Points of Departure: Stories
Page 35
When I wasn’t reading about secret places, I would look for secret places to call my own. I couldn’t find a magic wardrobe, so I had to make do. I cleared a patch of ground in a secluded corner of the backyard (back behind the big pussy willow bush where no one ever went) and I planted crocuses and Johnny-jump-ups to make a secret garden. I couldn’t go past a hole in a hedge or a cave or a culvert or a dark passageway without peering into the darkness and wondering if this were the one that led to a new world. In best junior scientist fashion, I learned to identify edible wild foods: young plantain leaves and such. I was, I think, planning to live off the land when something happened. I didn’t know what the event would be or when it would come along, but I knew that something momentous was going to happen.
I might need to be able to recognize edible plants when I found the way through and ended up in Oz or Perelandra or Narnia or wherever it was I would finally end up.
In the course of growing up, I never really quit looking for the secret door, the hidden passage, the opening to another dimension or another time. But at some point I suppose I realized that the secret way out would not just appear to me. I had to create my own secret ways. And so I started to spin daydreams. Not daydreams like getting a pony or climbing to the top of the mulberry tree in the backyard. Daydreams that were even more improbable—like saving a princess from a dragon or sailing off with pirates to do piratical things that involved a great deal of swashbuckling swordplay.
Of course, I continued to read like a maniac, devouring the imaginary worlds of science fiction and fantasy writers and using them to fuel my own adventures. In my version of the great twister, Dorothy had a companion named Pat Murphy on her trip to Oz. And Pat Murphy—a scrawny fourth grader with harlequin glasses and a mighty left hook—was certainly along when Tarzan visited the City of Gold.
Unlike those amazing writers who started putting words on paper when they were barely old enough to clutch the pen, I kept these daydreams to myself. After all, part of the value of secret places is their privacy. If anyone could get on my pirate ship and sail off to adventure, then everyone would. And the secret would be out. So I kept my heroic fantasies to myself.
Along the way, the characters in my internal stories began to change. Sometimes I didn’t save the day—I just watched as someone else got to be the hero. As the stories evolved, the plots changed too, continuing to entirely new conclusions, new adventures, new worlds.
When an adventure took a wrong turn, I would go back and fix it, rethink my actions or the actions of my characters in a way that was just not possible in life.
It wasn’t until I was in college that it occurred to me that I might actually write some stories down. Lois Natanson, a wonderful literature teacher, read one of my papers and told me I was an excellent writer. That was the first time that anyone had ever told me I could write and write well.
And so I began to try to write stories.
Strangely enough, I didn’t initially write about the secret people and places I knew. They were secret, remember?
Instead, I tried to write what I now think of as other people’s stories, stories that didn’t give too much of my own stuff away. I tried to write like authors I admired like Ursula Le Guin, like Kate Wilhelm, like Margaret Atwood. And then one day I wrote a story about a place that was my own, and it was like coming home, stepping into Narnia, touching down in Oz. And there was no turning back.
Looking back on the stories in this book, written over the last decade or so, I see traces of my childhood reading and daydreaming. Many of my stories deal with outsiders, people who are trapped in a world where they do not belong. Sam, the Neanderthal who has been yanked from his own time; the nameless alien woman who lingers in Mexico, unable to find her way home; Rachel, the chimp with the mind of a teenage girl—these are characters who have, in a sense, found that secret door I was always looking for. They’ve entered a new world filled with exotic things and strange people; it just happens to be the world in which we live every day.
Many of my stories take place in foreign countries. I travel as often as I can manage, and I come home with stories about the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras, about Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, about Nepal, places that are strange and alien, as exotic as Oz, as mysterious as Perelandra.
When I was a kid, I knew that fantastic things were waiting just around the corner, lingering in the shadows, lurking behind the rhododendron bush. Some were nice and some were horrible—like the witches under the bed or the monsters that hid in storm drains. I imagined their lives and they became real. Now that I’m a grownup, I am doing what I wanted to do then: I am opening the secret doorway and letting them into our world; I am walking through the secret passage and visiting theirs.
I still can’t walk past a cave without peering inside, and on some level I still believe in the witches under the bed and the value of the magic penny that I hope someday to find in a crack in the sidewalk.
That’s one of the reasons I write.
Acknowledgments
Over the years, many people have read and critiqued my work. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the patience and assistance of Richard Kadrey, Michael Blumein, Ruth Brown, Lisa Goldstein, Richard Kearns, Mark Laidlaw, Avon Swofford, Mikey Roessner-Herman, Richard Russo, Mark Van Name, Cherie Wilkerson, and Pam Winfrey. I would also like to thank the participants in the Sycamore Hill Workshop in 1987, 1988, and 1989, and the participants in the two Silver Lake Workshops, and the students and teachers at the 1976 Clarion Workshop for their collection. Finally, I would like to thank Kate Wilhelm, both for her teaching at Clarion and for the introduction to this collection.
About the Author
Pat Murphy has won numerous awards for her thoughtful, literary science fiction and fantasy writing, including two Nebula Awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She has published eight novels and many short stories. Her works include Rachel in Love; The Falling Woman; The City, Not Long After; Nadya; and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, a novel that Publishers Weekly called the “cerebral equivalent of a roller-coaster ride.” Her children’s novel, The Wild Girls, received a Christopher Award in 2008.
In addition to writing fiction, Pat writes about science for children and adults. She has authored three science books for adults and more than fifteen science activity books for children. Her science writings have been honored with the American Institute of Physics Science Communication Award, the Science Books and Films Prize for Excellence in Science Books, the Pirelli INTERNETional Award for environmental publishing, and an award from Good Housekeeping.
In 1991, with writer Karen Fowler, Pat cofounded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender roles. This award is funded by grassroots efforts that include auctions and bake sales, harnessing the power of chocolate chip cookies in an ongoing effort to change the world.
Pat enjoys looking for and making trouble. Her favorite color is ultraviolet. Her favorite book is whichever one she is working on right now.
David Wright
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Dead Men on TV,” published in Full Spectrum, edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, New York, Bantam Books, 1988.
“Don’t Look Back,” published in Fantasy Annual IV, edited by Terry Carr, New York, Pocketbooks, 1981 and Other Worlds 2, edited by Roy Torgeson, New York, Zebra Book
s, 1979.
“Orange Blossom Time,” published in Chrysalis 9, edited by Roy Torgeson, New York, Zebra Books, 1981.
“In the Islands,” published in Amazing SF, March 1983.
“Touch of the Bear,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1980.
“On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1985.
“His Vegetable Wife,” published in Interzone, Summer 1986.
“Sweetly the Waves Call to Me,” published in Elsewhere, edited by Jonathan Strong, New York, Ace Books, 1981.
“Good-Bye, Cynthia,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1988.
“Prescience,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1989.
“Clay Devils,” published in Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1987.
“Falling Star Is a Rock from Outer Space,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1986.
“With Four Lean Hounds,” published in Sword and Sorceress, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, New York, DAW Books, 1984.
“On the Dark Side of the Station Where the Train Never Stops,” published in Elsewhere III, edited by Terri Windling and Mack Arnold, New York, Ace Books, 1984.
“In the Abode of the Snows,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1986.
“Rachel in Love,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1987
“Recycling Strategies for the Inner City” appeared in substantially different form (as “Scavengers”) in Omni, April 1989.
“Bones,” published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1990.
Copyright © 1990 by Pat Murphy
Introduction Copyright © 1990 by Kate Wilhelm
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-8319-4
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