Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 58

OtherLife debuts San Diego on Thursday!

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Lifted wholesale from Kelley’s blog – with permission which I get because, hey, we’re married…

I am counting down to the North American premiere of OtherLife in San Diego on Thursday Oct 5 at 8:00 PM. The chance to see the film on a big screen with an audience is a huge payoff for me – something I’ve dreamed about for a long time.

Last night at my house:

Me: I hope lots of people come to the screening.

Nicola: They will.

Me: What if they don’t?

Nicola: Then we’ll have a lot of room.

Me: *whimpers*

As much as I like my space, I earnestly hope that Thursday’s screening will be stuffed with audience. If you’re there, please make sure to say hello. I will be the one wearing the WTF Is Happening Right Now look. I’ll be pretty easy to find.

It will be a party! Join us!

Back from a break

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Kelley and I have just got back from a few days on Orcas Island with a friend. Above was the view from the house we rented: late afternoon when we first arrived, and late morning on one of the many perfect days following. The others wrote a lot; I just stared at the water, read, and thought. Sometimes the three of us would go to Moran State Park (home of Mountain Lake: nurse logs and fishing herons), or to Darvill’s, the lovely little bookshop and café in East Sound. Kelley and I made our own expedition to Olga. (If ever you’re at Catkin Café, I can recommend both the skirt steak with salad—both steak and salad leaves were pretty much the Platonic ideal of their kind—and the potato and leek soup. The walnut and carrot bread is also pretty damn good; and, now that I think about it, the English Breakfast tea—piping hot water and proper tea leaf!)

I took binoculars and watched seals and heron and deer. (Black-tail deer were everywhere; too many, really. The island needs a couple of lynx or some other top predator.) But mainly I just zoned out and ate a lot. Actually we all ate a lot: we all love food, and cooking, and wine. We stayed up late by the fire, talking of writing, love, and life.

But mainly I did nothing. It’s the first time I’ve done nothing for a quite a while. I needed it. I don’t think I’d realised just how depleted I am after beginning and completing a PhD, and writing and editing a new and unexpected book, in a single year. But this trip helped me understand just how thorough the depletion is. So I’m going to be careful with my resources for the next few months. Expect me to start saying no to a lot of things…

 

Punching Nazis

There’s been a lot of conversation about whether or not it’s acceptable to punch a Nazi. That, dear reader, is a matter for your conscience. However, if you find yourself about to punch a Very Bad Person, it might be a good idea to know how.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I used to teach women how. So here are half a dozen pointers:

Don’t hit bone on bone. If you absolutely must, make sure you use your strong bone (your elbow) on their weak bone (their nose) rather than, say, a fist to the point of the jaw. But it’s even better to use bone against soft tissue. An elbow to the neck, a fist to the kidney, a sword finger to the solar plexus, a forearm between the legs, a heel to the side of the knee. It’s good to go for something disabling so they can’t chase you afterwards. Knees and throats are very useful for this: if they can’t breathe they can’t run; they can’t run if their patella’s gone, either (unless they have a wheelchair handy—and perhaps I’ve just lived a sheltered life but I’ve never met a Nazi in a wheelchair).
Get close. You have to be a lot closer than you think. If you’re hitting someone you have to be right inside their space. Maybe even touching if they’re tall and you’re not. Try it with a cushion; if you’re not used to hitting things you’ll be surprised.
Hit on the out-breath. Preferably with a shout. Sound will make you feel better and them feel worse.
Hit fast. Power comes from speed and mass. So you could wrap your fingers around a roll of quarters, or you could hit faster. In a perfect world, you’d do both: whip that fist/elbow/knife-hand through space. (It’s very satisfying.)
Hit through the target. Imagine you’re swinging a baseball bat—right through the ball. If you’re going for that full-arm swing from below, imagine your target wearing their balls for earrings…
Hit more than once. One blow is rarely enough. I’d say three minimum, depending on the damage you want to inflict and how fast you want to get out of there. But my favourite strike is a one-two combo, so mileage varies.

There are all kinds of other things to remember—put your thumb on the outside of your closed first; if you use a weapon make sure it’s an ordinary object (a comb, a book, a key); and always have an escape route—but those six are enough to get you started.

Workshop waitlist

The one-day workshop I’m teaching for Clarion West on Sunday, 8 October, is full, but it’s still possible to add a couple of names to the waiting list. Given that there’s almost always a cancellation or two due to the vagaries of life, the first couple of people on that list stand a very good chance of getting in. Apply here for the waiting list.*

The workshop is called What Readers Like—And Why:

Why do readers respond more strongly to some fiction than others? How does a writer immerse a reader into the protagonist’s world and persuade them to feel as the protagonist feels, see what she sees? Using examples, you’ll discuss the neuroscience behind what makes a particular word, sentence, or paragraph more likely to evoke empathy in a reader. Then with writing exercises and discussion you’ll learn how to analyze fiction—yours and others’—to discover how to make it more powerful. Prepare for this workshop with assigned reading and viewing, and come ready to learn how to make your readers’ hearts beat faster.

Only a bit of the workshop will be neuroscience; there’ll be a lot of stuff about genre and reader expectations, about awe and joy and reversals, about the sense of recognition. Also many other things I haven’t figured out yet. Most of it will be learning what makes great fiction gripping, and how to check your own work to make sure you’re enticing your reader rather than repulsing them. So it’s not just about what makes great story but also what makes a reader think, Ugh! and throw the book at the wall. We’re all different, though, so I’m expecting some of the discussion to be, y’know, lively…

One more thing. Until Clarion West commits to a timetable for accessible summer workshops, this will be the last thing I teach for them. This may or may not have any bearing on whether or not you apply.

* There’s still space in two other workshops, taught by J.M. Sidorova and Kij Johnson.

Disability Literature Consortium

The Disability Literature Consortium (DLC) is a group of disability journals—Breath & Shadow, Kaleidoscope, Deaf Poets Society, Pentimento, and Wordgathering—who have come together to provide a booth at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference to showcase the work of disabled writers. They plan to staff a booth at AWP 2018 in Tampa where they will display not only their own journals but books from other publishers.

In order to fund that booth, the DLC are raising funds on Generosity (the non-profit part of Indiegogo). I’ve already contributed. I hope you will, too.

If you want to know more about the missions of the journals that make up the DLC, take a look at the Storify of #CripLit’s Editor Roundtable held in January this year. Then go give some money!

More thoughts on women warriors

Here’s an interesting addition to the debate about the Viking warrior grave in Birka I discussed yesterday on Gemæcce. The author, Professor Judith Jesch, makes some good points about the overall gaps in the journal authors’ argument and presentation. Go read it. She is not wrong about many of them. I agree, from the supporting evidence offered (or lack of it), that there is no way to know for sure that the bones tested are the bones originally pictured. However, the evidence on balance suggests, in my opinion, that they are. I wish I were an anatomist; I wish I could assume that the original illustration is accurate. Perhaps then I could make a guess about the likely biological sex of skeleton pictured.

Of course I can make a guess—that, yes, it’s female—but I have no confidence in that guess. I’m an amateur. I can stare at pictures of brow ridges and mastoid processes until I’m blue in the face; I’m still just guessing. And Jesch is not wrong, either, when she suggests:

I have always thought (and to some extent still do) that the fascination with women warriors, both in popular culture and in academic discourse, is heavily, probably too heavily, influenced by 20th- and 21st-century desires.

I’m quite willing to admit that my perspective on the issue of women warriors in a heroic society is coloured by desire: I want it to be possible.

However, if the bones are in fact the ones pictured in the grave, and if at some point in the future more attention is paid to sword-grip circumference and bone development (were the hands large enough to grip the sword? were the wrists sufficiently developed to wield it?) and the consensus is that, yes, biologically it was possible for the individual to have fought with edged weapons, then either we say: It was a woman warrior, or we say: We should go back and delete all attributions to warrior status based on grave goods. Because we either follow one standard/set of assumptions or we discard them.

There’s a lot more to be said on this one, I think. I’ll look forward to hearing how the conversation develops.

Viking warrior proved to be a woman

A Viking-age warrior from Birka, Sweden, long assumed to be male was just confirmed by genomics to be female. See my post about this over on Gemæcce.

 

PhD thesis officially archived

My doctoral thesis, Norming the Other: narrative empathy via focalised heterotopia, has just been deposited in the Anglia Ruskin University digital archive, ARRO:

http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/702162/

The link is a persistent digital identifier and won’t break.

However, if for citation purposes you prefer an actual DOI, I’ve also deposited it with the Humanities Commons:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6C18X

Both are exactly the same archival PDF. It’s also available directly from this site:

https://nicolagriffith.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/griffith_norming-the-other.pdf

If you have questions about the PhD you might find some of them answered in the five-part piece I wrote about the process.

If you still have questions, I’m happy to chat via email.

Join me and Kelley in San Diego Oct 5 for North American premiere of OtherLife

On Thursday Oct 5, Kelley’s beautiful SF movie, OtherLife, has its North American premiere at the San Diego International Film Festival. We’ll be there, and we want as many people as humanly possible to be there with us. It screens at 8:00 pm and Kelley will be on stage to do a Q&A afterwards. You can buy tickets here.

We’ll also be at the opening night party on Wednesday, wearing Filmmaker badges, because not only is OtherLife based on Kelley’s novel Solitaire (“A stylistic and psychological tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review) but she’s credited as one of three screenwriters.* So this is a big deal for us; we are extremely excited. And I’m very proud. It would please us very much if you come help us celebrate.

As Kelley says on on her blog:

SDIFF is one of the best independent film festivals in the US, with over 2,000 submissions a year. So we’re thrilled And it’s our first chance to see OtherLife on a big screen with an audience. Will I be there? FUCK, YES. I AM SO EXCITED. I haven’t stopped dancing around the house since I heard the news.

Nicola and I will attend the screening on Thursday Oct 5 at 8:00 PM, and I’ll do a Q&A afterward. Please join us! It will be fun! And please help me spread the word. It would be wonderful to have a full house, see old friends, make new ones, and to hear from all of you what you think of our film.

It also screens on Sunday Oct 8 at 10:30 am, but we have other commitments and can’t be there. But if you can, go! It’s getting great reviews…

*Credits don’t always tell the whole story.

Two rings: 24 years and 4 years

Today is our double wedding anniversary.

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Photo by Mark Tiedemann

Image description: Colour photo of two white women’s hands wearing new gold bands, touching. White background with flowers out of focus.

On September 4, 1993 we got married in our back yard in Atlanta surrounded by family and friends from various countries. It had no legal force, but great emotional power. We took it very seriously: we were the first same-sex couple to register at Macy’s the first to be announced in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (and believe me, I have stories about both firsts). We thought it would be our only wedding.

Then, on the 25th anniversary of me and Kelley meeting, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down DOMA and same-sex marriage became real overnight.

Two months later, on September 4, 2013 we got married for the second and final time right here in Seattle. This time we had a judge.

Now we wear two rings:

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Photo by Jennifer Durham

Image description: Black and white photo of one white woman using two hands to enfold the hand of another. Both are wearing two gold bands on their ring finger; the outer rings are new and shining.