The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [18]
The chair, the room, the man, the world are all gone now. I still have the book. It has stitched itself like a thread through my life from that day to this, read variously, with different perceptions at different ages; today, my overtrained eye even proofreads as it travels over the lines, and sometimes stops to rearrange a sentence or quibble with a word choice. Is it a perfect book? No, doubtless not. No human thing is. Is it a great book? It is in my heart; it binds time for me, and binds the wounds of time.
"And he sang to them . . . until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness" is no bad epitaph for a writer. I could crawl on my knees through broken glass for the gift of words that pierce like those.
LSC: It grieves me to hear someone say, "I don't have to read The Lord of the Rings, I've seen the movies"—even though the movies are amazing accomplishments. And had the side effect of allowing us to get back in touch with our inner fan-girls.
LMB: It all comes back around, doesn't it? I tried sporadically to write through early college, but then got sidetracked—although there was a period during college when several of the members of the local SF club I'd discovered (in Columbus, Ohio) met at the house of a graduate student in English Literature who was himself trying to become a novelist, and who eventually succeeded, too. He went on in academia—I ran into him again a few years back at a con.
LSC: Then my family had moved to Texas. We didn't see each other for five years, during which time real life overwhelmed the murmurs of our muses.
LMB: Ray Bradbury, in a speech he gave at a Nebula banquet in the late eighties, told a tale of having one day decided he needed to "grow up"; endeavoring to put away childish things, he burned his comic book collection. About a month later, he woke up to himself and said, more or less, "What have I done?!" I was a slow learner; it took me about a decade to find that lost real self again. I married, worked for several years as a drug administration technician at the Ohio State University Hospitals, and finally had my two children.
During that same period you'd had your kids and began writing again, and made your first short story sales. I'm half-willing to swear that there's something about completing one's family that frees up women's energy, as though we're subconsciously holding something in reserve till then. Stuck in a small town with two preschool children and no job (or rather, no money—don't get me started on how our society devalues "women's work," or I'll still be ranting come sunset), I was inspired by your example. It seemed to me this might be a way to make some money but still get to stay home with my kids. Which eventually proved to be true, but it took a good long time getting to that point.
LSC: How did you get started?
LMB: I count the beginning of this effort as Thanksgiving Day, 1982, when, visiting my parents, I wrote a paragraph or two on my dad's new Kaypro II to try out the toy. I dimly recall that the fragment of description actually had its genesis from a writing exercise done for a couple of visits to a local Marion writer's group. They were mostly middle-aged and elderly women who met in a church basement and wrote domestic and religious poetry; after a hiatus, I found them again the following year when they'd moved to a bank basement, and inflicted much early SF on them. They were a very patient, if wildly inappropriate, audience. The fragment generated, the following month, my first story, a novelette eventually titled "Dreamweaver's Dilemma," although the actual paragraphs were cut from the final version.
Later, I found a much more useful (and younger) group of aspiring writers further away in Columbus, including some SF, fantasy, and mainstream people. Another influence that certainly deserves mention is Dee Redding, the wife of the minister of