The Science of Herself (9 page)

I can't work in longhand. I get too involved with penmanship. I become a monk with an illuminated manuscript.

My regular drill is to intend to write and then spend the day sitting at my computer doing my e-mail and browsing my favorite sites instead. Watching some TED talks. I love TED talks. They are the only place where I find hope for the future. But then I spoil the mood by scoping out the political scene. All the while
filled with a faint but ineffective self-loathing because I'm not writing.

Why do drivers wait so long to start moving when the light changes?

They're on the phone.

You have a solid reputation in genre (SF) and in mainstream as well. Does that ever make for a conflict?

Do I? A
solid
reputation? Are you sure? It seems to me that the question of whether I write genre fiction at all has dogged me my whole career. I was very pleased when
Locus
publisher Charles Brown told me years ago that of course I was a science fiction writer. It didn't matter
what
I wrote, he said, because I
thought
like a science fiction writer.

I do love genre fiction. I also love mainstream literary fiction. As a reader sometimes I want one and sometimes I want the other. There is no reason not to read both.

As a writer, sometimes I want to write one and sometimes the other, but this has been trickier. When I began publishing, NY believed that either people read science fiction and nothing else, or they never read science fiction. Scrupulous attention was paid to my positioning and though it never seemed like a problem to me, I was aware that it seemed like a problem to others.

It probably was a problem. It has been my great good fortune not to have to spend much time thinking about it.

The social world of science fiction has been extremely welcoming to me. I do truly want someday to repay that kindness by writing a book in the genre for those steadfast friends and readers. But guess what? Genre fiction is very hard to write well.

What do you like doing best, first draft or revisions?

I hate the first, fumbling, dispiriting draft. Team Revision all the way.

Tarantino, as in the name of the film director, originally meant citizen of Tarentum, the ancient Greek city in Southern Italy. Did you know that?

I know it now.

You teach in lots of writing workshops, and with some apparent success. What's your emphasis there? What do writers leave with that they came without?

How would you measure success as a workshop teacher? I try first to do no harm. I make my best possible effort to see the story the writer is trying to tell and help them achieve that. I try very hard not to confuse their story with the story I would be telling, given that same
material. Sometimes I fail at that, but not for lack of effort.

I believe that the learning in workshops happens to the critiquer not the critiqued. So I do demand that my students put careful attention into their responses as readers. As writers I caution them not to make changes based on the critiques they get unless they see clearly how that will improve the story they want to tell.

And I also provide such craft tips as have worked for me over the years. It's been a bit strange, or was at first, to look closely my own process, because most of it was happening unconsciously. In order to teach, I've had to observe myself at work. It's not always a pretty sight.

Who do you think would win in a fight, Dr. Johnson or Jane Austen? A footrace?

Austen would refuse to compete. Johnson would win, but he would look such a fool for having done so.

Ever do any hack work? What sort?

Nothing literary, but I once spent a summer sorting tomatoes for Hunt and Wesson. I was not good at this. The potential for advancement to catsup labels was always there and always out of reach. I turned out to be too picky about the tomatoes I wanted in my tomato sauce.

I was also pregnant at the time and suffering from morning sickness. I couldn't eat tomatoes for years.
Even now, the smell of mountains of off-peak tomatoes streaming past on conveyor belts haunts my dreams.

Do you read on the Kindle?

I read on the iPad, but only when I travel. I persist in liking books on paper best. I've learned that the sense of how close to the end of a book I am, which no electronic version can recreate for me in quite that same physical way, is an important component of my reading experience.

Carter Scholz claims he had a role in the development of
The Jane Austen Book Club
. Is this true, or just another of his tall tales?

There would be no
Jane Austen Book Club
without Carter Scholz. That's the plain and simple truth of the matter. I was at a bookstore with Carter when I misread the sign that gave me the title.

You spent your early youth in Indiana. Do you like James Whitcomb Riley?

I was kept away from the great Hoosier poet as a child. My parents surely had their reasons and I never developed a taste for him and his homespun dialect. The Hoosier poet my parents did approve of was Samuel Yellen, and they read to me often from his book
In the House and
Out
. Especially at bedtime. “It's time to take your place in Cassiopeia's chair” (or something very like that). This was a poem about the constellations, very beautiful and starry. Put me right to sleep.

What authors do you think have had the most influence on your work?

T.H. White, by a mile. Author of
The Once and Future King
. T.H. White is why I have never believed that I had to follow the rules or consider anything resembling a “contract with the reader.” T.H. White is why I never believed that I had to pick a single genre or a single tone or choose between comedy and tragedy, between historical and contemporary, between realistic and fantastical. No reason not to do them all and all the time, either piece by piece or within the same work or within the same paragraph. T.H. White taught me that writing can be more exuberant than is strictly tasteful, and I like exuberance best, though I'm not sure I often achieve it.

Do you read poetry for fun?

I do. For fun and for fuel. The innovative use of language is inspiring to me. It makes me want to write, which is a helpful first step in writing.

I understand that you are the only science fiction writer in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Is that fair?

Nothing in baseball is fair or foul but thinking makes it so.

Actually, I'm not
in
the Baseball Hall of Fame. I merely have my own key to the door. They gave it to me because my novel
The Sweetheart Season
was about a women's baseball team. At least in part.

What did you think of the film of
The Jane Austen Book Club
? You are allowed to dissemble on this one.

There are parts of the movie I think work really, really well. Some of those parts come straight from my book, but many do not.

There are also parts I don't care for. I don't believe reading Austen aloud can save a marriage. I don't believe a high school teacher should sit in the car necking with a student no matter how poorly she was mothered. My characters would never behave so badly.

And it is tiring to have people approach, as they quite often do, to tell me what they loved about my book, only to realize they are talking about the movie. If I persuade the people reading this of one thing, let it be that. The writer is going to know if you pretend to have read the book when you've only seen the movie. Don't even try.

But all in all, I like the movie. It's not my book, but it's smart and entertaining and there is a scene (not in my book) in which a nice woman gets falling-down drunk, which is, as already established, the mark of great storytelling.

What will your memorial bench say?

Hey! You, there! Shape up!

—FOR RYAN

M
Y MOTHER LIKES TO
refer to 1989 as the year I played baseball, as if she had nothing to do with it, as if nothing
she
did that year was worth noting. She has her un-amended way with too many of the facts of our lives, especially those occurring before I was born, about which there is little I can do. But this one is truly unfair. My baseball career was short, unpleasant, and largely her fault.

For purposes of calibration where my mother's stories are concerned, you should know that she used to say my father had been abducted by aliens. My mother and he made a pact after
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
that if one of them got the chance they should just go and the other would understand, so she figured right away that this is what had happened. He hadn't known
I was coming yet or all bets would have been off, my mother said.

This was before
X-Files
gave alien abduction a bad name; even so my mother said we didn't need to go telling everyone. There'd be plenty of time for that when he returned, which he would be doing, of course. If he could. It might be tricky. If the aliens had faster-than-light spaceships, then he wouldn't be aging at the same rate as we; he might even be growing younger; no one knew for sure how these things worked. He might come back as a boy like me. Or it was entirely possible that he would have to transmutate his physical body into a beam of pure light in order to get back to us, which, honestly, wasn't going to do us a whole lot of good and he probably should just stay put. In any case, he wouldn't want us pining away, waiting for him—he would want us to get on with our lives. So that's what we were doing and none of this is about my father.

My mother worked as a secretary over at the college in the department of anthropology. Sometimes she referred to this job as her fieldwork. I could write a book, she would tell Tamara and me over dinner, I could write a book about that department that would call the whole theory of evolution into question. Tamara lived with us to help pay the rent. She looked like Theda Bara, though of course I didn't know that back then. She wore peasant blouses and ankle bracelets and rings in her ears. She slept in the big bedroom and worked behind the counter at Cafe Roma and sometimes sang on open mike night.
She never did her dishes, but that was okay, my mom said. Tamara got enough of that at work and we couldn't afford not to be understanding. The dishes could be
my
job.

My other job was to go to school, which wasn't so easy in the sixth grade when this particular installment takes place. A lot of what made it hard was named Jeremy Campbell. You have to picture me, sitting in my first row desk, all hopeful attention. I just recently gave up my Inspector Gadget lunchbox for a nonpartisan brown bag. I'm trying to fit in. But that kid with the blond hair who could already be shaving, that's Jeremy Campbell. He's at the front of the room, so close I could touch him, giving his book report.

“But it's too late,” Jeremy says, looking at me to be sure I know he's looking at me. “Every single person in that house is dead.” He turns to Mrs. Gruber. “That's the end.”

“I guess it would have to be,” Mrs. Gruber says. “Are you sure this is a book you read? This isn't just some story you heard at summer camp?”

“
The Meathook Murders
.”

“Written by?”

Jeremy hesitates a moment. “King.”

“Stephen King?

“Stanley King.”

“It's not on the recommended list.”

Jeremy shakes his head sadly. “I can't explain that. It's the best book I ever read.”

“All right,” says Mrs. Gruber. “Take your seat, Jeremy.”

On his way past my desk Jeremy deliberately knocks my books onto the floor. “Are you trying to trip me, Nathan?” he asks.

“Take your seat, Jeremy,” Mrs. Gruber says.

“I'll talk to you later,” Jeremy assures me.

After school, having no friends to speak of, I sometimes biked to my mom's office. The bike path between my school and hers took me past the Little League fields, the Mormon temple, some locally famous hybrid trees— a very messy half walnut–half elm created by Luther Burbank himself just to see if he could—and the university day care, where I once spent all day every day finger painting and was a much happier camper.

I came to a stop sign at the same time as a woman in a minivan. (Maybe this was the same day as Jeremy's book report, maybe not. I include it so you'll know the sort of town we live in.) Even though I came to a complete stop, even though I didn't know her from Adam, she rolled down her window to talk to me. “You should be wearing a helmet,” she said.
That
kind of town. Someone had graffitied the words baseball spawns hate onto the Little League snack bar. This is a story about baseball, remember?

My mom's desk was in the same room as the faculty mailboxes. A busy place, but she liked that, she
always liked to talk to people. On my way into the office I passed one of the other secretaries and two profs. By the time I got to my mom I'd been asked three times how school was and three times I'd said it was fine. There was a picture of me on her desk, taken when I was three and wearing a Batman shirt with the batwings stretched over my fat little three-year-old stomach, and also my most recent school picture, no matter how bad.