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Carol Emshwiller

Books by Carol Emshwiller

World of No Return

She Spins Super-fine Sci-Fi
by Eva Poole-Gilson

            Carol has been publishing fiction since 1955, and in 2002 won the prestigious Nebula Short Story Award for “Creature” from her book Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories. The Nebula Awards are bestowed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, an organization  founded in 1965 by Damon Knight. Every spring the members—mostly writers and professionals associated with the field—vote to decide who will receive the awards, given for best novel, novella, novelette, and short story published in the previous year. The Awards are presented at a banquet, and an anthology of short fiction by the winners and runners-up is published each year.

            Winning this internationally recognized Award and having established a highly successful publication record spanning five decades—these two major accomplishments put Carol Emshwiller right into the illustrious inner circle of fine science fiction and literary writers, along with Ray Bradbury, Ben Bova, Ursula LeGuin, and others.

            What follows is an essay Carol wrote, also in 2002.     

How My Husband’s Death Changed My Writing
by Carol Emshwiller

            My whole reason for writing changed for a while after my husband died. I needed people to live with. All my life I’d lived with a lot of people around me. I come from one of those old fashioned families (do we have them anymore?) that usually had supper together. Around the table there was: Mom and Dad and Grandma, me and my three brothers, and often my much older half sister. Then later, in my own family, three kids and husband. Gradually the kids grew up and moved away until only my husband was left.

            After he died I was lonely for everybody: kids, babies, teenagers, a man…. As I began writing my western Ledoyt I didn’t feel lonely at all. I was living with my characters more intimately than I ever had before in my whole writing life. I hardly went out because I didn’t want to leave them. I did go on long walks and thought about them, my notebook in my pocket as usual. They were NEVER out of my mind. People gave up on inviting me to parties. I never went to movies. My characters were more real to me than my friends and relatives. I read only research on the West of the period of my novel and books written at that time.

            But before I even started on the Ledoyt I read a lot of Wendell Barry, Ivan Doig, Wallace Stegner, and such…in order to study the more leisurely, long winded, more inside-the-characters kind of writing. These are books I wouldn’t have thought of reading when my husband was alive.

            My writing went from outer, satiric, ironic, distanced…an arms length kind of writing to inner, close in, much deeper into characters. Even so, I didn’t write as close inside my people as most…or at least some literary writers do.

            Also I used much more of my own family than I’d ever used before. But you’ll not guess much about my family from this novel or any of my writing. I bunch my people up three or so to a character and then I add bits and pieces to them from other people. Ledoyt, the man in that book, ended up being a conglomeration of four people and pieces of others. That is until I’d got him going. After that he became just himself.

            I learned more about myself during the writing of Ledoyt than in any of my other writing. I learned what kind of characters I like to write over and over: a nasty girl who needs to change, an innocent nine or ten year old boy, a wounded man…. That was the first time I discovered and used all of these at the same time. I also used them in my other novel, Leaping Man Hill.

            Having come from a family with three brothers, after my husband died I was so homesick for anybody male. I felt like going off into the street and dragging in anybody that was hairy and sweaty.

            So in Ledoyt I created a man for myself. I made him a difficult man otherwise he wouldn’t be at all interesting even to me. (I didn’t make him as difficult as my real husband was…though whose isn’t?) When I was about a third into the book I realized Ledoyt wasn’t going to live through to the end. I almost quit writing it right then.

            I’m monogamous even to characters I created. I’m still in love with the Ledoyt. I still miss him. He keeps creeping in to my other writing. And because of living alone now I keep writing love stories that turn out happy—mostly they do.

            After two or three years of this kind of writing (my two novels, Ledoyt and its sequel, Leaping Man Hill) I went back to satire and humor. And back to science fiction and magic realism—back to a more distanced kind of writing in terms of characterization. I no longer need to live that closely with my people as I needed to after Ed’s death.

            We fantasy/science fiction writers don’t get that deeply into characters because our stories are more important than our people. Or in satire, it’s the satire that matters more than the characters. I did have (find) a plot in my two non-sci-fi novels, but I was much more interested in the people than the plot.