When I said I had no small talk, that really wasn't true. I can slip right in and be comfortable with any group of my own community. But this wasn't my community. These guys were Americans, not Mormons; those of us who grew up in Mormon society and remain intensely involved are only nominally members of the American community. We can fake it, but we're always speaking a foreign language. Only when we get with fellow Saints are we truly at home. If it had been a group of ten Mormons, I wouldn't have had any problem. We'd have a common fund of experience, speak the same language, share some of the same concerns. We could make jokes about Mormon culture, talk seriously about things that you can only discuss with someone who shares the same faith. With this group, though, relaxing would be much, much harder. I trusted their criticism, but once we were removed from the context of storytelling, they were gentiles and I would end up sitting and saying nothing or too much all night, feeling less and less comfortable. I know this from experience. So I was just as happy not to go.
Instead I stayed home and finished "The Fringe." The teacher betrayed the ring of smugglers and embezzlers; their sons left the teacher to die in a desert gully that would surely flood in the heavy rain that was coming. He struggled to climb only a few feet, and the pageant wagon people that I'll use later in the long story came and rescued him. There's more to it than that, but by the end I felt worn out but exhilarated. I had written a short story. I hadn't left anything out, and it was definitely under 7500 words. Best of all, it was finished.
At the same time, I was worried. This story, I thought, was probably OK; I wouldn't embarrass myself. But the second story—it depended completely on exactly that sense of belonging or not-belonging that had kept me away from the dinner that night. In fact, the comradeship, the exclusiveness of people who have the same faith and share the same culture was the subject of the story. I began to think I wouldn't try to write the second one. I wasn't sure I could bring it off, and if I failed, it would be excruciating, because it would be my own people who would be made to look ridiculous or unintelligible.
I wondered if anybody else there was feeling the same level of anxiety. I saw a few signs of nervousness, but most seemed relaxed and comfortable.
We had a new face—Tim Sullivan had decided to drive down from D.C. and join the workshop at the last minute. He was a welcome addition, if only because he made Greg Frost seem solemn by contrast. The two of them sat together from then on during critique sessions, and the Greg & Tim comedy show kept us from getting too serious about Literature, for which we were mostly grateful.
Steve Carper had a story that morning that treated the void of space like a substance, which could randomly penetrate and turn things into obsidian; a weird and frightening concept. I had read Gregg Keizer's story in an earlier version; it was about a human in an alien concentration camp which consisted of a perfect but unpopulated reproduction of Paris; one of Gregg's best. Allen Wold had a fun ghoul-meets-vampire story, but it contained a sentence about heavy clouds releasing their load, which had struck some people as scatalogically hilarious the night before—including me. There were some cloud-dump jokes before the session began.
But the knockout was Scott Sanders's "Ascension." Funny, disturbing, literary without being dull for even a moment. We all wished we had written it. We even speculated that he was bound to sell it right away; unless he sent it to Ellen Datlow, I pointed out, who would reject it because of the punctuation.
That night they all went to have dinner and see a movie. I was tempted, but it was an old Hitchcock, one of the ones they've just re-released, and I wasn't in the mood for tension. So I stayed and worked for a while, writing the beginning of "Salvage" but mostly reading the stories for Saturday. Then I took off and drove in to Raleigh and saw Johnny Dangerously. An unbelievably stupid movie—just what I needed.
Alas, when I came home, they were still gone, the house was locked up, and I couldn't get in. When I left, Jim Kelly and John Kessel had still been there talking on the phone to Jim Frenkel of Blue Jay about their collaborative novel; but by now they had finished and gone to join the others.
I contemplated sitting in my car with the engine running for a while. Instead I broke all my resolutions, drove to Burger King, and ate more than God ever meant man to eat. That was it for my money supply, but by then I was hungry. I had a notebook with me, too, and all of a sudden things fell into place for me with Speaker for the Dead. I knew how to begin the thing—all my wonderful middles never worked because the beginning was totally wrong. And now it was right. I practically wrote the whole first chapter there with the smell of Cheeseburger Deluxe giving me an empty-calorie high. Who says Mormons can't have fun?
There was no doubt in my mind now. No matter what happened, this workshop had been worth it. I had written a story in about five hours, one that I thought had a decent chance of working; and now I had unknotted a novel that had been doing dirt to me for nearly three years.
On Saturday, I was last. Gregg Keizer's second story was a powerful fantasy about a woman who conjures the wind for a sailing ship by dripping her own blood into the sea. Mark Van Name had a story about a dream therapist working her way back to the painful secrets a nearly catatonic little girl was hiding from. John Kessel had a piece of his first solo novel, which was so beautifully written that it made me want to kill him, remembering the botch I made of my first novel. Even his synopsis was brilliant—we all suggested he ought to try to get it published as is. It was filled with the author's self-questioning—should I have this happen, or is the plot getting out of hand? There were some problems, of course, since it was a first draft, but it was plain that Kessel's debut as a novelist will be stunning.
I tried to be intelligent in my comments on their stories, but the truth is I could hardly keep my mind off my own. I kept trying to read Scott Sanders's notes on my story—it was on top of his stack—without letting anybody else notice that I was doing it.
When they got to my story, they were very kind; but it occurred to me for the first time that they thought my having written the story in a few hours right at the workshop was kind of a stunt. Actually, I always write quickly—when I know what to write. I couldn't think up a story and write it in five hours. I have to think about it—and not think about it—for weeks, months, or years; but when it's ready, it comes out in a burst. And this workshop had helped me more than they understood—that story had not been ready when I arrived, but by the time I wrote it, the intensity of the concentration on storytelling, the ambient talent and intelligence, all had had a profound effect on me. It's not that it reawakened my old understanding of how to write stories. "The Fringe" was not like what I had written before. Most of my old stories, if I were writing them now, would have been novels this time. But "The Fringe" had to be a story. It was not an accidental story, it was an inevitable one.
That night we went to John Kessel's and Sue Hall's place for a stuff-it-yourself baked potato dinner. I had no shame; I ate two, to celebrate the vast relief that my story had passed muster.
We also restrained ourselves from murdering Scott Sanders; the February Asimov's had just arrived, and there was the story we had critiqued only the day before—that we had been sure he would soon get published—and lo! it was a miracle. Asimov's had already fulfilled our prophecy. Not only that, but when he was directly questioned, he admitted that his other story, which we were going to critique the next morning, had also been sold—to the redoubtable Ellen Datlow. He was sheepish, and vowed that our criticism really was helpful; he still regarded the stories as works in progress. Besides, these were the only two sf stories he had written in recent years; most of his stories were mainstream. He was so sweet about it that we all agreed to forgive him, or at least pretend to. Truth was, his criticism of other stories was so perceptive and helpful that we should have paid him to come even if he didn't bring any stories at all. Still, it took some of the fun out of the criticism, to know that the stories had been sold. My only consolation was that he had sold
the second one to Omni, so he still had no idea whether it was publishable or not.
That night I was feeling pretty good, now that my first story had been found acceptable. I began to realize that a lot of my feeling of awkwardness was because of my uncertainty about my stories. I didn't feel like hiding in the basement anymore. After reading the next day's stories, I wandered upstairs in my bathrobe. A lot of them were sitting around the tables while Mark Van Name read passages from Joe Bob's movie review column. The satire was bitter and delicious, and we laughed till we cried.
But on Sunday, I was burned out. Everything I said sounded stupid to me. Later, calm reflection assured me that my comments were indeed stupid. Fortunately, I noticed it in time and left most of the criticism to the people who were still making sense. We told Scott Sanders why his hunters-in-a-game-preserve-world story needed drastic revision, which it would never get unless the art department at Omni decided they needed thirty lines cut out to make it come even with the bottom of a page. (Actually, I loved the story, but I couldn't tell him that, could I? Not when he'd already spent the lousy two thousand bucks.)
Steve Carper had a comic story told as a series of articles in different magazines. Tim Sullivan's "I Was a Teenage Dinosaur" was not comic; but a story that begins with a guy running over a dog, taking the bleeding animal home with him, putting it in his bed for the night, and waking up to find it dead beside him—my kind of story. Poor Greg Frost made the mistake of calling his comic mystery story "Oobidis," which kept getting sung as "Oo-be-doo-be-doo" in our best Frank Sinatra voices—but he did create the most engaging pair of aliens I have ever read in sf, two little furballs that copulate constantly in the messiest possible fashion.
That night I finished "The Temple Salvage Expedition" and Gregg Keizer and I drove back to Greensboro. He had to work the next day, so he'd miss the last day of the workshop; Scott Sanders and Steve Carper also left early to meet Monday commitments.
I managed to make a wrong turn on the way through Durham. I never get lost unless Gregg's in the car. Another bad guess took us halfway to Chapel Hill. I'm not as mindless as this sounds—you have to have driven in North Carolina to understand. Signs are regularly posted just after the turn they warn you about. Lanes of traffic suddenly veer off and become highways going in the wrong direction. They put up highway number signs only if they feel like it. It's the locals' way of letting us Yankee carpetbaggers know that we aren't as smart as we all think we are.
We did get home. My kids were asleep; Kristine wasn't, but I was terrible company anyway. I spent an hour getting the story to print out and then xeroxing the copies I'd need. Finally we were able to talk. I woke the kids up enough to tell them I was home—Emily had been waking up with nightmares every night I was gone. Charlie did his normal midnight-is-really-morning routine, and seemed happy to see me. It was good to remember that the workshop wasn't the real world. It seemed hard to believe, though, that I had only been gone four nights and days. The experience had been so intense it seemed like much longer.
Bright and early I was back on the road to Sycamore Hill. Jim Kelly had finished his story only the night before, and I hadn't got a copy yet—I had to get there in time to read it before the eleven o'clock session. I got there and handed around my story, and then settled down to read Jim's "Rat." In five minutes I was in love. It was simply one of the most wonderful stories I've ever read. And he had written the last half of it on Mark's PC/XT upstairs—the other story that was written, in part, at Sycamore Hill. It's the story of a rat who is smuggling drugs; he swallowed several ampules of it and now is doing his best not to defecate them until he can get safely back to his apartment—which ain't easy. Making a rat believable as the protagonist of an urban drug-smuggling story ain't easy, either, but Jim did it. You'll notice the story when it's published, believe me.
Allen Wold's story was an admitted item of juvenilia—he hasn't written very many short stories in his life, and all his published work is in novels. I thought of going back to my trunk and pulling out some of my earliest plays, and I decided that by contrast Allen's early stuff looked very, very good.
They were kind to "Salvage." The thing that had worried me most—that the intensity of the religious elements in it would put them off—turned out not to be a problem at all. Though few there had particularly strong religious impulses, the sense of holiness that the story depended on seemed to work.
I realized, then, that this milieu—of Mormon country underwater, the survivors struggling to keep civilization alive—was viable; more important, I was viable. I had written two presentable short stories for the first time in years. I felt as good as if I had actually lost all forty-five pounds while eating as much as I wanted.
We spent the afternoon cleaning up the mess we had made of Mark's house. The carpet was new enough that all our footscuffing had raised more fuzzballs on the carpet than a thousand cats. We vacuumed, moved beds out into the garage, and set up for a party for local fans that was scheduled for that evening—the formal ending of Sycamore Hill. The party was a party—I figured I wouldn't be good for anything until I found some people who wanted to talk about things they really cared about; I do know how to listen. But I was still cresting from the exhilaration of the workshop—I don't know if I seemed stoned to anybody else, but I was as close to manic as a good Mormon is allowed to get. The party ended up being a lot of fun.
And then I went home.
I spent the next several days doing the revisions that the workshop had suggested; then I sent the stories off to my agent. Ordinarily I would have sent them to the magazines myself, but at least one of them I figured had a fair shot at getting into a non-genre magazine, and Barbara Bova handles my non-genre short fiction sales. Besides, I wanted to show off to both Ben and Barbara that I was actually doing stories again. I even went crazy enough to make some more copies and send a few to other people—a college dean in Utah who has been following my fiction; a critic for a Mormon intellectual journal who had just done a thoughtful piece on science fiction; a few others. What they thought, getting a story out of the blue like that, I have no idea—but I was celebrating.
I don't much care who buys them, actually (though I care very much that someone does). The workshop's response to the story was better than a check. In five days I learned to trust their judgment and value their good opinion. I don't want to get maudlin about this, but they made a real difference in my writing—and my confidence about my writing—in those few days. We didn't become intimate friends; we're not going to sell our houses so we can live close together from now on, or anything like that (though, come to think of it, Mark's hot tub might be worth living closer to).
We exchanged gifts that to me, at least, came at a crucial moment. The burst of creative energy that it unleashed in me is still going. I know I'll coast back down to normal after a while, but by then maybe it'll be time for the second annual Sycamore Hill Writers' Workshop. With any luck I won't be a paranoid wreck coming into the workshop—but if that's what it takes to get the results I got, I'll be ready.
It has been nearly four years since I wrote the preceding account of the first Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop; in a few weeks I'll be heading to the fourth. A lot of water has gone over the dam since then. A few months after Sycamore Hill, Gregg Keizer and I went to the Nebulas in New York, where he read my new opening to Speaker for the Dead, which had bogged down again; he provided the insights that allowed me to start over again—this time for the last time. I dedicated the book to him because it wouldn't have been any good without his help.
"The Fringe," the first of my Sycamore Hill stories, was sold to Ed Ferman at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed rejected "Salvage," however; it ended up with Gardner-Dozois, and with that I began a custom which lasted for several years, of sending every new story I wrote to Asimov's. I did write more short stories, too; though many of the tales that appeared in Asimov's were freestanding chunks out of my fantasy The Tales of Alvin Maker, others
were independent stories—"Dogwalker," "America." Two older stories—among those referred to above as unpublishable—got resurrected; I revised them and "Saving Grace" appeared in Night Cry; "Eye for Eye," after a rejection from Stan Schmidt at Analog, appeared in Asimov's.
"America" was a troubling story from the start. It began charged with sexual energy, as a story of an older woman falling in love with a boy. I couldn't write it, though, until I realized that the woman was an Indian who dreamed of the rebirth of Quetzalcoatl; and as I started writing, I suddenly discovered that the boy was a Mormon kid who was having trouble coping with his sexual desire within the bounds of what the doctrine of the Church permits. I am not comfortable writing about sex, especially when it is important to the story that the reader also experience something of the characters' sexual desire. Yet that is what the story required, and while I labored to make it tasteful, I also had to tell the tale truthfully. I was further surprised when I realized in the epilogue that the story had to be told by Carpenter, the palsied schoolteacher from "The Fringe." I went back and revised the story slightly so it would fit seamlessly into the future history of "The Fringe" and "Salvage."
Thematically, "America" is not fully about community in the way all the other stories in this collection are. The other stories are all science fiction; "America" is unarguably fantasy. I debated whether or not to include it here; the book was certainly long enough without it. I finally decided that the mythic underpinnings, the sense that there was a purpose behind all the loss and suffering—that was vital to understanding the other tales. Though, except for the epilogue, "America" takes place chronologically first, I put it last because it revises the meaning of all the other stories.