Women's History Month Celebration

It's Women's History Month, and I promised you something special. I have blogposts from some amazing women: writers, scientists, musicians, historians, farmers, activists and more. I've not told them what to write, just that I would really like them to be guests on my blog during March. These are the women who are making history right now.

What I found fascinating about chatting with them, is that nearly 1/3 of these wonderful women think their lives are dull and were surprised I asked them. No dull lives here. No boring people. I hope you enjoy this celebration of women's lives and interests as much as I am.

Women's History Month: Wendy Orr

My first guest I met through another Wendy - Wendy Dunn - when Wendy Dunn invited us both to be guests at an online writing festival for schoolchildren. Jodie Foster had just been signed to appear in the film of her book, so I was prepared to be intimidated. Wendy Orr is not intimidating, it turns out. She is, however, exceptionally interesting.

There ought to be a word for the time between finishing one manuscript and starting another. (I mean apart from ‘relief’ and ‘now I really do need to get around to all those other jobs I’ve been putting off for the last year’ – which may also be the best incentive for starting a new book.)

Of course each time is different, but this time sending off the fourth book in my upcoming Rainbow Street Animal Shelter series (for the in USA), coincided with the publication of Raven’s Mountain, my new middle grade novel in Australia. (By the way, I hate the term middle grade novel: it always makes the book sound as if it got a C grade. Must get over that.) But the timing means that I’m determined to take a couple of weeks off, not just for catching up on fan mail and accountant queries, and the perennial post-deadline task of trying to find my desk, but for reflection. And not just reflection for the purposes of interviews on the new book – because honestly, who doesn’t enjoy insightful questions that help trace our pathway through a newly completed work? This writing hiatus is a time for true reflection, on why I write, and why I write what I do, and then that sudden gift of inspiration which makes everything else fade into the background, as I get the first glimpse of what I want to write next.

Well, that’s the theory, but in the middle of my tai chi class last week, I suddenly felt the beginnings of a new book. Since finishing the last proofs for Raven, last October, I’ve been playing with the idea of returning to a world that I’d created twenty years ago, when I first started writing and was still searching for my voice. I have no desire to go back to the mammoth adult manuscript that I wrote then, but the world itself is still alive for me. Travelling to India in November, for the Bookaroo Children’s Literature Festival, somehow confirmed my desire to return to this world, although I didn’t think it had much in common with the India that I saw. And then, in that dreamy tai chi state, I heard new questions about the main character, suggesting that she is totally unlike anything I had expected, and had an image of the story idea floating in soap bubbles above my head, fragile and iridescent. The image moved me to tears. (Luckily everyone else in my tai chi group is equally vague in the beginning, familiar sequences, so no one noticed that I was crying.)

The next day I saw what I thought was a small dragonfly hovering above our pond. The wings were exactly the same iridescent blue as my story idea bubbles, and I felt I had to take it as a sign. When a twitter follower identified the insect as a damselfly, I knew that it was.

On the other hand, the fragile insect flying off into the distance could also be a sign that it’s time to let Raven go. I’ve lived with her for two and a half years, and it’s hard to remember that I created her as well as her mountain and all that happens to her. She is so real to me it feels as cruel as letting a flesh and blood eleven year old out into the world alone. But perhaps that damselfly was telling me that she’s strong enough to fly. Time to let her go free, and clear out the rooms for the new damsel to move in.

Wendy Orr was born in Canada, and grew up in France, Canada and USA. After high school she studied occupational therapy in England, married an Australian farmer, and moved to Australia. They had a son and daughter, and now live on five acres of bush near the sea.

Wendy started writing seriously in 1986, with her picture book Amanda's Dinosaur. In 1993 Leaving it to You was shortlisted for the CBCA awards, junior readers; Ark in the Park won the same award in 1995. Peeling the Onion, based on a serious car accident Wendy had in 1991, was widely published internationally, with awards including the CBCA Honour Book, older readers, in 1997, and an American Library Association Book for older readers. Her book Nim’s Island has been published in 24 countries around the world. In 2008 it became a Hollywood feature film starring Jodie Foster, Abigail Breslin and Gerard Butler.

Wendy’s latest book is Raven’s Mountain an adventure novel for mid to upper primary.

Women's History Month: Ann VanderMeer

Gillian asked me to guest blog this month in honor of Women’s History Month. March has always been a special month for me, not only because of this celebration but also because my birthday falls in this month! When Stephen Segal and John Betancourt asked me to take over as Fiction Editor of Weird Tales magazine back in 2007, I was thrilled at the idea. Imagine, asking me to do my favorite thing - read fiction. And then I thought some more about the honor and the history and what this all could mean. Women and the weird…

In addition to taking over the oldest fantasy magazine in the world, I was given the opportunity of being only the second female editor of Weird Tales since Dorothy McIlwraith in 1940. So, we decided to make the announcement on Valentine’s Day (why not?), and we opened to fiction submissions on my birthday the following month (which just so happened to be Women’s History Month). This was all very exciting! And just like Ms. McIlwraith, I love finding new writers, the next generation so to speak, and publishing them along with established pros.

And please keep in mind that Margaret Brundage did all those amazing covers in the 1930’s, making her the first (and only) female cover artist of that time. Yes, it’s true that many of her covers were considered controversial and at times even too provocative, but her work was beautiful and remarkable and certainly helped to sell a lot of magazines.

So why did it take over 50 years for another woman at Weird Tales? Certainly weird fiction appeals to women, too. Just look at all the female writers that graced the pages of Weird Tales since back in the day to now: Mary Elizabeth Counselman (who I had the honor of publishing in The Silver Web in the 1990’s), Margaret St. Clair, C. L. Moore, Allison V. Harding, Tanith Lee, Lois Tilton and Carrie Vaughn, among others. As a matter of fact, over 120 women published fiction in these pages from 1923-1954. And if you take a closer look at the Weird Tales Club you see all kinds of women readers (and letter writers), too.

And then…2011 - For the first time in the history of this iconic magazine, Weird Tales has an all-female editorial management team (I became Editor-in-Chief, Mary Robinette-Kowal is the Art Director and Paula Guran is the Nonfiction Editor and Webmistress). And it’s about time.

So yeah…women like the weird. We like to read it, talk about it, write letters about it, and draw and paint it. We really really do. So why not a female fiction editor??? My weird isn’t any more fragile or less dangerous than any male editor’s weird. Don’t be fooled by my size; my weird can be pretty darn ferocious. Just watch me.

(no subject)

Tonight's class was all about medieval food. I fed my students cubebs and sugar-coated fennel and we talked about everything from the role climate plays in developing cuisines to the equipment a good cook might have had access to in 13th century France.

Next week I've promised table etiquette, drinks and then sex and marriage. My class asked what practical demonstrations I would be giving. I pointed out that they had cubebs this week, so next week was words only. One student was most disappointed. She had the consolation of discovering that the periodic table on the wall (which was wrong last week) has now been fixed. Iron instead of sex...