By Gary K. Wolfe
Locus
Regular readers of this column are aware of my admiration for PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series, founded by the late Terry Bisson in 2009 and now under the capable editorial hands of Nisi Shawl and Nick Mamatas. Nicola Griffith’s She Is Here is the 34th volume in the series (five more are already announced), and as with earlier volumes it’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction plus an irreverent author interview (conducted by Nisi Shawl), to which Griffith has added a few poems and drawings. As we might expect, Griffith’s sharp and uncompromising voice comes across clearly in the nonfiction and the interview, but the important news for Griffith’s readers lies in the four short fiction pieces, especially an excellent novella, “Many Things in Dumnet”, which is original to the volume.
For all of her contributions to SF, mysteries, and historical fiction – which earned her last year’s Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master award from SFWA – Griffith’s shorter fiction has remained relatively sparse, the only earlier collection being the slim With Her Body from Aqueduct back in 2004.
The nonfiction selections begin with a brief but assertive “Writer’s Manifesto” (ending with the sly Outer Limits allusion, “I control the horizontal, I control the vertical”) and an equally pointed piece on the near-invisibility of characters in fiction who are disabled (“Over-writing the Old Story”). Griffith then explores
the disconnect between a writer’s solitary craft and the increasing demands of publishers to spend time establishing a “brand” or a target audience, and in particular how this affected the reception of her novel Hild. Another essay explores the changing meanings of the word “wife,” and how its meaning shifted at the personal level after she legally married her longtime partner Kelley Eskridge (twenty years after they were first married). The nonfiction section ends with two letters to figures important in Griffith’s own work, but in radically different ways. “My Story, Mystery: A Letter of Hild of Whitby” addresses the seventh-century saint who inspired the novels Hild and Menewood. “You made Whitby,” Griffith writes, “On some level, you made me.” Perhaps Hild’s most remarkable achievement, she suggests, was emerging as a powerful historical figure – “not as anyone’s parent or wife”– in a historical record that did its best to obliterate women’s achievements. “You lived a long and successful life, and died admired and powerful. You won.” The second letter, to Alice Sheldon (whom Griffith never met), is less celebrative if no less admiring. “You didn’t believe in the possibility of escape,” Griffith writes, pointing out the bleakness of much of Sheldon’s fiction as James Tiptree, Jr., before going on to speculate on Sheldon’s struggles with identity and offering an insightful reading of “The Women Men Don’t See”. Finally, Shawl’s perceptive interview returns to some of these themes, at one point focusing on the notion of mirror neurons, which Griffith also mentions in a couple of earlier pieces as a key element of empathy in fiction.
More than half the book consists of the four fiction selections. The shortest is “Glimmer”, which reminded me of nothing so much as the stargate sequence from 2001 but is actually a showpiece for Griffith’s lyrical prose, as a woman (who describes herself as “a cripple”) is transformed as she travels through time and space – “pulsing, lengthening, cooling, a cord stretched past the horizon along which she slides like a bead.” “Down the Path of the Sun”, one of Griffith’s earliest stories, is a grim but powerful postapocalyptic, postplague account of the narrator’s attempts to protect her sister in a violent, desperately diminished world. Both “Cold Wind” and “Many Things in Dumnet” are rare Griffith fantasy stories. “Cold Wind”, which begins in a women’s bar in contemporary Seattle, explores the complex relationships of predator and prey, as both the narrator and the strange woman she meets there both turn out to be not quite what they seem. “Many Things in Dumnet” is set in what appears to be a fantasy version of Griffith’s early medieval Britain, in which a musician, Anya Reine, arrives in Dumnet, “most southwesterly of the kingdoms of Albion,” and quickly lands a gig at a tavern – only to be warned that no one is allowed to perform without the approval of Macalla, who at first appears to be a local crime boss. But Macalla turns out to be far more than that, and so does Anya. Aided by totemic figures such as a silver fox, she eventually finds herself defending the kingdom from the predations of Macalla’s “wodebreath.” Apart from its supernatural fireworks and its convincing portrayal of a haunted medieval setting, the story also serves as a moving paean to the power of music. Along with three good short but stabby poems – never published anywhere before – and original drawings that evoke medieval manuscript icons – She is Here is a revealing and rewarding self-portrait of one of our most important – and most outspoken – voices.
