Thread by @doctorow

When people ask me how I became an sf writer in the hopes of following in my footsteps, I've got bad news for them: I became an sf writer thanks to an utterly unique set of extremely beneficial circumstances that have never been replicated, and more's the pity.

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Let's start with Judith Merril, the eminent sf writer, critic and editor. After the Chicago police riots in 1968, Judy went into voluntarily exile in Toronto, taking her daughters and her books - the collection she'd amassed with her ex-husband Fred Pohl - with her.

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Judy was a political radical who was core to both Rochdale, the Rochdale Free College and Seed Alternative School - radical educational programs that had a seismic effect on Canadian culture.

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She also got work on TV: for years, she hosted Doctor Who on TVO, Ontario's public broadcaster. Before every episode, she'd come on and talk about the tropes in it, where their origins were in sf history, often recounting personal stories about the writers who invented them.

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I grew up on these intros: my mom went to teacher's college at night and my dad and brother and I would stay home and watch Doctor Who and Judy, who my dad knew from radical politics.

Very little of that old Judy tape survives, but there is some!

retrontario.com/2014/02/02/tvo…

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Judy donated her and Fred's book collection to the Toronto Public Library system and founded a library she called "The Spaced Out Library" that is now the largest public sf reference collection in the world.

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It's now called the Merril Collection; Judy wouldn't let them change the name until she died. I visited the Merril the first time when I was 9 and met Judy in person, instantly recognizing her from TVO. She told us that we could bring stories to her and she'd help with them.

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When the plague is over, you should visit the Merril and ask to see their guest book - here's a page my class signed around 1981, including @superwuster.

torontopubliclibrary.ca/merril/

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Over the years, I started taking the subway down to the Spaced Out and getting my stories critiqued.

And after, I'd always visit @BakkaPhoenix, the oldest sf bookstore on Earth.

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I started visiting Bakka with school around the same time as the Merril. On my first visit, a young woman who was trying to sell her first story named @TanyaHuff was working behind the counter.

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Tanya asked me what kind of books I liked, and took me to the used section and put a $1 copy of H Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy in my hands. It was the first book I ever bought with my own money!

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Tanya became a mentor, too: when Judy was busy, I'd sometimes bring her stories to critique. She was INCREDIBLY patient. And when she started selling enough books to quit her job and write full time, I got her job.

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Working at Bakka and selling a few stories meant that I could start going to Toronto Hydra parties, the regular movable feast the Judy established based on the huge potluck dinners that NYC's legendary Futurian House used to throw.

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The Futurians were denied entry to the first Worldcon banquet for being leftists - my kind of sf writers! These parties included the librarians from the Merril, writers, critics, editors, artists, and the crew of TVO's sf show Prisoners of Gravity.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners…

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And even as I was going to those parties, working at Bakka and selling stories, I was also still attending the writers' workshop at Seed Alternative School, which Judy had founded more than a decade before, and which attracted students from all over the city.

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While also workshopping with the likes of @KarlSchroeder and @bydavidnickle at the Cecil Street Irregulars, ANOTHER workshop Judy founded, made up of some of the writers who'd brought her stories at the Spaced Out.

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I was also reading Tesseracts - Judy's anthology series of Canadian sf - and then went on to co-edit a volume, with @PaulaJohanson.

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Really, it was an INCREDIBLE time to be an aspiring sf writer, and so much of it boiled down to Judy's tireless energy for connecting and mentoring people and setting up institutions that outlived her.

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I do my best to pay it forward. I teach Clarion or Clarion West every year or two, I volunteer on the board of the @TPL_Foundation, which raises money for the Merril (tax deductible in the US and Canada!) and I try to mentor writers, too.

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And I try to tell as much of Judy's story as I know. But of course, Judy tells it better than me. Her Hugo-award winning memoir, Better to Have Loved (written with her granddaughter @emilypohlweary) is a must-read:

btlbooks.com/book/better-to…

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And I bring all of this up now because this Saturday, I'm being inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame:

pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hal…

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And so many of the past inductees are the people who mentored me: Judy Merril, Tanya Huff, Lorna Toolis (former head librarian of the Merril).

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As well as writers like @greatdismal, Spider Robinson, Phyllis Gottleib, Charles de Lint, Elizabeth Vonarburg and others who were so important to my own artistic formation.

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The Hall of Fame presentations are part of the Prix Aurora Awards, which livestream on Saturday from 4PM Pacific on. You can tune in here:



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I'm going to say all this stuff again, but I might cry a little while saying it. Be warned.

eof/