Portales Thursday/Friday
I spent the morning dealing with issues with Western Minerals and Oil and lunging Pi. After eating leftover BBQ (and there was a lot of leftoever BBQ) we headed out to the lectureship. Portales is a very small town on the south eastern edge of New Mexico. It’s surrounded by farms growing winter wheat and peanut farms and dairy farms. We’re out on the great eastern plains and it’s as flat as Texas. The man we were gathering to honor had arrived in NM via covered wagon in the early twentieth century. His family had homesteaded and Jack Williamson grew up on a working ranch and dreamed about the stars.
Portales is the site of Eastern New Mexico University. Jack was an English professor at the university, and he was a vibrant force on campus. The liberal arts building is named for him, and the library houses the Williamson collection which is a large and varied science fiction collection. I decided that I wanted to donate my papers to ENMU because of Jack and all the other terrific people at Eastern. So in addition to our luggage Ian’s trunk held five boxes of first drafts of novels and scripts, spec pilots, spec movies, character sketches, etc.
We arrived at the hotel in the late afternoon, and were chatting with Ed Bryant in the lobby when Connie swept in from teaching a class. She immediatly asked me “if anything had happened today”. I didn’t realize she was talking about _in the news_ so I said, no, my day was pretty quiet. Connie was so funny because she waved that off and declared. “Oh, I don’t care about your day. Did anything happen in the news!” I had to tell her that sadly, nothing appeared to have happened. Something you must understand is that Connie, Parris and I are political junkies, but those first two make me look like a piker. We are all united in our distrust and disgust with George Bush and this administration and Republicans in general. I realized I was going to have to find a nugget to offer Connie that would return me to the ranks of political maven.
Then it was time to head out for the traditional pre-lectureship lasagna dinner. This year it was hosted by Gene Bundy, the university’s librarian and his wife Geni who is also a professor on campus. We had a great time with great food. (The spinach lasagna was awesome), and we discussed plans for the following day, and began the discussion of how to continue the lectureship now that we had lost Jack. After the long drive we were tired so it was an early night — not a common thing when many science fiction writers gather together.
As I said earlier Portales is a _small_ town. There are only a few restaurants. It is also very rural and very conservative. We gathered at Mark’s Diner for breakfast, and I couldn’t help but wonder what the worthies of Portales made of Connie’s magnificent collection of bumper stickers. One was an Impeach Bush, but my favorite was a Sinclair Lewis quote. “When fascim comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Inside the waitress took one look at this large and rowdy crowd and put us in the back room. That usually only happens when Gardner Dozois is with us, but I think he was there in spirit. Emily Mah, a member of Critical Mass had invited a young man from Los Alamos who is attending Eastern, and is an aspiring writer. Stephen was great. We had expected more members of his newly formed writers group, but it was only Stephen and an older woman who taught school in a near-by town. We all chimed in to set out rules and techniques for running a crit group that after long testing at Clarion and Milford and Rio Hondo have been found to work.
We lingered at Marks until past 11:00 am and then we had to get over to the campus for the lectureship luncheon in the ballroom of the student union. (Another thing you have to understand about the good people of Portales. They _never_ want you to go hungryl. We just sort of float from meal to meal to snack to meal.) It was the usual set up with Connie, and Rick Hauptman, Jack’s bibliographer and Eleanor Wood his agent, and Patrice Caldwell who is the vital force behind the lectureship and who team taught with Jack seated at the head table. The rest of us were arrayed at round tables scattered throughout the room. Steve Gould was typing up his impressions of the luncheon on his Palm and fold out keyboard. He noticed that there were seven of us at the table and eight delicious frosted brownies so he imagined the rumble that would ensue over that extra brownie. As usual we were bad kids and all sat together. I was at the table with Ian, Walter Jon, Steve and Terry and one lonely lady from the campus who seemed confused by us. I took a lot of photos because I noticed when I unpacked after moving into my new house that the pictures that meant something to me were the pictures of people, not the beautiful scenes from England or Italy.
After an appropriate amount of time to eat the folks at the headtable talked about Jack and what he had meant to our field and more importantly what he had meant to us. I kept expecting to see him sitting up there as he had for all the many years before, and I felt that hot prickle behind the eyelids. Another wonderful bit of information that Rick Hauptman imparted to us was the Jack invited the phrase the “prime directive” when he wrote THE HUMANOIDS. Connie talked about how while we have his writings and our memories the best has been lost.
After lunch I dropped off my boxes at the library and then we settled down for a couple of back to back panels. Connie moderated the first which was a look at Science Fiction in the past and Jack’s place in that. On the panel with her were Ed Bryant and Eleanor Wood, and a gentleman who owns a small press. Connie was a perfect moderator, keeping the conversation moving, and eliciting great comments from her panelists while not monopolizing the conversation. Ed made a wonderful point that really what all literature does, including science fiction, and maybe more so with science fiction, is reinterpret myth. I know this is probably old news to readers with an English lit background, but I’m a music and history major, turned lawyer, turned writer, and I found all of this fascinating.
We broke for punch and cookies (yes, snack time), and the punch was very welcome because they are repairing the airconditioning in the library, and the multiple fans were trying hard and failing miserably. Then it was our turn. My panel was about what is being written now. Where are we going? How do we write? My panelists were Ian Tregillis, Emily Mah, Walter Jon Williams and Eleanor who could set us all straight since she has been selling our books for a good long time. We had a lively discussion about how do we train ourselves to look at the new technology and see not so much stories based on that technology, but how it is going to affect how human’s live and react. Jack was a master at that.
Emily writes Y/A science fiction which really hasn’t been done since Heinlein with a few notable exceptions like Steve Gould’s brilliant book, JUMPER. I pointed out that while Heinlein was teaching about math and the solar system in HAVE SPACESUIT he was really giving us a lesson about courage and loyalty and about a young man becoming a man of honor and integrity.
With both panels we had a lot of questions from the audience and there were a lot of students in attendance. I really liked this format. In the past the formal lecture had always been in the theater on Thursday evening with the special guest and Jack moderating for as long as he had the energy. It was very nice, but rather formal, and we had more older people from the town rather than the students that I think we really need to reach. We finished our discussion around 4:30. Some of the gang went off for the traditional visit to the Dairy Queen while the rest of us took the opportunity to rest before attending the Faculty Picnic at the President’s house. We also plotted how to button hole the president and try to convince him that continuing the lectureship was a good idea.
So, more about the amazing ENMU steel band, how Walter Jon is a great dancer, and wine and chips in the breakfast room of the Holiday Inn Express tomorrow.
Melinda