A LITERARY QUARTERLY April 2016 X Vol. 6. No. 2 Essay “I Begin to Meet You at Last”: On the Tiptree-Russ-Le Guin Correspondence by Julie Phillips PoEms Clear-Cut Spirit Song The Goddess of the Unseen The Gods of Tales #221 Woman Rising Woman #221 by Neile Graham IN THIS ISSUE Men Who Aren’t Crazy by Sonya Taaffe Poetess Strikes Again by Gwynne Garfinkle GrandmothEr maGma X Toward a Feminist Masculinity The Will to Change, bell hooks Betsy James Betsy by Daniel Abraham Book rEviEws All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism by Judith Merril, edited by Ritch Calvin The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar Lost Trails: Forgotten Tales of the Weird West edited by Cynthia Ward Damnificados “Since its launch in 2011 The Cascadia Subduction Zone has emerged as one by JJ Amaworo Wilson of the best critical journals the field has to offer.” h Jonathan McCalmont, February 18, 2013, Hugo Ballot Nomination FEaturEd artist Betsy James $5.00 Managing Editor vol. 6 no. 2 — APril 2016 Ann Keefer Reviews Editor Essays Nisi Shawl “I Begin to Meet You at Last”: On the Tiptree-Russ-Le Guin Correspondence by Julie Phillips h 1 Features Editor L. Timmel Duchamp PoEms Arts Editor Men Who Aren’t Crazy Kath Wilham by Sonya Taaffe h 7 $5.00 Poetess Strikes Again by Gwynne Garfinkle h 7 The Gods of Tales by Neile Graham h 7 Clear-Cut Spirit Song The Goddess of the Unseen by Neile Graham h 19 GrandmothEr maGma Toward a Feminist Masculinity The Will to Change, bell hooks by Daniel Abraham h 8 Book rEviEws All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders reviewed by S. Qiouyi Lu h 10 The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism, by Judith Merril, edited by Ritch Calvin reviewed by Michael Levy h 12 The Winged Histories, by Sofia Samatar reviewed by Tansy Rayner Roberts h 14 Lost Trails: Forgotten Tales of the Weird West, edited by Cynthia Ward reviewed by Kristin King h 15 Damnificados, by JJ Amaworo Wilson reviewed by Victoria Elizabeth Garcia h 17 FEaturEd artist Image to Word: The Morning Series by Betsy James h 20 Subscriptions and single issues online at: To order by check, payable to: www.thecsz.com Aqueduct Press Print subscription: $16/yr; P.O. Box 95787 Print single issue: $5 Seattle, WA 98145-2787 Electronic Subscription (pdf format): $10/yr [Washington State Residents Electronic single issue: $3 add 9.6% sales tax.] In This Issue Cover banner collagraph of the Cascadia subduction zone by Marilyn Liden Bode y “I Begin to Meet You at Last”: On the Tiptree-Russ-Le Guin Correspondence by Julie Phillips This was a talk given at the Univer- and talkative group of outsiders: sci­ sity of Oregon, December 4, 2015, ence fiction writers and fans. Unofficial at a symposium to honor the life and communication is important to all these work of Alice B. Sheldon and cel- groups, not only because it’s beautiful Alli’s papers are the place ebrate the donation of her papers to and fun and lively and sometimes ex­ where Tiptree lives. the University of Oregon Libraries. tremely funny, but also because it can Thank you for inviting me to speak, and help you learn to be yourself. It seems let me just say how great it is that you’ve to me that’s the story of science fiction: all come together for Alice Sheldon this it’s the literature of imagination, but also year, the 100th anniversary of her birth. the literature of loneliness, of alienation, I’m especially pleased to be at an event and of connection. If you’re not like oth­ in honor of the Alice Sheldon papers. er people, and you can’t imagine what They’ve been donated by Jeff Smith, it might be like to be you, you’ve never who did a terrific job of keeping them all seen yourself reflected anywhere, you’re these years, and putting together editions wondering what planet you’d have to go of Alli’s work, and loaning them to me to to discover like minds, that’s when to write Alli’s life story. I know I became you start trying to dream up new possi­ very possessive about her papers while I bilities. And if you’re lucky, you can find was working on them, so I can imagine other people who can tell you something how hard it must be for Jeff to give them about who you are. [A]rchival research is the up — Jeff is now making crying faces in Within that conversation, I want to hot thing in academia right the audience — and I hope the University talk in particular about three writers now. Students and scholars i of Oregon appreciates his gift. whose lives were connected with each have taken a new interest other’s through the letters that are here. in letters and diaries and The papers are especially important 1 because Alice Sheldon’s entire imper­ Three writers who never met but who the private discourse that sonation of a male writer went on on knew each other intimately through goes on underneath and paper. It went on in the fiction she wrote their letters. I hope the University real­ around the public story. as James Tiptree Jr. and also a few im­ izes just how lucky they are to have the portant stories she wrote under a female papers not only of Alice Sheldon, but pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon. And also of two other great writers, Joanna it went on in pages and pages of cor­ Russ and Ursula Le Guin. respondence with other writers. Alli’s Alice Sheldon, also known as Alli, also papers are the place where Tiptree lives. known as Tip, also known as James Tip­ Apparently archival research is the tree Jr. Born in 1915, she was an African hot thing in academia right now. Stu­ explorer, a debutante, a painter, an army dents and scholars have taken a new officer in the Second World War, a chick­ interest in letters and diaries and the pri­ en farmer, a research psychologist, and fi­ vate discourse that goes on underneath nally, became a published science fiction …that’s the story of and around the public story. Archives are writer under the name of a jar of jam. science fiction: it’s the full of discussions that are taking place From a young age, she’d felt herself literature of imagination, below the radar and outside the official to be different from everyone else, be­ but also the literature of view. I was just talking to Timmi Du­ ing bright and imaginative and also fall­ loneliness, of alienation, champ about what she called “the amaz­ ing into hopeless love affairs with other and of connection. ing power of conversation to shift your girls — one of whom died from a botched perspective.” And that’s it exactly; that’s abortion, just as Alli herself nearly died. what letters can do. She’d been well­liked, and very pretty — So when I heard this about archives I which creates its own problems — and immediately said, yes, of course, women, she learned to use her looks as a mask and LGBT people, and so on. But it’s for her differences, which served her fairly also true of another, particularly verbal well until at fifty­two she wound up, by Cont. on p. 2 I Begin to Meet You accident on purpose you might say, tak­ people in science fiction with the range at Last ing the intellectual role of a man. Her of interests that they had, who could go (Cont. from p. 1) performance as James Tiptree Jr. went from Philip K. Dick to Virginia Woolf on for about ten years, from 1967 to and back in the blink of a paragraph. 1977, and during that time she wrote Tip tended to put Ursula on a ped­ fan letters to, and started corresponding estal, and he certainly wasn’t alone in with, a number of her colleagues, espe­ this. While she was wrestling with the cially Russ and Le Guin. problem of feminist anger, she wrote to Ursula Le Guin was born in 1929. She Tip “I find […] that to some portions of grew up in Berkeley, California, where I our dear mutual Readership I have come think she must have absorbed science fic­ to represent Refinement, with a touch tion in the atmosphere. In the seventies, of Motherhood. Le Guin is the kind of after a visit to her family, she wrote to a sf writer it is safe to give your aunt for Ursula never transformed herself into a man, but friend, “I don’t understand how anybody Christmas. Jesus. Better, perhaps, they for a long time the main who has ever lived in California can ask should know the ugly truth. Some aunts characters of her stories me where I get my crazy ideas from. Sci­ are safe with me, others not. Bears just 1 3 were all men. ence Fiction is far behind Berkeley.” look cuddly.” Like Alli, she wasn’t at home in the Joanna Russ, the youngest of the three, world; she called high school a “Siberia” was born in 1937, a child of the 1950s. of mysterious social codes.2 She was at Like Alli Sheldon she was an only child; home in her family, but there was a cer­ like all three women she grew up very tain amount of competition between her bright and with a feeling of being iso­ and her three older brothers — all four lated and unrecognized.