24 October 2005

SF In the High Desert
by Suzy McKee Charnas

Suzy McKee Charnas surfaced in SF in the mid-seventies with Walk to the End of the World (1974), a Campbell Award finalist. The four books that sprang from Walk (comprising a futurist, feminist epic) closed in 1999 with The Conqueror's Child, a Tiptree winner. Her SF and fantasy works have won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Mythopoeic Award for young-adult fantasy. A full-length play, based on her classic novel The Vampire Tapestry, has been staged on both coasts. Stagestruck Vampires (Tachyon Books), her latest book, collects her shorter fiction (new stories are often published online at SCIFI.COM).

A story about vampires like a school of sharks; a playlet about an enduring robot and its time-traveling master; a script about a priest so desperate to do standup comedy that he makes a deal with the devil; sexual tensions among a guy, a gal, and her female android bodyguard—which is also in love with the woman. All this out of an eight-week course with students most of whom had never even read SF or fantasy.

I was between writing projects when I ran into the head of the Drama Department at the University of New Mexico. We'd been acquaintances for years, though we seldom run into each other. I haven't been hanging in university circles.

He seized this occasion (we'd met at a play): "We need to do something with you in the department." I knew from the newspapers that the brand-new university president was looking for "dead wood" to prune, so department heads were doubtless looking eager to show fresh green. This recurrent situation happened to coincide this time with a resurgence of my own restlessness. Fresh from teaching at Clarion, I missed the classroom.

Over coffee I offered to teach an eight-week course in which we'd read some great stuff and do writing exercises, having each student produce a piece of science fiction, fantasy, or horror prose as a term project in place of a final exam. Call it "The Disciplined Imagination: Reading and Writing Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror." Jim wanted sixteen weeks, but I stuck to my guns. There's a natural tension that inevitably sags out there in the middle of a full term course, and they weren't going to pay me well enough for me to go through that. I was offered $3200.

A friend at Berkeley advised me that the average university pay for this gig would be $5000-$6000. New Mexico is, economically, an armpit of America, on a par with Louisiana on a good day. I asked for $4500, and accepted the last-ditch offer of $4000 (hey, an armpit is an armpit) plus a Teaching Assistant.

My course was one that the UNM English Department would rather die than offer. Creative Writing profs have been reported as starting class this way: "We'll have no genre trash in MY course." I think this means, "I've never read this stuff and don't know how to read it or critique it, so DON'T SHOW ME ANY—lest I look like a fool and maybe even accept plagiarized work because I'd not well-read enough to recognize it." (To be fair, I've also heard teachers complain that having an accepting attitude just gets them flooded with bad pastiche of Tolkien, et al.)

I've taught SF, reading and writing, at both Clarions and at High School and college level, so I had a definite advantage here. Still high on the Clarion experience, I meant to run an extended version of a workshop with reading assignments in the literature, plus lectures by me about the professional experience of authorship.

This ambitious plan was, as it turned out, pretty nuts. My students, drawn from all levels of the university and carrying many other courses, did not want and could not have managed full immersion in the intense, hothouse atmosphere of a workshop in which the job is to produce and critique fiction to the exclusion of doing anything else. They were not selected from a pool of eager applicants who had submitted writing samples to qualify for the class. They were just curious people looking for an easy filler course that wouldn't put them to sleep and that might sharpen up their writing skills (I only understood the nature of the challenge I'd set myself once we'd started classes). Still, why not aim high?

Being an adjunct instructor was an odd experience from the get-go. My class description didn't make it into the university catalog, so word got out in various clumsy, unofficial ways and went unnoticed by many students until too late. Apparently adjuncts are expected to go around putting up self-produced flyers to attract students—a situation both laughably inefficient and personally demeaning to the instructor. But Arts departments are often run by artists. When you work with and for them you are pretty much on your own (an arts department not run by artists tends to be run badly, and into the ground, by lumpen-bureaucrats).

Seven students signed up, forming a small but very mixed bag. They included a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair who was midway through writing a novel; a bright and lively drama student who had never written anything; a woman who aspired to writing Romances; a man in his forties who'd run his own theater company for years and who kept turning in exercises modeled on Mamet and Shepherd; a tentative kid who'd wandered in from her literature courses with no writing background at all; a shy boy, a doctoral Drama student, with a notable speech impediment and a promisingly skewed sense of humor; and a hippie sort of kid, home-schooled, who was scared off by the writing exercises and dropped the course. Since my course was given through the Department of Drama and Dance, I had some aspiring scriptwriters. One student was from the English Department, and two hadn't realized they were even expected to produce writing of their own. I was afraid that I might need to concentrate heavily on the readings and let the writing component drop into the background.

But classroom exercises in sensory observation (close your eyes: what do you remember seeing in this room? What about the ceiling, what's up there?) reassured me that these people were smart and willing to play, so I went ahead with the writing assignments as planned. Over years of teaching I've collected a roster of exercises, primarily about sharpening the sensory memory (sitting outside during the break, what did you hear nearby; in the middle distance; far away? Go back: what did you miss?). There was always something to throw out at them if too many of the students showed up unprepared to discuss the assigned readings. We ran Mondays and Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 12:30. College students sometimes cut morning classes because they oversleep (that's okay; they cut afternoon classes because they have run out of coffee-energy). My plan to have students pair up to critique each other's work in class proved unworkable, since all too often one half of a pair would be absent for one reason or another (and there are oh, so many reasons; you soon see that flexibility and contingency plans are vital).

Two and a half hours is a big block of time even with a fifteen-minute break. The workshop and lecture elements were designed to vary the pace and content so that the big time block wouldn't drag. Mondays, the first hour would include the return of marked papers and a lecture-and-discussion on the reading assigned over the previous weekend, plus a writing exercise. Then break, followed by a talk by me about the business of writing (work habits, editors, agents, the endless demands of pushing and publicizing your own work). We wound up with a workshop session on the latest writing assignment, and then I would assign a fresh exercise and reading for the upcoming Wednesday. (It's crucial to encourage students to ask questions if a writing assignment isn't clear; otherwise you get wildly varied results that are hard to work with or evaluate in a workshopping session.) These components—lecture, reading-discussion, in-class exercise and workshopping writing assignments—were easy to shuffle around and vary in response to how far we got with the reading-discussion in a given class period.

None of them read fantasy or SF, but that didn't mean I had a clean slate to work with. They all had notions of SF and Fantasy formed from movies, comics, and TV. I meant to shatter those notions with high quality older and newer examples.

The trouble with current SF/F as teaching texts is that the novels tend toward Very Large Volumes of bug-eyed space opera and/or meticulous World-building, or else very demanding intellectual work; I didn't want to hit my neophytes with M. John Harrison's Light, for instance. I had deliberately chosen more accessible—and, unavoidably, less avante garde—works. Part of my agenda was, of course, to seduce them into reading more SF, fantasy, and horror, and you don't do that by scaring them to death with the most cutting-edge material. (Chip Delaney says Damn the torpedoes, hit 'em with the most challenging work you've got; but in an educationally laggard State like New Mexico that, in my opinion, is a recipe for failure.)

We started with Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, my example of (comparatively) early SF, full of wild and woolly optimism, breathtaking speed, and inventive excess. They came in with their eyes spinning in their little heads: Stars had blown them and their preconceptions away, as planned.

One reason I'd taken the job was that my newest book (Stagestruck Vampires), a collection of short work of my own, embraces SF, fantasy, and horror, and I thought it would be interesting to pair a story or essay from there with each classic or current reading. The first piece of my own that we read was "Listening to Brahms," partnered in Week Two with Spin State, Chris Moriarty's Campbell nominated punk-noire future-crime novel. "Brahms," read as a different style of the deepening pessimism of current SF, gave me a lesson in teaching from your own work: the students kept mum for fear of offending me. I ended up requiring them to each bring three major questions about any story of mine that they read for class, to kick off discussion.

Week Three, earmarked for a dip into Fantasy, featured Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock, a fantasy award-winning classic that turned out to be too slow for some of them (next time I'll use, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks which is, I think, more accessible as it rewards a much less developed familiarity with literary history and mythology). I'd have used Tolkien, but the Ring trilogy is too long, and I did not want to be forced into talking about the movie version instead of the books (luckily our fantasy sessions had the benefit of one student's comments imported from her Tolkien class).

To counterbalance the Holdstock, for Week Four I assigned, as planned, a novel by a modern female fantasist, Kij Johnson: Fudoki (I was determined to maintain a gender balance in my authors). What I'd had in mind was a demonstration of how fantasy authors draw on mythological roots, specifically (in the cases of Holdstock and Johnson) Celtic and Japanese. This book proved a bit slow for our purposes, and a bit thin (the ramifications of a cat becoming a human being seemed to me to be not very deeply explored, in part because the story is told as a fable—not a good match for the layered, brooding menace of Holdstock's book).

Week six began with Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man, read for fun and the satirical side of Fantasy. This book wasn't the breeze I had expected. The city-killing-mall theme wasn't very funny, and as an extended symbol it didn't unfold clearly and organically. I wound up using the book as an example of a double-barreled structure in which only one shot—the story about Death and Miss Flitworth—is a success. Next time, I'd use Mort or Small Gods; both have better integration and development of the multiple plot lines Pratchett typically uses.

Some students had a hard time getting past the way Pratchett's beginnings are fractured into many viewpoints and plot elements. You have to trust him till it all begins to cohere. Since reader trust is a major requirement in reading most SF/F, confusion was a useful point of departure for discussion.

We then used a story of mine, "Beauty and the Opera, or the Phantom Beast," as an example of Very Dark Fantasy edging over into Horror—but Horror rooted in character. I liked offering the pleasures of print creepiness in contrast to the orchestrated shock-tactics of cinematic horror.

By this time, their projects were shaping up. Workshopping had led to revision of initial exercises into more developed pieces, which I scheduled for critiques in our eighth and last week (plus some leftover discussion of the previously assigned readings). Meanwhile, I'd stumbled on a DVD set of the two-season TV series Dead Like Me—a perfect complement to Pratchett's book about Death/death, and ideal for a course in the drama department where some of these same students were being taught, in other classes, the relentless formulae of standard screenwriting. In Week Seven, we watched the pilot. I'd use an episode next time, leaving more discussion time (probably "Cook," a strong and moving story).

The general reaction was, "THEY CANCELED THIS SHOW?" Conversation about the relentless demands of commercial mass entertainment dovetailed nicely with lecture material on breaking into print and staying there.

Term projects were presented and workshopped: ten to fifteen pages (lots more from some, but in script form). Gratifyingly, all of it was a Hell of a lot better than what the students had started out with. They had really learned (and said so)—from each other, from the readings, from the writing exercises, and, I trust, from me.

Their work was now down; mine wasn't. Marking was excruciating.

I couldn't judge people for the quality of their writing as they had come in at such varying levels. Why assume that the great progress that one student had made was "worth" more or had cost greater effort than the smaller degree of progress shown by the work of another student? You can't mark people up or down for talent or quickness of perception or the lack of same; that's what they come equipped with, not a matter of choice.

Another standard criterion, amount and quality of classroom participation, was also nearly useless. One person had been out for a family crisis and funeral, another for illness, and one couldn't afford books and had to wait for library copies to become available so she was always behind the discussion. The guy with the speech problem had barely said a word (though I heard that he talked a lot about the course material outside of class).

In the end, I marked on all of the above criteria but within a very narrow range—A to B minus. That seemed to satisfy all around.

Despite my own initial, overreaching ambition, it had all come together, however clumsily, into something valuable. The level of talent, imagination, and willingness to take chances that these people brought astonished me; they came to class with vague ideas of what we'd be reading, writing, and discussing, but they bonded so strongly that they planned to continue meeting as a writers' group. I think that, short and unpredictable as it was, the course shocked them awake. Some will go on reading SF. Some will, I think, write it.

As for me, I came away invigorated by being closely involved in my students' energy, curiosity, and responsiveness; fizzing with new ideas from our discussions and from my own reappraisals of the readings we'd gone over together; and, not least, reaffirmed in my sense of having something of value to offer to younger readers and writers.

I'd do it again in a minute.