A Miracle Built on a Moment: a 37-year love story in photos

June 26, 1988, East Lansing, MI: I met Kelley and fell instantly in love. I love her still—in some ways more than ever, because I know her better. It’s also the 10th anniversary of Obergefell v Hodges. I’d intended to write a post about that but I find the post I wrote last year says everything I want to say: it explains without explaining just why that Supreme Court decision was so important. So here it is again—I just updated a little and added another picture at the end.

The Moment

37 years ago today I met Kelley. 37 years ago today I fell instantly and irrevocably in love. Most people find that difficult to believe. I understand. I’ll say only that if you ever have every cell in your body stop, shiver, and align in one direction like iron filings around a magnet, you will know. It remains the oddest, most powerful and inarguable thing that’s ever happened to me. A done deal, the work of a moment. And absolutely non-negotiable.

37 years later, here we are, living the life that bloomed from that moment. Every day is a miracle.

Does this mean our life together was inevitable and easy? It was not. Against that simple, visceral knowing was ranged every rational, practical and institutional argument in the world.1 So although the connection, commitment, and (so far) life-long bond happened in an instant, it took 18 months to make it possible for me to move from the UK to Kelley in the US, and another 5 years of browbeating the world to make the US State Department declare it to be in the National Interest to grant me, an out lesbian with no money, connections, degree, or job offer, but with a chronic degenerative illness and no visible means of support, a waiver to live permanently in this country.2

37 Years: A Photostory

I met Kelley in the corridor of a dorm at MSU in East Lansing, Michigan. It was 104º with no air-conditioning. We were there for Clarion—I was their very first foreign student. I’ve told the story elsewhere. But the bottom line was: we had six weeks together and then I had to go back to my life—family, partner, job, mortgage—in the UK with no practical hope of coming back…

While we were apart. Kelley went to partiesI worked every hour the universe sent teaching to earn $$

That autumn we were apart, in 1988, was very, very hard. Kelley was working at GE Computer Services, going to parties, and making friends in the Atlanta queer community. In Hull, I was grief-stricken (my little sister died), stressed out of my mind (in love with two women on opposite sides of the Atlantic), and frantically earning money to get back to the US. As well as my actual job as a caseworker at a street-drugs agency (basically doing social work for people using heroin and meth), I was teaching women’s self defence as many evenings and weekends as I could. I hadn’t really started to get sick yet…

1989—what is love without a cat?

Then I did get sick. And I lost weight. But then, finally, I managed to get back to Kelley. I’m not sure we let go of each other for more than 5 minutes at a time the whole seven weeks I was in the US. This Polaroid was taken in Tampa, where Kelley introduced me to her mother and stepfather.

This time when I left her it was to return to the UK one last time, sell my house, leave my partner of 10 years, and say goodbye to my family. It took three months. It was hard.

We lived in a brand new apartment way outside Atlanta: Duluth, Georgia. Then moved closer into the city with a rented house in Decatur. Finally, with the advance I got from Ammonite, we had just enough to put down a scarily skimpy deposit and risk an adjustable rate mortgage on a little house in Atlanta itself. At some point I would either sort immigration and we’d move somewhere not so damned hot, or the immigration thing would completely implode and we’d have to leave the country. Either way, we’d be selling before the interest rate jumped too much. It was worth the risk. But money was tight, immigration was daunting, and my mysterious fatigue was not getting better.

Stressed and tired we find refuge in each other. Photo by Mark Tiedemann.

In this photo, taken in 1992, the strain is showing. We were seeing lawyer after lawyer and not getting the immigration answers we needed. I was having medical test after medical test, ditto. We knew it was serious when I began to limp. Six months later, I had my diagnosis: MS.

Six months after that, we got married. I wore long sleeves because of all the IV bruises on my arms. But I was so happy that day. I don’t think we let go of each other at all except to hug other people. It was a home-made wedding; the whole thing, excluding the rings, cost $500.

I started to let my hair grow

Although the marriage had zero legal force it had a profound effect on me. Weirdly, that manifested in me beginning to grow my hair. (Something about being settled? Being a wife? It’s a mystery.)

Now we play grownup, or maybe dress-up: Southern Ladies Who Lunch

Anyway, by the next spring it was long enough to spray and pin into an up-do for a big ol’ Southern party at my editor’s father’s house: everyone who was anyone in Atlanta society was there. It was like playing dress-up. It was playing dress up.

Then I sold another book (Slow River). I got my Green Card. And we moved to Seattle.

1997 outside a friend’s house in Seattle

1997. Seattle. We are much more at home. Kelley has a fab job at Wizards of the Coast and I’ve published two novels and sold a third (The Blue Place). We have a lovely little house in Wallingford (that’s a friend’s house in the background). We’re bursting with happiness. One fly in the ointment: my hair. It’s long enough to plait, very heavy and very annoying. Here it’s scragged out of the way; I am sick of it.

1999, Monteplier VT2000, Queens Grill, Queen Elizabeth II

1999. Vermont. I’ve started to shorten my hair; this was also th eyear I started using a cane. One year later, in 2000, I’ve chopped it all off and bleached it white. This is us in the Queen’s Grill onboard QE2: a transatlantic crossing that was our 40th birthday present to ourselves. We’re both wearing long dresses because they take First Class seriously on that boat. (Next time: a tux! At the time I didn’t know anywhere I could get one.)

About to dance the Freedom Fandango2002 at the PKD Awards

2000 was a big year. My MS was increasing upon me and Kelley cashed in her stock options. Life was uncertain. We had no idea how many years of good life I, and so we, had left. Live life now, is what we decided. Kelley quit her job and we threw an enormous party—rented out a whole nightclub in Pioneer Square—called it the Freedom Fandango, and invited everyone we knew.

I underwent an experimental course of chemo. Felt brilliant. Felt terrible. Then stabilised. The second photo was taken after I’d stabilised again: me and Kelley at the PK Dick Awards with our friends Mark and Donna. I was there to support Mark, who was nominated, and to accept the award for Steve Baxter if he won—which he did. I was about to publish the second Aud novel, Stay. Kelley was about to publish her brilliant novel Solitaire .

‘Stabilised’ is always a relative term when it comes to MS. It’s actually a course of endless decline. By 2004 it was clear we would have to leave our beloved house-with-all-the-steps in Wallingford and find something more accessible. So here in 2005 is one last shot of Kelley making hummus in the kitchen of our old house. One of me in the kitchen of our new single-level house a month later in Broadview. Kelley has published Solitaire and just started the longest-ever negotiation for the movie rights. I’m working on Always.

Los Angeles: Lammy #6We were up late...Celebrating 20 years

May 2008 in Los Angeles: winning my sixth Lambda Literary Award (for And Now We Are Going to Have a Party). Then the day after in the bar feeling a leetle rough. Then June in Seattle: a dinner party at home to celebrate our 20th anniversary. I am about to start writing Hild. Kelley is writing the screenplay for OtherLife.

These are all taken between 2009 and 2012. The black and white one by Jennifer Durham is me being delirious with delight at getting an offer from FSG for Hild.

2013. General happiness, and then, a few months later, a fully legal wedding on the 20th anniversary of our first nothing-legal wedding. All these photos by Jennifer Durham, too.

2013, as co-Guests of Honour at Westercon.

In 2013 Kelley and I were co-Guests of Honour at Westercon. It was fabulous. We turned it into a mini Clarion reunion and had a splendid time. All that year, and the next, we travelled: a US hardcover tour for Hild, then a UK tour, then a US paperback tour, culminating in Washington DC for Kelley’s father’s 80th birthday.

In 2015 and 2016 I found myself in the news, a lot. In 2015 it was the unexpected whirlwind around the Literary Bias data I put together. In 2016 it was the even more unexpected resurrection of Anita Corbin’s Visible Girls series and then Visible Girls Revisited. It’s pretty weird being recognised for a random moment 43 years ago.

By this time I’d transitioned to using a wheelchair. I was ill and tired. Kelley was working staggering hours as a freelancer. We were dealing with a Lot of Family Stuff. This photo was taken by Anita for the new series; I don’t like the photo, perhaps because I feel as though I look heavy. (I’m not talking about physical weight but emotional weight.) And I was unhappy about the wheelchair. It’s hard to explain: I’m not unhappy about using a wheelchair—the wheelchair has given me a kind of freedom I had lost. I was unhappy about being posed with the wheelchair. It felt…weird. Sort of fetishistic. In fact I’ve cropped this photo because in the original the chair became the focal point.

2019. © Anita Corbin as part of the Visible Girls Revisited series..

Then it was the pandemic, and we went nowhere and took only endless photos of experiments with home hair cuts.

Then, woo-hoo, we started going to conventions again—specifically ICFA. Here we are in 2022 and 2023, loving the sun and the company.

2022. Blurry photo by the pool2023. A less blurry photo on the other side of the pool

Spear won awards and nominated for a bazillon more, and Menewood came out. And here we are at the World Fantasy Convention last year.

Nov 2023, WFC. We’re in the bar—shocking, I know—I’m off camera to the leftNov 2023, WFC. We’re in the mass signing—Kelley’s off camera to the right

And here we are this time last year at the same event—Kelley at the pre-game wine-and-nibbles (I was doing the meet-and-greet with board members and donors at the other end of the room) and me on the stage an hour later.3

Kelley listening to friends talk while I sing for my supper at the other end of the roomMe on stage getting intense about queerness in the Early Medieval while Kelley watches from the audience

We’re both tired. We’ve been through a lot of external stresses the last couple of years.4 But as you can see between the photos of te year before and then last summer we were beginning to get a lot of that sorted and the strain is easing. And, as always, we find our refuge each in the other—and the strength inside ourselves to be strong for the other when they can’t.

This last 12 months has been more difficult in health terms—but, again, recently the news has been encouraging—and, again, other stressful parts of our lives are improving. (Apart from, y’know, the occasional, Hey, we nearly died moment. And the even more recent week where every single one of our appliances—washer, dryer, stove, fridge—died at once.)

But also in the last 12 months some amazing things have happened: I was inducted into the SFF Hall of Fame, the Aud books have been republished in the US (and this time next week the UK), and earlier this month I SFWA honoured me with the 41st Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. Kelley and I were in Kansas City together and did a lovely joint presentation as well as enjoying another mini Clarion reunion. Here we are at the banquet, before they let in the awards audience and before I go up on stage. The food, sadly, was awful but the company, as always, marvellous.

Nebula banquet, June 2025. Photo by either Mark Tiedemann or K Acuna (sorry I can’t remember which)

Kelley is the finest person in the world. I fell in love with her in a moment but have spent my life since then trying to be the person she deserves. I might never get there but it continues to be an amazing journey.

Little things like reason—everyone, even Kelley to begin with, thought I was, well, perhaps ‘not sensible’ is the kindest way to phrase it—family, my partner, friends, jobs, money, health, immigration law… ︎And thereby create new immigration law. ︎So many photos these days seem to be taken at events where for one reason or another we can’t sit, as we prefer, right next to each other. We really, really have to fix that! ︎I wrote about that here and here. ︎