20 May 2002

Why, and How a Wallflower Throws a Party at Wiscon
by Laurie J. Marks
www.LaurieJMarks.com

Laurie J. Marks lives in Massachusetts in a 112-year-old Victorian home with her partner, Deb Mensinger, and their cat, Evil Demon. She teaches composition, creative writing, and science fiction at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her newest book, Fire Logic, was published this month. Her other novels are Delan the Mislaid, The Moonbane Mage, Ara's Field, The Watcher's Mask, and Dancing Jack.

It's been eight years since my last novel was published, and I've had a lot of reasons to despair of ever publishing another. So when a copy of my latest novel, Fire Logic, arrived in the mail last week I felt, along with a lot of more complicated emotions, utter glee. Hard cover! Published by Tor! And it's gorgeous! It will be in bookstores next week, and not only on shelves, but also in free-standing displays (oddly known as "dumps"). And, as if this weren't enough, it's getting a starred review in Publisher's Weekly!

I'm not exactly a party girl — in fact, I'm more the wallflower type. But it's definitely time for a party — at Wiscon, of course. So some friends from all over the country are putting one together, mostly by email. Planning this party has been an exercise in unlikely collaborations that seem extremely typical of Wiscon. Here's an example: my mother, who lives smack dab in the middle of about a million acres of California vineyards and wineries, wants to contribute something to the party. I asked her to send a case of wine. After much consideration and consultations, she selected twelve bottles, sent my father out to buy a special packing crate, and then discovered that she can't ship the wine to me in Massachusetts, which means I can't put it in my little car and drive it to Wisconsin. ("Why can't she ship the wine to Massachusetts?" That question belongs to the class of questions it's rarely worth learning the answer to, so I haven't bothered.) However, it turns out my mother can ship it directly to Wisconsin. (No, I haven't tried to explain that one either.) "Fine," said Deb, my beloved, unflappable spouse. "We'll find someone in Wisconsin to ship it to."

I sent a note to Jeanne Gomoll, a founding mother of Wiscon, who said that she and Scott Custis would be happy to take custody of the wine. However, there's a problem: no one at home to sign for it during the day. So Jeanne sent a note to Jae Adams, a long-time Wiscon supporter, who said we could go right ahead and ship the wine to her. I don't even know Jae, but I sent her a note that I hope made her feel like I would throw myself in front of a moving train for her. Then I sent a note to my mother: Ship the wine!

Thank goodness not every aspect of planning the party has been that complicated, though last Saturday, when Deb and I spent twelve hours running around greater Boston, packing the car with an unlikely assortment of plastic buckets, paper plates, golf pencils, and other oddities; and checking prices on unique local drinks and snacks; I did begin to get the distinct panicky feeling that this thing is getting just a little bit bigger than I'd anticipated. One anonymous friend, the kindest, most comforting woman in the universe, who I made friends with at Wiscon, is constructing the flyers to advertise the party, and I promise you she will start sending me hugs and hand-pats by email, just as soon as she reads the word "panicky" in the previous sentence. Amy Axt Hanson, who I met at Wiscon when someone decided we needed to know each other, with whom I collaborated by email for a year to put together the first Writer's Respite, is making a flyer to advertise my book. She also plans to produce eight pounds of bon-bons, a giant jar of salsa, and some smoked salmon out of her luggage. I hope that smoked salmon is extremely well-sealed. Donna Simone , who I met at Wiscon when she stole the show on a panel I was moderating, is giving Amy moral support and prepping for her role as party hostess (since I'm a wallflower, I really need a person like her and wouldn't mind having a dozen). I'm sure that her phone calls with Amy involve a lot of wild laughter, because the two of them are the funniest people on the planet. They met at Wiscon, of course, where at my instigation they shared a hotel room, and became fine friends, and now they live in the same town, though they used to live half a country apart. This is the way things go at Wiscon.

I'm having the party at Wiscon because in the seven years or so I've been attending the following things happened:

I proposed a living room discussion titled "Writing When the Sky is Falling." In a comfy room filled with cookie-crunching women, I told how I had managed to keep working on my novel while my beloved Deb was hospitalized with a rare and terrifying disease. Nobody cared or seemed to notice that my spouse and I happen to be the same sex. (One of the women in the room was my anonymous acquaintance, who was about to transform herself from stranger to friend — she stayed afterwards and I cried, and that's how she began earning her title as the kindest and most comforting woman in the universe.)

I bravely introduced myself to my hero, Suzy McKee Charnas, whose Holdfast Chronicle books first linked the concepts "feminist" and "science fiction" for me, back in the seventies. She said cheerfully, "How about lunch?" And there I was, eating a bowl of won-ton soup with her, while the silly girl in my brain squealed hysterically, "I'm having lunch with Suzy McKee Charnas!"

During the opening ceremonies, a bunch of cheap plastic toys were tossed into the crowd as souveniers — two of each kind. I found the person whose toy matched mine: a young woman who was in the midst of a leisurely and rather aimless wander about the country. She became my best buddy for the entire weekend. We were both broke, and so we ate a lot of soba noodles at the noodle shop down the road. It was very bohemian.

Rosemary Kirstein, who is in my writer's group, Ann Zeddies (who writes as Toni Anzetti) and I all sat on a hillside by the capitol building one Saturday, and composed a spontaneous potluck lunch by trading with each other our farmer's market food finds: bread, cheese, smoked fish, cucumbers and tomatoes, and the inevitable cappuccino. A few months later, the characters in Rosemary's novel traded food in exactly the same way, in a state of similarly relaxed conviviality. You can read that scene in her novel The Language of Power, when it's published.

I developed a following of people who came to all the panels I moderated: not because I was glib, or beautiful, or confrontational, or dominating, or even eloquent or showy. They wanted to come to my panels because I'm a good moderator. I'm a teacher, after all, and I've had lots of practice at lesson planning, and since I hate the spotlight I work pretty devotedly at making things interactive and participatory. Some people actually were perceptive enough to become fans of my invisible woman routine.

When I discovered Wiscon, I was an impoverished graduate student who couldn't get her publisher to return her phone calls. I went on to become an impoverished composition instructor who couldn't get her agent to return her phone calls. After that I became the impoverished wife of a very sick spouse — and by then I was hunting for a new publisher and a new agent. I was given several generous travel scholarships. People wanted me to be able to come, so they sent me a plane ticket.

At my first Wiscon, at the first panel I ever moderated in my life, Ursula LeGuin grabbed my hand and cried, "Laurie J. Marks! I've always wanted to meet you! Your book Dancing Jack is in a place of honor in my bookcase!" And I believed at the time that nobody had ever heard of me, or read anything I'd written.

Amy and Donna and I and a bunch of other strong-willed, fearless, extremely organized women put together the first Writer's Respite and the first living room discussions. People wanted to spend so much time complimenting and thanking us that we could hardly get our work done. We picked up volunteers like a magnet picks up iron filings. A total stranger handed me a hundred dollars. "I can't volunteer," she explained, "But I want to do something to make sure this happens again next year."

It's Monday morning. I've got to catch my flight home. The airport shuttle bus is outside the door. The driver is calling my name. I grab the handle of my suitcase and look backwards. The lobby is crammed with casually-dressed people who have hardly eaten or slept for three days. Everyone is blissfully happy. They're engrossed in eager, thoughtful, funny discussions that I want to join. But I have to leave, and I'm crying. I want to establish a small town with these people, and rub elbows with them until we've got no elbows left to rub. Every single Memorial Day, every single year, this is how I feel.

At Wiscon, people throw their weight behind good ideas, and make those good ideas happen. Broad Universe. The Writer's Respite. I was fortunate to get some of that weight thrown my way: My editors are Wiscon regulars. So are most of the people who wrote cover quotes for Fire Logic. But what really made a difference to me was the Wiscon community. What we get from books — reading or writing them — can seem pretty ephemeral in a hospital emergency room at 2 a.m. Or when you realize that other people your age are planning their retirement while you're one paycheck away from homelessness. Or when you revise the same chapter for the thirtieth time, knowing perfectly well that no one's ever going to read it. But at Wiscon those ephemeral values becomes vivid and substantial: real people, a real community, a real enactment of real beliefs, a real understanding of exactly how fictions are true. Wiscon lasts only four days a year, but it's gotten me through some pretty bad stuff.

That's why we're having a party. It's not for me. It's for them.