Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 54

#CripLit chat Sat 5/19: New Fiction by Disabled Writers

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Image description: Black text and black icons on a bright yellow rectangle. Top centre in large letters, “#CripLit Twitter Chat, New Fiction,” below it in smaller letters “May 19, 2018, 7 pm Eastern/4pm Pacific,” followed by “Featuring @nicolaz & @Anne_Finger.” The text is flanked on the left with an icon of a pile of books, and, on the right, a pen.

#CripLit Twitter Chat

New Fiction by Disabled Writers

Saturday, May 19, 2018

4 pm Pacific/ 7 pm Eastern

You are invited to the eleventh #CripLit chat co-hosted by novelist Nicola Griffith and Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project®. For this Twitter chat we are delighted to be joined by Anne Finger. Nicola and Anne will talk about their new novels—both published on Tuesday, May 15—which feature disabled protagonists. They will answer the guideline questions below, but may also ask each other questions, too. What we really hope is that you will ask Anne and Nicola plenty of questions, and add your own answers to some of the questions here. We want a good conversation about excellent fiction featuring disabled characters!

Anne Finger

Anne Finger is an activist, educator, and writer who has long been prominent in the U.S. disability movement. The author of four volumes of fiction and two memoirs, she has served as president of the Society for Disability Studies, the president of Axis Dance Company, and written for Disability Studies Quarterly.

Finger’s first book, the 1988 story collection Basic Skills, contains several disability-themed works, two of them drawing on her childhood experiences of polio. Her 1990 memoir Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth, integrates accounts of her early life, her social activism, and her experiences at the hands of the medical profession. Her 1994 novel Bone Truth tells a story of a woman considering motherhood and struggling to frame a narrative explaining her own life and her difficult parents. With 2006’s Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio, Finger produced an anti-individualist memoir, one that integrates her own experiences and feelings into a wealth of social and historical contexts. The stories collected in her 2009 Call Me Ahab aspire to reveal the breadth of disability culture. Her new novel is A Woman, In Bed. (Cinco Puntas Press, 2018)

(Bio adapted from Josh Lukin’s introduction to his interview with Anne Finger in Wordgathering.)

Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defense, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US.

After her 1993 diagnosis of multiple sclerosis she focused on writing. Her novels are Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always, Hild, and her new one, So Lucky (FSG Originals, 2018). She is the co-editor of the BENDING THE LANDSCAPE series of original queer fiction. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, and Out. Her work has won, among others, the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, and Lambda Literary Award (six times), and is translated into 13 languages.

She has served as a Trustee of the Multiple Sclerosis Association and the Lambda Literary Foundation, is a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Journal of Historical Fictions, and the SF Gateway. She is now a dual US/UK citizen, holds a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University, and lives in Seattle with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge.

(Bio adapted from Nicola Griffith’s website.)

Additional Links

Book Review: A Woman, in Bed, Kirkus, Jan 3, 2018.

Book Review: A Woman in Bed, by Michael Northern, Wordgathering, March 2018.

How Ableism Affects a Book Review, by Nicola Griffith, nicolagriffith.com, April 2, 2018

Saying Hello: Doing Disability My Way, by Carly Findlay, Feminist Writers Festival, April 24, 2018

I Built My Own Godd*mn Castle, by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Tor.com, July 31, 2017.

The Fries Test: On Disability Representation in Our Culture, by Kenny Fries, Medium, Nov 1, 2017

How to Participate

Follow @DisVisibility and @nicolaz on Twitter for updates.

When it’s time, search #CripLit on Twitter for the series of live tweets under the ‘Latest’ tab for the full conversation.

If you might be overwhelmed by the volume of tweets and only want to see the chat’s questions so you can respond to them, check @DisVisibility’s account. Each question will tweeted 6-8 minutes apart.

Check out this explanation of how to participate in a twitter chat by Ruti Regan: https://storify.com/RutiRegan/examplechat

Check out this captioned #ASL explanation of how to participate in a chat by @behearddc

https://www.facebook.com/HEARDDC/videos/1181213075257528/

Introductory Tweets and Questions for 5/19 Chat

Welcome to the #CripLit chat on New Fiction with Disabled Protagonists. This chat is co-hosted by @nicolaz & @disvisibility with guest host @Anne_Finger. Please remember to use the #CripLit hashtag when you tweet.

If you respond to a question such as Q1, your tweet should follow this format: “A1 [your message] #CripLit”

Q1 Please introduce yourselves and share your journey to becoming a writer. Why do you write? #CripLit

Q2 Tell us about your new works—would you label them disability fiction? Why/why not? And what did you hope to achieve? #CripLit

Q3 What were the joys/challenges (physical, emotional, mental/intellectual) of writing a novel with a disabled protagonist? #CripLit

Q4 Before the books were published, did you worry about how they would be received? What worried you? Did anything help? #CripLit

Q5 The books are published. How have they been received? And how do you feel about that? #CripLit

The Fries Test is a test for disability representation in fiction proposed by activist and writer Kenny Fries. To pass the Fries Test, a book-length work must have two or more disabled characters. For more: https://medium.com/@kennyfries/the-fries-test-on-disability-representation-in-our-culture-9d1bad72cc00 #CripLit

The Fries Test: Those characters must have their own narrative purpose other than the education or profit of a nondisabled character. Their disability must not be eradicated by death or a cure. #CripLit

Last year Nicola put out a call on social media for suggestions of books written for adults that pass the test. She made a list. There are only 52 books on the list. Check out the list here: https://nicolagriffith.com/fiction-that-passes-the-fries-test/  #CripLit

Q6 Why do you think so few novels pass the Fries Test? Do you think it’s harder to write and/or publish  #CripLit fiction or nonfiction?

Q7 Do you see parallels between  #CripLit narratives and those of other marginalised groups: queer, POC, working class, etc?

Q8 Do you have any advice for writers wanting to tell #CripLit stories?

Q9 Where should we look to discover new #CripLit fiction? How can we help each other write and publish more?

Thank you for joining our #CripLit chat. Please continue the conversation! A Wakelet will be up tomorrow. Check the #CripLit hashtag. Feel free to contact @DisVisibility @nicolaz with any ideas/feedback

A new So Lucky audio excerpt! With monster!

I particularly like this one! Such fun to read. It’s about nine minutes. FYI, language NSFW…

It’s out May 15 (just two weeks!) from Macmillan Audio, but if you liked this bit, listen to another excerpt on SoundCloud and preorder here:

US: Audible | Libro.fm | Amazon | Google Play | iBooks | Indiebound | B&N
UK: Amazon | iTunes

Recording the So Lucky audiobook

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Photo by Eric Johnson, engineer at Clatter &Din studio

Image description: A woman sitting before a hideously expensive-looking microphone in a sound studio, wearing headphones, and reading from an iPad placed on a music stand which is covered with sound-deadening old carpet. To one side is a wheelchair and a small table.

In February I recorded So Lucky for Macmillan Audio. It was my first professional book narration.

Making it happen

From the minute I wrote the first draft of So Lucky I wanted to narrate the book. I like to read aloud. I used to front a band, and performing my own fiction has always been the next best thing to singing. Whenever a new novel is published I love to read from and talk about the book, followed by audience Q&A; it’s my favourite part of the publication process. I thought Lucky would be a great book to learn on: it’s mine, so I knew how it should sound and how to pronounce all the names; it’s short; and, given that the entire book was a complete surprise to everyone, no one had any set expectations. My editor has heard me perform before, and he was fine with it. It took a little longer to persuade Macmillan Audio but eventually, in February, everything was sorted and off I went to Clatter & Din, a beautifully wheelchair-accessible studio in Seattle’s SoDo neighbourhood, and laid it down in nine hours over three and a half days.

I wasn’t going into this completely ignorant. I’d done my homework and talked to professionals—Janis Ian, whose second GRAMMY was for spoken word narration of her memoir, Society’s Child, was particularly helpful. She talked to me about how often to take breaks, the best way to preserve and extend voice stamina, even what cough drops were most useful.1 I also talked to the producer at Macmillan, Matie Argiropoulos, and she said: Don’t worry, we have authors narrate their own books all the time.2 Just read over the first bit a couple of times aloud—though not at full volume!—and you’ll be fine. Oh, and rest your voice as much as possible.

That last part was what worried me. MS makes me a bit more liable to fatigue than most people, and performance—of any kind, but particularly voice—is notoriously tiring. Given the word count of the book I thought the finished recording would be somewhere between 4 and 4.5 hours (it ended up being 4:52, including credits). But how long would that take to lay down? How many hours would I have to be reading, reading, and reading again?

Cursory research gave me a consensus estimate of two hours per finished hour, or perhaps a little over. The more expert you are, the less time it takes. Matie, being sensibly cautious with a first-timer, booked five days in the studio.

Final pass proofs wouldn’t be done until the beginning of March, far too late for recording. So I made changes on a Word document, upped the font-size to 14-point for ease of reading, then turned that into a PDF, and uploaded it to m old iPad Air. I also sent it to Matie, who forwarded it to the sound engineer. Now we would all be reading from exactly the same document: literally on the same page.

The day before we were to begin I ran through the first forty pages out loud. (Mindful of both Janis and Matie’s advice to save my voice, I whispered rather than using full volume.) It was immediately clear to me that I’d have to add dialogue tags here and there on the fly. What’s obvious on a page is not obvious to a listener. I was used to adding tags in public readings but I wasn’t sure if that was a Done Thing for the official narration. I checked with Matie: Yep, that would be okay. And I could also add directions for things like texts, Tweets, and emails.

It begins…

On the day, Friday, I dressed in studio-friendly clothes (soft non-rustling fabrics, no metal zippers or dangly/jangly jewellery—none of which I wear in everyday life, anyway), loaded my wheelchair backpack with essentials (chamomile tea, water, iPad, two kinds of cough drop, notebook) and with Kelley plunged into the horrors of Seattle rush hour traffic in freezing temperatures. We arrived at the studio just before 9:30 and were greeted by a dog, Elvis, and half a dozen techs, engineers, and back office people with long hair, flannels, fleeces, hats and tats. We all chatted for a bit, explored the break room, got some tea. This was going to work.

The studio I was to work in was enormous, big enough for a large band and maybe a small choir. (Seriously: huge.) It was also cold, but that’s okay with me; I was dressed warmly and I’d be drinking mug after mug of hot tea. I transferred out of my wheelchair to a small, solid, non-creaky chair in front of a music stand covered in sound-deadening carpet. I put my iPad on the stand. Turned it on. Laid out my supplies on the small side table. Then I turned to the hideously expensive-looking microphone, pop-filter, headphones, and shock-proof stands, and then the straightforward-looking input board for the headphones. After a bit of experimentation I found the right heights and angles of chair, iPad, and light, put on the headphones, and started testing.

Eric was in the sound booth, visible behind glass, at the massive board. Kelley sat with her laptop at a desk behind him. (She’d planned to get some work done but in the end mostly listened to the narration.) They could both hear what I said via speaker; I heard Eric through the headphones. I also heard my own voice. And Matie, who was looped in via Skype from New York. It only took a minute for me to adjust the headphone mix to what was comfortable and for Eric to find a rich mix with plenty of range left for the bits of the book that get loud (and parts of it do).

Matie said Hey, asked if I had any questions, spoke about process for a minute—just read naturally; she would interject with corrections; she would also hear when I was getting tired and suggest a break. Then we chatted about accents. No, I said, I wasn’t going to try American accents, except for one old southern women because we need her to sound distinctive. (There are reasons. You’ll see/hear if you read or listen to the book.) She told me to just begin without copyright info or acknowledgements, so I plunged right in.

After about ten sentences Mattie stopped me. Relax. Breathe naturally; we have breath-scrubbing software to take out the worst bits. (I hadn’t known that!) Also, it’s a bit too fast; start again. Surprised—the audiobooks I’ve listened to always seemed to move faster than I would read aloud for an audience, so I’d assumed I should, too—I did. This time everyone was happy. We were off…

It took me about two pages to get the hang of just stopping when I made a mistake, backing up to the beginning of the phrase or sentence to match breath and tone, and doing it again. Every time that happened Eric made a note with his Pencil on his iPad Pro so that the editor, when they got the files, could see where to focus. It began to go very fast. So Lucky is a short book, and I’d been working on the proofs just the week before, so I knew its rhythms by heart.

Matie and I quickly found that we both preferred the same communication style: minimal, but swift and direct. No hedging. To some, perhaps, it might have felt abrupt or too blunt, but it worked perfectly for me: tell me once, clearly, then step back and let me do it. I liked it; I think our mutual understanding made life much easier. Of course, it could be that Matie has done this so many times she can adapt to anyone’s style, in which case, I owe her even more thanks.

We stopped for our first 15-minute break after just 40 minutes. Back again for 35 minutes. Break for 10. Back for another 30. Break for an hour’s lunch: fabulous Indian food and scritching of Elvis. Back again…and this time I started to cough. I tried everything—tea, water, honey, cough drops—but it was no good. We were done for the day. Matie said we were already ahead of schedule so no worries

Halfway home I stopped coughing. I regretted the fact that we hadn’t got more done but, eh, that’s just how things go sometimes.

Over the weekend I practised the southern accent for the old woman: it had to be creepy and distinctive, but not hammy.

On Monday morning I was fine. We arrived at 10 this time, to avoid the worst of the traffic, and started tearing through the text. Eric would stop me if some noise interrupted the recording (at one point I forgot to power down my wheelchair and the batteries in the hubs beeped as they turned off after half an hour; at another, there was some weird howl from the equipment that no one understood) or when he heard mouth noise. I’d sip some tea and go back a sentence or two. Mattie would stop me every now and again when either I made a mistake I didn’t catch—marble for maple, say—or she heard me getting tired. (I’d say that on average we stopped about every 35 minutes for about 10 minutes.) Very occasionally (I think it happened three times) she’d break in and ask for a different intonation. Things were going brilliantly, very fast and smooth.

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The first day. I drank a lot of chamomile tea. Cups and cups and cups. Photo by Kelley Eskridge.

Image description: Woman in profile, wearing headphones and smiling as she sips from a mug of chamomile tea. Just visible on the left are the pop-filter of a microphone and the corner of an iPad on a music stand. Visible behind her are a wheelchair and small table.

We broke for lunch again. Back into the studio…and I started coughing again. And, again, I couldn’t stop. Again, Matie said: No problem, we’re seriously ahead of schedule; go home. Yet again, on the way home I was fine.

I thought about it that night and realised: it was Elvis. I’m officially allergic to dogs but I spend so little time around them and it’s such a minor allergy that I tend to discount it. But audio work is unforgiving.

The next day I had a plan: I would stay away from Elvis at lunch time, and take a Benadryl 20 mins before I got back to the microphone. That would give me a solid 40 mins or more before the Benadryl hit me like a sledgehammer and I start to get stupid and slow. It worked. This time we had a different engineer, and it was a bit less smooth—his style of recording, playback, and commentary were really different—but still went fast. The only problem was that my stomach gurgled a lot. No one was fazed by that; it happens at lot. Matie told me to hug a cushion tight against my belly which reduce the number of gurgles and lessened the volume.

Image description: Two photos of a woman facing the camera from behind a professional studio microphone set up and lit music stand, wearing headphones. On the left, she has that impatient, “Yes, can I help you?” look. On the right, she is smiling.

At one point, I’m sorry to say I don’t remember when, and I recorded the credits: Macmillan, Matie, me. It’s pretty weird announcing my own name as author, but at least I got to say “Narrated by the author” rather than having to say my name twice. Then we went back to the main text. And as I went I got faster and more accurate. If we’d pushed another 30 minutes I think we could have wrapped the book on Day 3. But Matie said, No, let’s come back fresh tomorrow and finish strong. After all, Macmillan had paid for the studio for five days. And maybe tomorrow when we were done we could get some photos for Macmillan to use in publicity? And also she wanted me to think about how I was going to play the ending.

She’s the director, and a professional, so I said I would. But I didn’t; I didn’t have to. I knew exactly how I was going to read it. This was the emotional crux of the whole story; there was only way it could go.

The next day we got there at 10:00 a.m. Yet another new engineer, and I sighed inwardly. This last bit of the book had to go exactly right and it would suck if this engineer was hard to work with. It did take us a moment to find our rhythm but then we did, and it was great. We began. And before I knew it it was upon me, the ending, and it poured out—it roared out—and it was perfect. It was done.

Everyone was silent—I thought maybe my headphones were broken—and then I realised that behind the glass the engineer was wiping his face and Kelley was grinning like a maniac.

How it felt

I have always loved to perform, and that momentary silence at the end from any audience means they liked it. But the exhilaration I felt this time went beyond my expectations. It’s hard to articulate the thrill as those final words tore from my mouth, clothed in the power of the human voice, and took form. They felt like living things. It felt like sorcery. I cannot wait for you to listen to this book, especially the end.

Lessons

What will I do differently next time? The first thing is to buy an iPad Pro, a large one, and a Pencil, so I can mark the text with reminders about accents, emphasis, breath. Doing So Lucky without notes was doable, because it’s mine and because it’s short. But if I wanted to narrate, say, Menewood, the Hild sequel, the length and complexity would absolutely demand notes. And if it were someone else’s book, notes on the page would mean I’d have to spent less time practising.

Next time I’d also avoid dogs. And I’d take my own food to avoid allergies.

And next time I’d like to get the contract signed and sealed before the job begins (this one wasn’t signed until the end of February, two weeks after we wrapped). For So Lucky I had no leverage: I was untried, a beginner. There was no way to get more than Macmillan’s base rate ($250 per finished hour) and their standard boilerplate (though actually we managed to get some of that changed). After all, I wanted it more than they did. Also, they were taking a risk. I might be crap: they might have to eat the cost and start again with a real narrator. But now I’m a known quantity and quality, and it’s not crap.

Preorder

Seriously, I can’t wait for you to hear this. It’s out May 15 from Macmillan Audio, but you can listen to an excerpt on SoundCloud. Then preorder here:

US: Audible | Libro.fm | Amazon | Google Play | iBooks | Indiebound | B&N
UK: Amazon | iTunes

1 Janis recommended Pine Brother Honey Cough Drops. Sadly they didn’t work for me, I’m guessing because of the corn syrup, but the rest of her advice was spot on.

2 Turns out that Macmillan has nonfiction authors read their books all the time; fiction is less usual.

Short excerpt from So Lucky

It came for me in November, that loveliest of months in Atlanta: blue sky stinging with lemon sun, and squirrels screaming at each other over the pecans because they weren’t fooled; they knew winter was coming. While Rose stood by her Subaru, irresolute, a large red-brown dogwood leaf—the same color as her hair—fell on its roof. She hated the mess of leaf fall, had threatened over the years to “cut that damned tree down.” Too late now.

“Mara?” she said. “Are you sure it’s all right?”

After fourteen years of course it wasn’t all right, but, “Yes,” I said, because she would leave anyway.

The shadows under her eyes, the tiny tight lines by her mouth, nearly broke my heart. I hoped the lover whose name I knew perfectly well but refused to use would know what to do when those lines crinkled down like concertinas, as they were doing now.

“You should get going,” I said, before she could cry. “Traffic.”

She shook her head, slow and baffled: How did we get to this?

I turned away. And tripped. A slippery leaf, I thought, if I thought anything at all. A twig. Or that uneven bit of concrete we really should fix. But it wasn’t we anymore. It was just me.

#

Aiyana sat, as she always did, with her feet tucked under her and her close-cropped head dark against the far end of the sofa. I sat catty-corner in the armchair. The physical distance between us was a habit developed four years ago when, one summer evening in a bar after a softball game, sexual awareness unfurled between us. We never spoke of it but we knew that to come within the orbit of each other’s skin-scent and cellular hum could end only one way: falling helplessly, spectacularly into the other’s gravity well, momentarily brilliant like all falling stars, but doomed, because I loved Rose. And this friendship was too precious to burn.

The day had been warm enough for the end of summer, but the sun still set at November times. At twilight I opened the windows and cool air began to move through the house. The dark was not close and scented with humidity, not sappy with bright greens and hot pinks, but spare and smelling as brittle as the straw-colored winter lawn.

Aiyana turned her glass of Pinot, playing with the refraction of the floor lamp’s low light. “So. She really left.”

“She really did.”

Her eyes were velvety but she said nothing because she was leaving, too. Two days before Rose asked for a divorce, Aiyana won funding for postdoc research at the University of Auckland’s Douglas Human Brain Bank.

“You’ve booked your flight?” She closed her eyes slowly, the way she said yes when not trusting herself to speak.

“When do you leave?”

“Two and a half weeks.”

Two and a half weeks. No Rose, no Aiyana. “I need more wine.”

In the kitchen I reached for the second bottle of Pinot already on the counter but then thought, Fuck it, and opened the wine fridge for the Barolo. My hand tingled and I shook it. Static maybe.

When I brought through the wine with fresh glasses she raised her eyebrows.

“If not now, then when?” I had been saving it for a fifteenth anniversary that would never come. I knelt by the coffee table. The cork made a satisfying thock, like the sound of summer tennis. I poured; it smelled of sun-baked dirt. I handed her a glass.

Perhaps because Rose was gone, or Aiyana was leaving, too, which made it safe, or maybe it was the smell of the wine or just that we wanted it that way, our fingertips touched and my belly dropped, and now the music seemed to deepen and the air thicken to cream. Her nostrils flared. We were caught.

Her feet were the color of polished maple, perfect, not like mine, not hard from years of karate. They needed to be touched. I needed to touch them. She sat still, wineglass in her hand, while I bent and brushed the side of one foot with one cheek, then the other. Under the soft, soft skin, tendon and bone flexed like steel hawsers as her toes curled and uncurled. I stroked the foot. I wanted to kiss it.

Her eyes were almost wholly black, fringed with dark-brown pleats. I kept stroking. She closed them slowly. I took the wineglass from her hand and put it on the table.

Our breath was fast, harsh, mutual. My cheek where it had touched her felt more alive than the rest of me and all I could think was how it would feel to lay my whole length against hers. So I did.

#

Josh next door had forgotten to turn off his porch light again and through my bedroom window a slice of light curved over Aiyana’s forehead, cheek, and chin. A face familiar from sweaty afternoons playing softball, drinking beer afterward, and sometimes coffee at the Flying Biscuit. But strange here. Nothing like the face I was used to seeing on that pillow.

“What?”

She didn’t smell like Rose, either. I slid an arm over her belly, breathed her in, then drew back and began to stroke in lazy circles. “Are you still going to Greensboro first?” Her grandmother lived there. Nana was old enough to be her great-grandmother, and to a woman of that generation, a granddaughter leaving for New Zealand was goodbye, a one-way trip.

“I can’t think when you do that.”

“Are you?”

“In ten days.”

I dipped my finger into her belly button, in and out. “Will you come back?”

“It’s just Greensboro, babe.”

I butted her arm. “From New Zealand.” The fellowship was for one year, extensible to two on mutual approval.

She arched so that her belly pushed into my hand and her head moved deeper into the pillow, and shadow. “Give me some incentive.”

(From So Lucky. Used with permission of MCD x FSG Originals. Copyright © 2018 by Nicola Griffith.)

See what others have to say about So Lucky.

Listen to an audio excerpt.

Preorder in paper, digital, or audio formats:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD x FSG Originals), 15 May 2018, 192 pp
US: Indiebound | Amazon | iBooks | Barnes and Noble | Google Play | Libro.fm
UK: Amazon | iTunes

See where I’ll be reading and signing in support of the book in the next couple of months.

Animated book cover for So Lucky!

 

Image description: Book cover in matte black with the title “So Lucky,” and the author’s name “Nicola Griffith,” in big uppercase type rendered as burning paper. In smaller, brighter letters between title and author is, “A novel,” and, below the writer’s name, “Author of Hild.” It is animated so that orange flecks of burning paper drift across the image from lower left to upper right and the flame letters move subtly, as dying embers do.

I love this animation of the cover done by the amazing graphics people at FSG. (I added the sound, so don’t blame them for the poor quality…) Preorder (including audiobook—narrated by me!) here:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD x FSG Originals), 15 May 2018, 192 pp
US: Indiebound | Amazon | iBooks | Barnes and Noble | Google Play
UK: Amazon | iTunes

So Lucky audiobook available for preorder

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Image description: Cover of So Lucky audiobook—matte black with title, “So Lucky” and author, “Nicola Griffith,” rendered in paper burning to grey with orange flame—with earbuds attached.

The audiobook for So Lucky—narrated by me!—it’s now available for preorder. Listen to an excerpt then go buy:

US: Audible | Google Play | Barnes & Noble | Amazon | iBooks

UK: Audible | Amazon | Waterstones | iBooks

If you want to hear more before you buy, then come to one of my readings.

In a week or so I’ll write a juicy blog post about how it was to be in the studio to do the recording. Meanwhile, enjoy that wee bit on SoundCloud.

Columbus, OH: 4/18 @3:45pm

On Wednesday April 18, with artist Riva Lehrer, I’ll be giving the Ethel Louise Armstrong Lecture on Disability Arts and Culture at Ohio State University’s 18th Annual Multiple Perspectives Conference at 3:45pm. The title of the lecture is “Disability in Art and Life.” We’ll be talking about our books, how they are intertwined with our disability and culture, and how our lives intersect with each other.

We’ve got some pretty exciting stuff lined up. Riva will be reading from and talking about her memoir-in-progress, Golem Girl (Oneworld) and I’ll be reading from and talking about my seventh novel, So Lucky (FSG, May 2018). Then we’ll have a staged conversation about our thoughts on all kinds of things. Then we’ll do an audience Q&A. We could talk about theory, of course, but we won’t. By this time, we’re guessing the academics will be stuffed to bursting with Disability Studies papers, panels, and policies, and might welcome two friends simply talking with passion about their art and their disabled lives. We’re also storytellers and entertainers—we know how to engage an audience—so join us!

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Riva (left) and me talking about making her portrait of me. Photos by Jennifer Durham.

Image description: Black and white photo of two women, Riva Lehrer on the left and Nicola Griffith on the right, sitting behind a table. Both are holding microphones. Nicola is saying something that is making Riva howl with laughter.

Listen to me narrate the So Lucky audiobook

I just got finished files for the So Lucky audiobook. Holy shit! I can’t wait for you to hear this!

From the minute I finished the book, I wanted to narrate it. I love to read for audiences. I used to front a band and performing my own fiction has always been the next best thing to singing. So I thought I knew how it would be to do the whole book in a studio. I was so wrong—but I’ll tell that story in another blog post.

Meanwhile, I’ll just say it was thrilling to read the entire book aloud the way it was meant to be. Absolutely electrifying to feel the words I imagined come alive in the air, clothe themselves in the power of the human voice, and take shape. There are parts of this book that, on the page, are frightening; aloud, they are terrifying. I am grinning so hard! The ending, especially, is— Well, you’ll just have to wait and see.

Here’s the very beginning. It starts quietly enough…

Macmillan have only just delivered their assets to retailers so the digital version is not yet available through all platforms (notable exception: Google Play). But it won’t be long, so stay tuned.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD x FSG Originals), 15 May 2018
US: Indiebound | Amazon | iBooks | Barnes and Noble | Google Play
UK: Amazon | iTunes

How ableism affects a book review

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It’s been my policy to never comment for the record on book reviews except to correct errors of fact. I’m making an exception for So Lucky‘s first review because it epitomises the bias faced by novels about disabled characters written by disabled authors and it’s time this bias was called out.

Look at the first sentence of the So Lucky review:

This affecting and autobiographical novel…recounts

In How to Suppress Women’s Writing Joanna Russ lays out eleven methods to belittle the work of women (and, I would argue, of members of other oppressed groups). Labelling fiction as ‘autobiographical’ could be assigned to either Denial of Agency or Pollution of Agency. From a male-identified author (for example, Karl Ove Knausgaard), autobiographical fiction is Art. From a female-identified author, it is merely a transcription of real life with no creativity involved: Oh, she wrote it, but it’s not really art because it’s the story of her life. She just, y’know, transcribed what was actually happening.1

This same journal reviewing So Lucky has reviewed my previous novels.2 Here are some words and phrases plucked from those reviews:

Griffith opens her latest

Griffith is enthralling

Griffith’s work is hugely satisfying

Griffith goes boldly

Griffith’s compelling prose

Griffith breathes life into an appealing heroine

These are reviews of novels about nondisabled characters written (as far as the reviewer is concerned) by a nondisabled author: Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always, and Hild (I can’t find the review of Ammonite). In these reviews, the agent is always ‘Griffith’, that is, the author. The author is acknowledged as the one responsible for creation and therefore the reader’s reaction.

But this review immediately sidesteps the author and names the ‘autobiographical novel’ as the actor and agent. When both author and protagonist are disabled it’s apparently the novel itself that affects the reader. My role as a novelist is denied. My expertise is dismissed.

Further on we get this:

the end product is a plausible warts-and-all portrayal

Again, the reviewer suggests that the subject, the doer, if you like, is not the author. Rather, it is the story of struggle and disability that evokes a response in the reader, not the author’s prose. In this review, rather than creating the story I become the story. It is not what I do that matter, but who I am. And what I am in this assessment is Other.

Now let’s turn to the description of the disabled protagonist, Mara. Her agency, too, is diminished. She does things ‘accidentally’ rather than, as I frame it in the novel, in a vicious rage. Her quite conscious and deliberate choice in the book, which becomes an almost-fatal error, is based on a crucial character flaw, yet is dismissed as a

subplot involving crimes against the disabled [that] could have been dispensed with

Agency appears to be incompatible with disability. A ‘meaningful’ life is also apparently incompatible, and so the book becomes about Mara’s ‘struggle’ to have a life ‘despite’ her MS. This ‘struggle’ is what apparently makes So Lucky ‘affecting’—struggle is used twice, in a 200-word review3. According to the reviewer, readers won’t be impressed or wanting more or thrilled by my hugely satisfying work and compelling prose, they will be ‘affected’ and ‘inspired’ by Mara’s disability.4

Inspired is literally the last word of the review.

In 2014 activist Stella Young coined the term ‘inspiration porn’.5 Inspiration porn is the portrayal of a disabled person as an object of inspiration for the benefit of nondisabled people. By objectifying disabled people, inspiration porn dehumanises us. Inspiration porn renders us Other.

So Lucky is not inspiration porn.6 It is reviewed as such here because of the unacknowledged, unconscious ableism of the reviewer. The reviewer may have felt benevolent towards both the author and the book, their bias might be implicit rather than explicit7, yet the review offers a reading of the novel in which the agency and humanity of both author and protagonist are diminished, denied, and dismissed.

Do better, critics.

1 Well, no. As with all my novels, I use elements of my own life but Mara’s story is no more my story than Aud’s in The Blue Place, Lore’s in Slow River, or Hild’s in, well, Hild.

2 I won’t name the journal. I’m not inclined to send them traffic.

3 And let’s not even mention ‘medical adversity,’ because, of course, what Mara is actually dealing with is the effects of the social model of disability. Her central difficulty is ableism—her own, and others’—not just illness.

4 This is the kind of review a queer novel could have expected 60 years ago in which the protagonist is remarkable only as a pitiful creature crying out to be treated as human and relying on the kindness and forbearance of strangers.

5 If after Young’s TEDx talk you want to know more about this, Wikipedia has some references that will get you started.

6 According to the disabled critics who have read it, So Lucky is ‘a new wave of disability story’ (Susan Nussbaum, winner of the PEN/Bellwether Award), a ‘tour de force of the onset of disability’ (Steven Brown, the co-founder of the Institute of Disability Culture), a ‘story of what we all share’ (Kenny Fries, multiple award-winning author and creator of the Fries Test), and a ‘hallucinatory exploration of the body, reality, and identity’ that is ‘disorienting, destabilizing, and game-changing’ (Riva Lehrer, this year’s winner of the President’s Award from the Society for Disability Studies, an artist whose works hangs in the National Portrait Gallery). These are well known, extremely well-respected scholars, artists, and cultural critics. They understand when a book is doing something exciting and different. So what game-changing narrative strategies does So Lucky employ to achieve this innovation? Well, wouldn’t it be lovely if a critic could get past tired ableist assumptions to ponder that question…

7 If I thought it would make a difference I’d ask reviewers to visit Harvard’s Project Implicit, take the implicit bias test for disability, and post their results along with the review.

Presiding over the heat death of the universe

I’ve lived the freelance life since I moved to this country 29 years ago. Mostly I’m just fine with that; I’ve learnt to shrug and roll with the emotional ups and downs that come with the territory. But I become hyper-aware of how precarious freelance life is when a series of Bad Things1 occur and my psychotic sense of self-belief teeters. I suspect most creators go through this.

I spend years at a time knowing with rock-solid certainty that life is good, that everything’s going swimmingly, and all will be well. Then, Whap! in the space of a day that towering belief falls, and I convince myself that, Aaaargh! I’ve lost my touch! My career is OVER! And from there I gallop recklessly up the ladder of assumption until I’m living in a paper bag under the bridge eating cat food, or presiding over the heat death of the universe.

Most of the time I consider myself relatively rational2 but there’s something about freelance, I-make-things-with-my-brain life that occasionally pushes a person over the edge into superstitious meltdown. The first time I went through this was when my first novel, Ammonite , which had already won a Lambda Literary Award and the Tiptree Award was short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke Award (I’m telling you this not to boast but to show just how fucking irrational what happened next was). On the day of the award I was lounging about on the grass of our Atlanta back garden with a cat dozing on my lap. It was a lovely April day, smelling of honeysuckle and jasmine, threaded with birdsong, and the sunshine just right. I was smiling at the flowers, occasionally checking that the phone was to hand, waiting for news of my win–because of course I was going to win; Ammonite was on a roll. The award was mine; I deserved it. I had to win, because clearly that’s what the universe intended; top of the pile was my rightful place. But in the midst of this truly gorgeous day, I started to worry: What if I didn’t win? I might never win another award for Ammonite. And what would that mean? I might never win another award for a book again. And somehow might morphed into Oh-god-never-ever, and My career would be over… And then the phone rang and, with a sense of fate, I heard that, yes, I’d lost. That was it; the world had gone horribly wrong. My run of luck was over. I would never get it back. A vast shadow fell over the day and I mourned the end of my professional life before it had had a chance to really flower.

Now I look back on the moment and while I want to howl with laughter at the ridiculous young me I also respect what she went through. Because even today, every few years, I go through some version of it. It never lasts long–two days after that phone call in April I was happily back at work on the copyedits of Slow River–but it can happen anytime.

Sometimes I go through it at the start of a new novel: Oh my god I don’t know how to write anymore! My MS is rotting my brain! I’ve lost it, lost whatever talent I used to have… (As though writing were a lucky coin could that could fall out of a hole in your pocket.) Sometimes I go through it at the pre-publication stage: This is it, I’ve finally been relegated to the Publishing B Team; no one knows the book is coming, no one will pay attention, it will sink without trace. It doesn’t happen with every book, but I know that at some point, with some book, I’ll go through it again.

Illness, pain, stress make all this worse of course but they’re not the cause. The cause is just that weird thing called art, having to live in the undefined place, to hold strong opinions lightly, to balance two or or more opposing ideas at once. There are studies showing that on a daily basis willpower fatigues rather like a muscle; after a while you just can’t do it anymore and have to give up until you can hit the reset button (usually sleep will do it). I think the determined self-belief that allows an artist to decide that, Yes, it’s just shit I made up but people will pay their hard-earned money for this crazy notion that no one else has ever written before occasionally just quits and that’s when we fall into the abyss. The loss (for me at least) is always fleeting but every time–every single time–I think, No, this time it’s true…

It’s entirely possible that part of it springs from childishness: But Mummy I WANT this acclaim/award/cheque, I DESERVE it, I’m SPECIAL! And of course, yes, I am special. So are you. So is every single one of us. But there’s always a place where the artist’s necessary and almost psychotic self-belief expands into the untenable belief that the universe must and will warp itself around us; that we are the centre of all things. And the sudden pendulum swing is a necessary correction, a reset. (Otherwise we bcome like those dickhead writers we’ve all met.) We need both, I think, to make this thing called art and to remain reasonable human beings. Or at least I do. No doubt there are very many super sensible, unvaryingly sane artists out there. And congratulations; I’m glad it works for you (really). But for those of you like me: Hey, when emotionally you are living in the paper bag or watching the sun dim, don’t beat yourself up, open a beer or make a cup of tea, read a good book, and just wait. It’ll change. It always does.

1 To be clear, I’m fine. But I’ve witnessed two horrible accidents in the last three weeks, both (conveniently for my superstitious brain) connected to book stuff. One, involving a family member, came within a hair’s-breadth of, as our internist said to the patient, “Leaving you on a ventilator.” One result was that Kelley and I couldn’t go to Florida for the first scheduled reading from So Lucky. The second was on Monday, on the way to my second scheduled event for So Lucky, a PNBA Happy Hour at Queer/Bar: we were cruising slowly (probably no more than 15 miles an hour) for a place to park when an SUV coming through the intersection ahead of us got t-boned by another car. The SUV rolled, turned, and skidded on its roof right at us. We had to get into reverse super fast, and even so the crushed and shattered vehicle came to rest just 6 feet from our bumper. So now So Lucky is clearly The Book of Accidents because of course two data points make a trend, and it’s all about me :: eyeroll ::

2 For, y’know, a writer.