I’m sitting in a coffeeshop in downtown Santa Cruz, waiting out the day until my evening flight back to Austin after attending the Dickens Universe on the Santa Cruz campus. My university sends two students every year, and the professor who accompanied us has been going for more than twenty years. This year’s books were Hard Times and Gaskell’s Mary Barton. The grad-student Dickens experience involves three lectures a day, a seminar for grad students, and some sort of other work — a pedagogy workshop, a writing workshop, presentation training, or co-teaching Elderhostel/undergrad/local students. I co-taught — it was wonderful. We had a small class of involved, well-read, interested students, and even after five days of discussing the same novels, they were still talking after our last class session ended on Friday.

Yesterday afternoon a group of the remaining grad students took the bus down to Natural Bridges State Park and sat on the beach. We left behind a sand-castle version of Coketown, which really looked more like a castle than a mill; but it was a really good castle. I wasn’t a castle-builder. My biggest accomplishment yesterday was not getting sunburned.

I’ve also been trying to think about new fiction-writing projects, probably in reaction to having spent the last month writing dissertation prospectus material just about every day. I found a nice little idea while I was looking through microfilm reels of the NY Journal American for a patron’s order at work last week. I really hate microfilm because it makes me feel so seasick and headachey — I wish I could skim through the JA archive in my brain somehow, because it’s so full of strange, vivid, violent stories. Death all over the pages, but interesting early c20 deaths, reported in the lurid house style: “Woman Shot by Woman,” that kind of thing. We’ll see if or when I have time to write this one. It still needs to grow.

Another semester, another long stretch of blog silence. I haven’t got much to say or much time to say it in; this year is one of those strange larval periods, I guess, for my academic work and my writing and my family life. Editors are reading a novel I wrote, I’m starting to write a dissertation prospectus — and all the while we’re keeping an eye on my father’s health, as we have been since I graduated from college in May of 2003. It’s my five-year college reunion this May, and that means it’ll also have been five years since my father’s cancer was diagnosed.

By the end of the summer or beginning of the fall I should be beginning to write my dissertation. I’m hoping it’ll give me a new clarity of purpose.

The wonderful Kate Elliott has written a great essay giving advice about the business of writing to first-time fantasy and sf novelists — including yours truly, since I was fortunate enough to meet her at WFC last year and asked her about this via email later.

I was on a panel at the Intellectual Property bookstore next to UT yesterday, talking about the experience of a first publication. (Insert grateful wave at Small Beer Press folks here!) This panel was organized by UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center, where I worked last year, and went pretty darn well — the other two people on the panel had more publication credits, but many of the current MFA/MA students in the audience were in about the same career stage as I am, so the difference in experience worked well. What I enjoyed most, though, was the chance to talk about writing for a while. Since I finished the novel and got my master’s, I haven’t had many chances to do so — other than with a few close friends, and T., and my parents, while I was working on The White Silk Tent this summer. I don’t have much time to read writing blogs during the school year, or even to read books not related to my dissertation topic.

Anyway, it was lovely to read Kate’s essay, for just those very reasons. It gave me, along with some excellent advice, another chance to think and talk about writing.

Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life — a kind of “female Tom Sawyer story,” as she put it. They didn’t. Twenty-five years later she wrote the memoir manuscript I’m currently adapting; twenty-five years after that, I got the HRC internship.

On our first day of orientation, I had just enough time to glance at the letter and to laugh a little at how Louise-ish it is, how her style hadn’t really changed much in twenty-five years. The rejection letters are filed in a different set of manuscript boxes and are uncataloged. There’s a binder in the reading room, I think, that lists their contents. I’m planning to look for their response to Louise soon, though if it was a form letter, it may not have been saved, I suppose.

This morning the NY Times Book Review ran a story (by a UT professor) about the rejection letters and reader reports in the Knopf collection. Now I just want to sit down and look through all of them.

I had good intentions this summer, I swear. I was going write regularly here and talk in some depth about the memoir project, maybe about my academic work. Instead I wrote three-plus chapters of the memoir and rewrote one conference paper into an article-length piece; I thought about my dissertation project; I read seven hundred pages of Clarissa and a fair number of other books both academic and non-; I picked raspberries and blueberries and strawberries in my family’s back garden; I washed a lot of dishes. Now the semester’s begun and tomorrow is my first full day of work at the HRC.

It’s strange not to be teaching, especially since my classmates are all preparing for their own classes. I feel a bit like I’m getting away with something, even though I’ll be working twenty hours a week at the HRC and four at the Undergraduate Writing Center. I hope I will have the chance to teach my planned class on the rhetoric of popular fiction some time, but I’ll have plenty to do this semester, between my dissertation reading and my exciting new French class. I’m a complete beginner with French, though it’s the fifth language I’ve studied. So far, I can say sophisticated things like “Look at the window” and “Susie is wearing a red blouse,” and I sound like an idiot when I try to make the guttural R, but I still love it (even the funny numbers). I do have to stop thinking “wo” when I mean “je,” though. Zhongwen =/= Français, though in a perfect world I’d be studying both right now.

I still have way too much to do today, considering that it’s the last day of a three-day weekend, so I’m off to work. (”Work” here includes studying French, thankfully.) But I will try to be better about writing here this semester.

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week. To see the many amazing contributions bloggers have been making (this year and last), visit the IBARW del.icio.us page. Within that collection of links, there are about 50 (so far) blog posts on writing and race. I want to highlight a few here that deal specifically with the question of authorial intent and reader interpretation, particularly within genre writing.

Kameron Hurley addresses why writing colorblind is writing white.

Kate Nepveu posts on reading through default assumptions.

Yoon Ha Lee makes the point that “Even if race is not an issue in the universe in which you are writing, it is an issue for the reader.”

And two posts by Pam Noles about racial representation, reader identification, and whitewashing disguised as colorblindness: “Shame”, and a follow-up post addressing responses to that essay.

Go, read, think. I will be, too.

Where I work
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I don’t always write on this deck — sometimes it’s too bright, and sometimes I need to stay inside with my father. When I do work here, though, I sit in one chair and put my feet on the other so I can balance my laptop comfortably. It’s usually quiet, a little dusty. Sometimes cars go by on the street to the right, or neighbors do, walking their dogs. I bring a mug of tea and my cell phone out with me, but I get a bad wireless signal, which is good for my productivity.

The day I took this picture, the first page of my outline got caught by a breeze and fluttered off the deck. I had to chase it down.

A whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while.

I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’ in an emotional sense, but the superficial details of situation are similar: a mother with beautiful red-brown hair, a father who keeps throwing money into failed land purchases. She has a habit of making comparisons to works she must have read long ago — she also compares her mother to Isabel Archer at another point, and the only similarity there is that Isabel and her mother were both beautiful and stoic. I’m still tempted to use it as an excuse to re-read Portrait of a Lady, though.

This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and it wasn’t easy to stop — there were so many, and they were beautiful and so easy to pick.

Then we came home and I wrote while my parents pitted them. I think I got the better end of the deal.

I’m working on The White Silk Tent, my revision of my grandmother’s memoir. I’ve been reading biographical theory to try to situate myself and my strategies: what kind of voice did I want to use, what sort of other research did I want to do? I thought for a while, and then I started writing. And I’m still thinking, of course. But for now, my version contains three kinds of text:

• Sections of Louise’s original manuscript, very slightly edited for clarity
• Biographical sections based on her manuscript but substantially rewritten and edited, and recast in the third person
• Interpolations in my voice which allow me to comment on her memoir, to add information she didn’t have, to interpret things, etc.

And then, likely, documentary material — text and photos from the trunk of family memorabilia she left to accompany the manuscript, and maybe things from the HRC, as well.

My goal for the summer is to get three chapters completed and polished, so that I’ll have a sense of the process involved in writing the book and the amount of time I’ll need to complete it. And then I’ll need to get back to working on academic projects and thinking about my dissertation — which may also be related to biography. (I’m reading Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography now with great interest. And on that note: you can find my new Goodreads page here.)

I’m reading Julie Phillips’s biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr. It’s excellent and I’m entranced.

In the beginning I was merely interested, because I found it tough to relax into the biographical form as Phillips practices it. Having spent this semester working on (among other things) Austen’s use of modal verbs, I was struck and a little annoyed by Phillips’s use of “must” and “should have,” her reliance on conditional forms to buttress psychological claims about Sheldon. That choice reminded me, not pleasantly, of the more biographical bits of the Gilbert-and-Gubar style of feminist criticism — another critical mode I view with sympathy and support but can’t help quibbling with, either. Phillips’s “musts” seem, at times, to push too hard to nail down the unknowable:

She also acquired a .38 revolver, which she either bought or was given by Bill at a time when a sensational carjacking and murder had made the New Mexico roads seem unsafe. It was this gun, acquired for self-defense, that Alice claimed Bill had used against her. (She also once suggested that she had used it for a game of Russian roulette.) Nonetheless, she kept it. Later in life, whenever she was depressed enough to think of killing herself, she always pictured doing it with the .38. The gun must have given her a sense of power over death. [James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, 96]

That pithy last sentence! Why? It’s a shove from drama into banality. It flattens an ambivalent and interesting and totemic-seeming fact.

I’m quibbling, as I said — the book is just wonderful, and the psychologizing conditional statements either grow fewer, or integrate more smoothly into Phillips’s thoughtful and careful treatment of Sheldon/Tiptree, or both. (I’ll have to reread it to tell; right now I’m too grabbed by it.) But I wish that, in the early chapters, Phillips had allowed more of Alice’s ambivalence to remain unencapsulated.

More on this later, when I’m done with the book.

ETA: I read the last half of the book in a happy rush yesterday and this morning, and while I stand by my quibbling, I think the whole thing’s delightful. The primary sources make up a great portion of the book’s brilliance — Sheldon/Tiptree wrote wonderful letters — but Phillips does a beautiful job, too.