and Greece. She graduated with a degree in Anthropology from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and completed a semester of graduate studies at Tulane University in New Orleans before embarking on a career in archaeology. She worked in Belize, Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Vermont, Hawaii and Palau before giving up the shovel bum life to write full time. She currently lives with her husband in southern California.
Wendy Walker was born in 1951 in New York City, where she still lives with her husband, writer Tom La Farge. She is the author of the underground classic of art history, espionage, and science fiction The Secret Service (1992), as well as two volumes of tales, The Sea-Rabbit, Or, The Artist Of Life (1988) and Stories Out Of Omarie (1995) (all from Sun and Moon Press). Her critical fictions have appeared in Conjunctions, 3rd Bed, Fantastic Metropolis, Parnassus and The Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Poetry. She is co-translator with Rabia Zbakh of the Moroccan poet Abdelkrim Tabal. Her ideogrammatic history Blue Fire, about Constance Kent and "the great crime of 1860," was a finalist for the Fitzpatrick O'Dinn Award for the Best Book-Length Work of Constrained Literature in English, sponsored by Spineless Books. Her novel-in-progress, The City Under the Bed, deals with war, anamorphosis and photography.
Wendy has worked as a teacher of art, art history, and creative writing, at both secondary and university levels. She has also served as a visual arts consultant and advisor to arts organizations in New York, and was director of The Grady Alexis Gallery at El Taller Latino Americano, where she helped to found the Casa del Angel, the Angelo Romano Permanent Collection.
She maintains a website here.
Cynthia Ward was born in Oklahoma and lived in Maine, Spain, Germany, and the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Seattle. She has published stories in anthologies and magazines such as Asimov's SF Magazine, Bending the Landscape: Horror (2001), and has written articles and reviews for Locus Online, SF Weekly, among other magazines and webzines. Her market-news columns appear in Speculations and The SFWA Bulletin. Cynthia is completing her first novel, tentatively titled The Killing Moon. Visit her website here.