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ReservationsApril 11, 2006 I made my airline reservations for WisCon yesterday morning. It took well over an hour, partly because I had to synchronize arrival and departure times with the ferry and bus schedules: no departures from Logan before 11 a.m. unless I want to spend the previous night in town, and no arrivals too late to catch the 5 p.m. bus from Logan to Woods Hole, which on weeknights is the last one that's sure to reach the dock before the last ferry leaves. Of course the bus schedule for late May wasn't posted yet, and did I have a summer ferry schedule? I did not. The essentials don't change all that much, and I've learned over the years to leave plenty of margin for error because, as both the Steamship Authority and Bonanza Bus emphasize on their schedules, bus-ferry connections are not guaranteed. Just because the schedules say that the boat arrives ten minutes before the bus leaves doesn't mean you won't see the bus disappearing up the hill while you're still out in the harbor. Price, of course, was also a factor: I'm getting reimbursed for this trip, thanks to the astonishing success of WisCon's grantwriters, but I tend to be even more frugal with other people's money than I am with my own, and with my own I am notoriously cheap. It's possible to spend $900 or more on a round-trip to Madison, Wisconsin, so I was happy with the $314.20 that's now been billed to my credit card. So, after nearly three months of dilly-dallying, I'm committed to WisCon. The hassle of making reservations wasn't the real block, or the fact that I don't really like flying and haven't flown on a commercial flight since my last trip to WisCon in 1998 -- which is to say before 9/11; the worst of the security nuttiness has supposedly subsided since then, but I still expect changes. Neither was coming up with the three hundred bucks or so that I'll need for incidentals: bus fare, taxi, hotel tips, meals, and probably a bunch of books from the dealers' room. I wondered whether I could afford it, sure, but in reality I can usually come up with money to do the things I really want to do. It's the things I'm not sure I want to do that always seem too expensive. I really wasn't sure I wanted to go to WisCon. Sure, WisCon was a mainstay of my life from 1990 through 1998. When I started messing around with fantasy and science fiction in the very late 1970s, I knew nothing about sf conventions in general, or WisCon in particular. Gradually, through the 1980s, I became aware of the subterranean network of feminists in f/sf, first the various fanzines like Witch and the Chameleon (which had stopped publishing by the time I discovered it) and Janus, which turned into Aurora and then disappeared from sight not long after I started subscribing. I'm not sure when I learned about WisCon, which began in 1975 -- this year is the 30th anniversary blowout -- but I didn't actually get there till after my first women's f/sf anthology, Memories and Visions, was in print and the second, The Women Who Walk Through Fire, had already gone to press, or was about to. WisCon was a revelation. A place where you weren't weird because you were a feminist, and you weren't weird because you read (were immersed in) f/sf? I'd always been one or the other, and on Martha's Vineyard I was both. WisCon was actually at a low ebb in those days, with the mainstay organizers verging on burnout and wondering whether there was any need for a feminist f/sf con. But the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award was founded at WisCon the next year; energies gathered and coalesced and drew in other energies, and it seems WisCon has been riding an ever-cresting wave ever since. One of the interview questions I can't wait to answer runs something like: "You were heavily involved in f/sf for years, but you've written a novel set on contemporary Martha's Vineyard that isn't f or sf at all. What gives?" "Aha," I will say, "f/sf is all over The Mud of the Place, it's just not obvious to the unaided eye." Whereupon I will discourse with great eloquence about how f/sf taught me the importance of worldbuilding, which came in very handy while I struggled to make Martha's Vineyard visible to hypothetical readers who thought they knew all about the place but in fact didn't know much. F/sf isn't just about individuals; it's consciously, and purposefully, about societies and eras that often didn't exist until the author brought them into being. (Real-time novelists do this too, but they're less upfront about it; often they're downright oblivious.) And f/sf tells stories, unlike much "literary" fiction, which seems to take it for granted that nothing much happens. If the interviewer seems a little slow on the uptake, I will point out (very politely, of course) that fantasy and fairy tale are closely related and that "Sleeping Beauty" is all over The Mud of the Place. F/sfdom also takes its literature seriously. F/sf readers discuss stories with the passionate intensity that other people bring to, say, football games. As a feminist bookseller from 1981 to 1985, I got to see over and over again how important books were to people, how they changed and even saved lives. For the most part, Martha's Vineyard is not like that. The people I know are passionately intense about things like horses and dogs and town politics, but not generally about books. When I landed in WisCon, I'd been living on Martha's Vineyard for five years, and my connection to the feminist print world was growing ever more peripheral to my life -- though it continued to sustain and inspire me in important ways. Still does. My annual pilgrimage to WisCon kept me going through the 1990s. My one-act play "A Midsummer Night's Alternative" got a stupendous staged reading at WisCon 22, the last WisCon I attended. WisCon, I will happily and truthfully tell any interviewer who asks, made it possible for me to write my first novel. It also played a key role in getting me back into horses. Writing the novel and having a horse are the two biggest reasons I haven't been back to WisCon since 1998. More important -- writing the novel and having a horse, not to mention remaining on Martha's Vineyard, have significantly altered my trajectory, and that, that is the real source of my reservations, and my months of procrastination. Should I go? What will I find there? Will I come out from Elfland and find everything changed and myself with no place in the world? or myself changed and no longer connected to the place? Would it be better to keep separate my memories of WisCons past and not mess them up by finding out what has happened since I left town? Yesterday I made my reservations. This morning I pulled Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home off the shelf (again) and went looking for the aphorism that's the working epigraph of what was going to be my first novel and now looks to be my third:
That's what I needed to know: that I'm not trying to go backwards, not trying to find something that no longer exists. Since 1998 I've come round for sure, and I've got a few stories to tell.
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