I sometimes feel like I should write for the people who raised me, write to be accessible. But I went to a prestigious liberal arts college and the world opened up to me and I’m not sure I can even relate to them anymore. I want to. I sometimes wish I could be that writer who brings the thing I have seen back home and puts them on display for those who haven’t had the luck that I have. And then sometimes I want to be the person who takes that simple beauty of _their_ life and shows its value to the sophisticates. I guess ultimately, I want to be a bridge that goes both ways.

Jeremy T.

This feels like a moral obligation to some of us, I guess. I want, in some way, to bear witness. I want people to write me and say, ‘that’s my life!’ which when you get right down to it, is a pretty strange thing for an sf writer to want. But not so strange when I think that when I was growing up I would lie in bed every night and imagine myself in science fiction adventures. I found a Andre Norton book when I was in 6th grade (before that it was horse books and lives of saints, which pretty much tells you what I was like, doesn’t it.) After that my nights were filled with mutant powers and alien landscapes and strange animals only I could connect with. (Needless to say, when I found Anne McCaffrey, I was hooked. Science fiction horse books! Only they’re dragons! And they’re smart and they fly and they love you more than life itself!)

It sounds really romantic and writerly, doesn’t it, lying there in my bed thinking about other worlds. It really wasn’t. I didn’t tell myself complicated stories or anything, I just thought about the stuff waiting to go to sleep. But when I imagined myself in those landscapes, I had no gender. I think that I could imagine those landscapes because even though a lot Andre Norton’s early science fiction stories were about boys, they were boys that could have easily have been girls. (Later, they would be girls—Witchworld girls, Moon of Three Rings girls, but when I started reading her the protagonists were male—Daybreak 2020 and Star Rangers.)

I wanted to write science fiction that I could be part of. I wanted to be the bridge, I guess, to quote you again, Jeremy.

Like Rory, though, I felt like an alien growing up. I didn’t know that almost every adolescent feels like an alien, I just knew I did. Peter Gabriel’s “Salisbury Hill” could make me cry because I wanted something to come out of the night and take me home. It wasn’t until I was 29 and moved to China that I realized how American I am and how really NOT alien I am. Nothing like being surrounded by people who can’t understand you and who you can’t understand to make you reexamine your prejudices. And I’m not talking just about language. We couldn’t get each others jokes, we couldn’t get each others food. It was pretty basic.

In the end, I guess I think writing is hard enough that the only way to write well is to be selfishly personal. I write like an oyster makes pearls. Some piece of grit bothers me and I keep coating it in nacre and coating it in nacre until it’s smooth and it doesn’t anymore.

That’s the other half of how accessible should I make my writing. How accessible can I make it and how much is just dancing in the dark? I think I have to keep worrying a a little about what the dancing looks like to other people, but I also have to worry about whether or not I simply keep from falling down.