Joanna Russ (1937-2011)
A couple of days ago word came that Joanna Russ had suffered a series of strokes and wasn't expected to survive long. Today it was announced that she died at 7 this morning in a Tucson hospice.
I've written here before that Russ is probably the writer I most wish I could write like. I've told the anecdote about the college writing course in which I was given the exercise of taking a paragraph from a Joan Didion essay and copying the grammatical structure while creating a paragraph of my own. I enjoyed the exercise so much that in a creative writing class I was taking at the same time I took a paragraph from Russ' science fiction novel, And Chaos Died, and did the same thing in a story I was working on.
And Chaos Died was probably my favorite of her novels. It's certainly the one I've read the most. It's an incredible tour de force in which we see what it's like to become telepathic and telekinetic (and freak out about it) from the subjective point of view. It's also very homophobic, which ended up being ironic when Russ came out as a lesbian not too long after. Even ignoring the homophobia, it probably isn't her greatest novel, even if it's my favorite. The most influential -- and I believe the one that sold the most copies -- was The Female Man, her complex and fiercely feminist exploration of gender dystopias and utopias. I found all of her novels powerful, even We Who Are About To and the non-SF On Strike Against God, neither of which I've ever re-read. She was a great writer of short fiction and essays as well. How to Suppress Women's Writing was another important feminist work, and Magic Mammas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts is a collection of writing that explores, amongst other things, the contradictory feelings about sex in the feminist movement.
It's frequently noted that she studied under Nabokov at Cornell, but I've never heard any details and don't remember her ever discussing it in her own writing. Was he a big influence? I never got to know her, although I had the chance. When I first moved to Seattle she still lived here (she was a professor of literature at the University of Washington) and hung out at Vanguard parties. I was always too intimidated to talk to her. She was brilliant, opinionated, and strong-willed. She basically stopped writing fiction sometime in the '80s, and didn't write much non-fiction after that either. The writing she did leave us -- stories, novels, essays -- is a treasure trove of fluent science fiction and probing, personal feminist thinking.
I only recently finished reading her collection of reviews and essays, The Country You Have Never Seen. It reminded me again how much I loved her writing. I discovered her in college when I was still impressionable. She made one hell of an impression. Somebody today described her as a tiger. Yes. A lion. A creature of fierce intelligence and passion, who could express herself in a manner that seemed effortless. For me, one of the great writers died today. We who are about to die salute her.
I've written here before that Russ is probably the writer I most wish I could write like. I've told the anecdote about the college writing course in which I was given the exercise of taking a paragraph from a Joan Didion essay and copying the grammatical structure while creating a paragraph of my own. I enjoyed the exercise so much that in a creative writing class I was taking at the same time I took a paragraph from Russ' science fiction novel, And Chaos Died, and did the same thing in a story I was working on.
And Chaos Died was probably my favorite of her novels. It's certainly the one I've read the most. It's an incredible tour de force in which we see what it's like to become telepathic and telekinetic (and freak out about it) from the subjective point of view. It's also very homophobic, which ended up being ironic when Russ came out as a lesbian not too long after. Even ignoring the homophobia, it probably isn't her greatest novel, even if it's my favorite. The most influential -- and I believe the one that sold the most copies -- was The Female Man, her complex and fiercely feminist exploration of gender dystopias and utopias. I found all of her novels powerful, even We Who Are About To and the non-SF On Strike Against God, neither of which I've ever re-read. She was a great writer of short fiction and essays as well. How to Suppress Women's Writing was another important feminist work, and Magic Mammas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts is a collection of writing that explores, amongst other things, the contradictory feelings about sex in the feminist movement.
It's frequently noted that she studied under Nabokov at Cornell, but I've never heard any details and don't remember her ever discussing it in her own writing. Was he a big influence? I never got to know her, although I had the chance. When I first moved to Seattle she still lived here (she was a professor of literature at the University of Washington) and hung out at Vanguard parties. I was always too intimidated to talk to her. She was brilliant, opinionated, and strong-willed. She basically stopped writing fiction sometime in the '80s, and didn't write much non-fiction after that either. The writing she did leave us -- stories, novels, essays -- is a treasure trove of fluent science fiction and probing, personal feminist thinking.
I only recently finished reading her collection of reviews and essays, The Country You Have Never Seen. It reminded me again how much I loved her writing. I discovered her in college when I was still impressionable. She made one hell of an impression. Somebody today described her as a tiger. Yes. A lion. A creature of fierce intelligence and passion, who could express herself in a manner that seemed effortless. For me, one of the great writers died today. We who are about to die salute her.