BEYOND BELIEF

Professions Piece for Foundation

I decided to become a writer in the summer of 1962, when I was five years old. My mother took me to see THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, a fantasia with George Pal Pupettoons and claymation dragons and the austerely beautiful, melancholy young Lawrence Harvey as Wilhelm Grimm, neglecting his day job to collect folk tales and each night bring them to life as he scribbles in his garret room. Near the end of the movie, Wilhelm lies in his garret close to death: he has forsaken his writing, and it's literally killing him. And then they begin to come, climbing through the window and creeping from beneath his desk: giants and princesses, fairies and dragons and Red Riding Hood, all the creatures of his stories, all the magic that had been locked inside his head, loosed now and arriving to plead with him not to die. Without Wilhelm there will be no stories; without him they will all die and be forgotten. No Singing Bone; no elves; no wise women or dragons or brave boys named Jack. And see now, the storyteller rallies: when next we glimpse Wilhelm he's bent over his desk, papers everywhere and his dull commissions forever forgotten. Cue theme music and leather-bound volume of Marchen; cue my five-year-old self in the audience, crying and utterly transported by the vision of the man in the attic room surrounded by all he had given birth to: this was how I was going to spend my life! First, however, I had to learn to read and write.

* * *

I was in many ways the *eidos* of the fledgling writer: bespctacled, often sick with asthma, lying in bed and reading THE JUNGLE BOOKS, THE CALL OF THE WILD, THE BIG GOLDEN BOOK OF ELVES AND FAIRIES; good in school, part of a huge gang of children that each afternoon played Ringolevio and Hide and Seek in the idyllic little Yonkers cul-de-sac where we lived. Every weekend we would drive across the city to where my grandparents' house overlooked the Hudson, a great rambling old house with eight fireplaces and six bathrooms -- six! -- built around 1900 and filled with the strange things my lawyer grandfather had bought at auction during the Depression. Tapestries, swords; Roman coins and daggers, oriental rugs everywhere underfoot, a Hudson River School painting that had been repaired where one of my cousins shot an arrow through it. And clocks, scores and scores of clocks, from pocketwatches with little silver skulls for fobs to the huge grandfather clock that stood in the foyer, a clock big enough to hide in, though no one ever did. There was an ornate little porcelain holy water storup by the front entry, nearly as marvelous as all those bathrooms; in the winding stairway to the third floor, the stuffed head of a caribou that my father had shot when he was sixteen. In the attic room, once a nursery, there were all the books my father and aunts and uncles had once read, along with the strange, slighly sad relics of ancient holidays: Halloween noisemakers, pasteboard Santas with dirty white wool beards and gilt gowns; an enormous box full of toy guns that my brothers and boy cousins would raid imemdiately upon our arrival. From the attic I could look down the broad slow black girth of the Hudson and see the lights of the George Washington Bridge; directly across the river were the brilliant arabesques of the roller coaster at Parlisades Amusement Park, where there would be fireworks in the summer, and the words PALISADES AMUSEMENT PARK floating above the cliffs like a banner from a dream. On the veranda outside his study my garndfather had set up a telescope, so that I could observe the ominous miracle of the sun going down behind the Palaisades, a crimson disk at once beautiful and terrifying, bitten away by the cliffs and the skeleton of a rolelr coaster. This is the house I called Lazyland (a name that did come in a dream) in my novel GLIMMERING; this is the house behind all my books, a world within the world, wonderful and faintly terrfiying, where the last sound I heard at night was my grandfather's footsteps as he paced slowly from floor to floor, stopping all the clocks so that their concerted chiming would not wake his dreaming grandchildren.

* * *

When I was eight, our favorite babysitter gave me two paperback books. One was John Steinbeck's THE RED PONY; the other something called THE HOBBIT. I loved animals and animal stories, and had expanded my career plans slightly to include becoming a zoologist. But I didn't like horses, and so THE RED PONY remains unread. THE HOBBIT, however, looked strange, and there was a slight whiff of the Alpine in its cover image of mountains: I was suspicious that it might be something like HEIDI. Still, its very oddity seduced me - the title made no sense - and so one day I began to read it. Thatwas when my life changed again, an experience intensified when I read THE LORD OF THE RINGS a year later and, immediately upon compelting it, turned to Page One and read it all over again. This of course has become the Ur Experience of so many of us who became fantasy writers; but back then, for me at least, this was a journey into literary Terra Incognita. There was yet no fantasy publishing industry; there were no signposts showing me to other books like these (a helpful brochure from the Westchester County Library Commission suggested that readers who enjoyed THE HOBBIT might also like George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM). And so I simply read Tolkien over and over and over again; until Lin Carter's A LOOK BEHIND THE LORD OF THE RINGS appeared in 1967, when I was ten. By then we had moved from Yonkers to a small, semi-rural town sixty miles north of Manhattan. I became the ugly, smart New Girl at St. Patrick's School, and Tolkien's world became even more a haven for me, until another smart new girl arrived -- Janine, who, miraculously, had also read Tolkien! -- and my social life became more pleasant. After school I wandered in the woods for hours, pretending I was an Abenaki Indian and making snares to catch rabbits (I never did). But at night I pored over Lin Carter's book, which provided a map of sorts to the world beyond The Fields We Know: the inspiration for Tolkien's work in the Elder Eddas and Icelandic sagas, Middle English lays and "Beowulf;" the work of other writers like C.S. Lewis and Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison and Charles Williams. I began to track down all of these. The town librarian ordered me a copy of "Beowulf," its pages alternating between modern and old English, and I read this painstakingly; she also found me a volume of the Norse Myths, and the Eddas, and (with some shaking of her head amid warnings that I wouldn't like it, which I didn't) Edmund Spenser's "THE FAERIE QUEEN." And then Lin Carter himself began editing the Adult Fantasy Series at Ballantine, Tolkien's American paperback publishers, and I would order each title as it became available: THE WORM OUROBOROS; THE WELL AT THE WORLD'S END; LUD-IN-THE-MIST; DRAGONS, ELVES, AND HEROES; THE ISLAND OF THE MIGHTY; RED MOON AND BLACK MOUNTAIN. The library had all of Lord Dunsany, oddly enough, with the original Sid Simes illustrations (my favorite WAS captioned "There the Gibbelins lived, and discreditably fed"), and for my thirteenth birthday my mother gave me the only thing I wanted, Jorge Luis Borges' just-published THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS. I was writing my own stories by this time. Ghost stories ("The Soul of Caliban"), versions of the Greek myths I loved, epic fantasy novels - THE UNICORN'S AMULET, THE DRAGON-HARP OF FAERIE, THE QUEST FOR THE BLACK UNICORN. I've never gone back to read these, but I vividly recall how dark they were. My protagonists had a knack for going slowly, irrecovably mad, and the landscapes they gazed upon were wastelands, populated by gods and beings that brought only pain or, at best, a terrible yearning that could never be assuaged. Parn, the hero of one book, looks out his castle window one night and has a vision of the blind god Othiym, a beautiful, terrible Dionysian figure who rides a stag that bellows in pain at the god's touch. The vision drives Parn to leave home in search of the malign god; he never finds Othiym (I never finished the story) but I used the name years later for the maleficent lunar goddess of WAKING THE MOON. These were the taproots of my story tree. Thinking back I'm struck by how little I've strayed from them, and also by what a long time it took for me to learn to actually write a story. I was an arrogant and confident adolescent, too arrogant even to take touch-typing lessons in high school, something I've always regretted. As a teenager I became stagestruck, going to Broadway as often as I could and each summer seeing all the plays in rep at the American Shakespeare Theater in nearby Stratford, Connecticut. I joined a local theater group and wrote plays for them, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's ALICE books (I played Alice; she went mad) and, with my friend Janine, a number of fractured fairy tales, including "Tales of the Bedragoned Buffoon" and "The Silly Situation at the Ravastan School," featuring a proto-Hogwarts castle where youngsters apply themselves to The Study of Advanced Folly, and a villainous sorceror named The Wart of Peckindorf. When the time came to go to college I decided on Catholic Unviersity in Washington, D.C., a city I'd fallen in love with on my eight-grade class trip. C.U. had a famed acting program and a gorgeous new theater complex that housed the Drama Deparment. I joined the intensive B.F.A. program, majoring in playwriting but with my career plans once again revamped - they now included acting *and* directing. Noel Coward was my role model But within the first few weeks I bombed. I had a disastrous Freshman audition, one of those make-or-break scenarios before the entire Drama Dpartment faculty and graduate and post-graduate student body. The careers of undergraduate actors were determined by this audtion. I bombed spectacularly, doing a pastiche of the fool Feste's speeches from "Twelfth Night," but had the pesence of mind to remain on the stage afterward and announce that I was available for tech work. So I was busy, at least, doing assistant stage manager work and running lights and sound in the Callen lab theater, and doing prop work on the Hartke Mainstage theater. I got a job as an usher for the American debut of two short Tom Stoppard plays, "Dirty Linen and New Found Land," and every night watched Stoppard himself at the back of the theater, observing the performance. The play's kindly director knew I was an aspiring playwright and urged me to talk to Stoppard, but I was far too shy; though one night Stoppard spoke to me, taking my hand and turning it over curiously then pronouncing, "You *do* have black fingernails!" I was writing, too, absurdist one-acts equally inspired by Ionesco and Woody Allen. I had started a new book, something called THE AMLETH UNION, about a group of friends discovering the existence of an ancient, supernatural order on the grounds of their university in Washington, D.C. Mostly however, I ran wild, exploring the ciy with my beloved friend O.J., drinking heavily, taking drugs, having indiscriminate sex, getting involved in the nascent punk scene between New York and D.C. I had a few years earlier taken to heart Rimbaud's Lettre Voyante: To be a poet, one must become a seer. One becomes a seer through a deliberate derangement of all the senses. I told myself I would do this until I was thirty, and then settle down to a serious life as a writer. My academic career took a nosedive as dramatic as my audition: I went from being the only freshman on the Dean's List, with a perfect 4.0 average, to flunking out, in just three years. My friends had all gotten their acts together; they were completing their degrees and going on to jobs and lives and relationships (all save O.J., who was exhibiting the first signs of what became a terrible and tragic mental illness). I felt like Falstaff abandoned by Prince Hal. In disgrace, I went home to live with my parents, and -- the final ignominy -- took a low-paying job at a bookstore.

* * *

Somehow, throughout all of this, I wrote. In my freshman year I shared first prize in the university's C.W. Stoddard Fiction Award, for a dark short story called "Lords" in which a Dionysian god preys upon the children of Kamensic Village, the fictionalized version of my hometown. The prize consisted of fifty bucks and a case of Heinekin, which id rnak in triump with my friends on the roof of the building that housed the campus literary magazine. I also inherited the mantle of the magazine's editor, a responsibility I absolved myself of after a year (not fast enough). I dabbled at the libretto for a Brechtian musical version of "Beowulf;" several terrible, brittle comedies in the Coward mode; some short sbsurdist plays. The Theater of the Absurd was made for me: nothing had to make any sense. Nothing needed to have a proper ending, or even a proper beginning. I also ran a thriving black market business, writing term papers for other students. I charged a dollar a page, plus a six-pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes; and would settle in front of my old Royal Upright typewriter, chainsmoking and drinking as I wrote about FRANKENSTEIN or KING LEAR or DUNE -- there was a popular course on science fiction and fantasy being offered by the English Department, and I thought it incredible that students couldn't be bothered to read DUNE. I got As in my playwriting class, and in anthropology, but nothing else. I seldom showed up for classes, and every Sunday night offered the same dilemma: to catch up with my studies, or take the bus down to the Biograph Theater in Georgetown with O.J. and take in a double-bill of Truffaut or Fellini or Bunuel? Week after week I'd ask myself, "Twenty years from now, what will matter: that you did well on this test or that you saw "Amarcord"? Week after week I'd make the same decision. I saw the Ramones' first D.C. gig, Talking Heads playing a pre-Christmas show for an audience of about ten people -- one of them was David Byrne's mother, who invited me for dinner at their house in Baltimore -- numerous small club performances by Patti Smith; an unforgettable Springsteen show in the Georgetown University gymnasium. But at some point during my brief tenure in the Drama Department, I burned out on theater. There were only so many times I could read "Oedipus Rex," only so many times I could watch university productions of "MacBeth" and "A Man for All Seasons," even with Paul Scofield in the wings, hitting up on my classmates. The more plays I read (and performed in -- despite my failed audtion, I acted in small student productions and scenes, playing the ghost in "Blithe Spirit," Mrs. X. in Stindberg's "The Other," xxx in Moliere, among others), the more I realized that there is a very small, finite number of great plays, and I was not ever going to write one of them. The realization chastened me, but it was also a relief. Great plays are collaborative efforts between author, director, actor, designer; a play's ultimate glory is not upon the printed page but the proscenium. I was too much of a loner,m and too arrogant, to be good at this collaborative process. Plus I used too many words; a liability in playwriting. But I loved the feeling of power that came from creating contemporary characters, people I might see on the street, and moving them around on the page; though this was offset by a sense of constriction, that I couldn't make use of the more visionary, supernatural effects I liked to play with in my stories. I had for some time been working at a science fiction novel, much influenced by the work of Angela Carter and Samuel R. Delany's DHALGREN; a story set in a far-future Washington D.C., where the trees and vegetation had run amok, and a guild of prostitutes lived in the ruins of Embassy Row. I didn't get very far on my story -- I always did much more thinking about witing than I did actual writing -- but the image of the city I loved overgrown with roses and decay remained in my head for years, until it finally became the poisonous bloom of WINTERLONG .

* * *

Yet I still didn't know how to write, except in the roughest, most intuitive fashion. Convinced of my innate talent, I refused to take any writing classes (save playwriting, which was required). I had a rude awakening when a story I submitted to The New Yorker was rejected, though with a very kind note from an editor, who noted my obvious debts to Fred Barthelme and Frederick Exley and gently suggested I concentrate on plotting. Advice which I have to this day pretty much ignored: plot remains a distant fourth for me, behind character and setting and the evocation of pure emotional experience. Since high school days, I had kept notebooks in which I wrote about people I knew. I would hitchhike to Katonah, the real-life model for my fictionalized Kamensic Village, and sit there and observe kids my own age, teenagers I knew only slightly or not at all, and record their actions and conversations. I did the same in college, writing about my friends. This caused problems when a girlfreind read my notebook without my knowledge; she was appalled by the detached, clinical descriptions of herself and our circle, and I couldn't say much in my own defense (except for warning her not to read somebody else's journal without permission). I've never been good at Making Things Up; nearly all of the characters in my fiction are based upon real people, and there is a certain vampiric guilt in this process of observation and distillation, though the final characterization is nearly always pretty remote from its original inspiration. It was as a teenager that I also developed the habit of fixating on individuals as erotic and creative muses, people who, sometimes for years or even decades, have served as prisms for my work. Often these aren't people I know well (though sometimes they are), and nearly always there is a physical or chronological distance betwen myself and the person I'm writing about. One thing I did take from my years of studying acting is the habit of observation, of trying to fit into another's skin so acutely that one can mimic the other's moves, the tenor of his or her breathing. I am very conscious when writing of attempting to cast my work, drawing on people I know in the process; and very often when a character doesn't work it's not a matter of plot dynamics so much as miscasting - A should be played by a drag king, not a male-to-female transsexual; B shoul be a dying astronaut rather than a patrician WASP woman. These revelations often come to me in dreams. "Snow on Sugar Mountain" only came to life after I dreamed of an elderly man, an astronaut dying of cancer, who was struggling to climb the rusted scaffolding of one of the missile towers at the Redstone Arsenal, reaching futilely for the full moon in the sky above him when he at last reached the top. Up until then, the story's central character was a dying woman I had lived with and cared for, over the course of several weeks when I was nineteen. I began the story not long after she died, but it was some years before the dream came to me and the story finally came together. Still, dreaming wasn't going to help me much while I was working at a bookstore. I did reconnect with my old drama group and write another play for them, "The Misadventures of MaryAnna Maudlin and the Dreadful Things that Befell Her," but I had an overwhelming sense of being exiled from The Land of Eternal Youth to The Land of the Underemployed. My boyfriend, W., was in D.C., and many of my friends were now living in Manhattan, so I spent as much time as possible on various trains, shuttling between my parents' house and the two cities. It was during one of these trips, on March 17, a few weeks before my twenty-second birthday, that I was abducted and raped while visiting W. in Washington. Until then I had always envisioned myself as the heroine of my own life, triumphing over adversity -- even the bookstore became a Dickensian backdrop to the story I was always telling myself about myself: a New York fixture, it had been around for decades and was run by three generations of the same family. Suddenly my storyline changed. I had been raised Catholic, but the concept of evil was, in those post-Vatican II days, very much a relative thing, at least as it was taught to me in the Catholic schools I attended, and all the dark gods and godlings I wrote about in my stories were pretty much window-dressing. When I was raped, I saw for the first time that evil was real, and impartial, and utterly random. It was a terrifying realization, and the vision I had then never left me: that if you peeled back the surface of this world, you would see the real world beneath, the world that was, is, a wasteland. It's the vision that most of my fictional protagonists have at some point, and one that I now have to fight in my waking life. At the time, though, I was determined to act as though nothing happened. In retrospect this seems ridiculous: when i first saw the opening of David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS, with its vision of a battered girl coming across a railroad trestle, I recognized myself, running screaming down the middle of a street near the D.C. riot corridor. I had thought I was going to be murdered: how could I ever have pretended it didn't matter? But in the aftermath I did what I had always done, what I always do: attempt to transmute my own experience into a story, with a coherent narrative and a resolution that, even if it's not a happy one, offers some closure to the reader. And there was more Bad Stuff to be endured: the emergency room doctor who treated me after the rape told me that he detected something inside me, a growth. I should have someone look at it as soon as possible. I was in shock, and completely forgot his warning until I was home some days later and was examined by my mother's gynecologist, who then sent me to another specialist, who called in his partners, who eventually all confirmed that I had a large tumor on my ovary. In those pre-sonogram days, there was no way of detrmining if this was benign, or if it was ovarian cancer; the doctors were pragmatic, telling me they weren't crtain what they would find when they went inside. The growth was large, and if it was cancerous there was not a lot they would be able to do to treat it. Surgery was scheduled for the first available slot, which wasn't for several weeks. I didn't have health insurance, but the surgeon agreed to let me pay over time. I continued to work at the bookstore, earning my $97.00 a week,. At night I helped rehearse "MaryAnna Maudlin." As it turned out, I missed the performances: I was in the hospital. I underwent surgery, feeling as though I'd never left the nightmarish emergency room at D.C. General; one ovary and fallopian tube had been devoured by tumors, which were removed. At one point during recovery I half-woke and sat up, dazed: I saw my father in a chair watching me, his face anguished: the results of the bipsy had not come back yet. I stared at him then immediately passed out. When hours later I finally woke again, the surgeon was there, beaming as he held up the results of the biopsy. The tumors were benign. I spent the next few days in the hospital recovering, reading John Fowles' THE MAGUS while shot full of Demerol. Two days after being released, I quit my job at the bookstore and moved back to D.C. to live with W.

* * *

This was May, 1979. That summer, W and I and a group of friends squatted in a house in Turkey Ticket with no electricity or plumbing; from the front window, I could see the abandoned gas station where I'd been abducted in March. I got a job at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum -- I had worked there the previous summer -- and by the end of the summer we'd moved to a small apartment complex nearby, where several dozen of our friends already lived. For the next six years I had a rather idyllic, punky FRIENDS-style existence, working at NASM by day and spending a lot of time at clubs at night. I got readmitted to the university and entered the Anthropology Department, paying the exorbitant tuition costs myself and getting straight As this time. I was still working a full-time job and carrying a heavy party schedule. Cocaine and speed helped immeasurably in all this, but when after two years I finally got my degree I quit all drugs cold turkey, as I'd quit chainsmoking a few years before. W., an English major who had a wonderful gift as an editor, encouraged my writing and gave me a self-correcting electric typewriter, a godsend for someone who couldn't type and who rewrote obsessively. During the week I'd get up at four or five A.M. and write for several hours before going off to NASM; on weekend nights I'd sit at the typewriter with a drink at my elbow (and the occasional cigarette) and write with the stereo blasting. I was working on a supernatural novel set in Texas, where my mother grew up and where I'd spent my summers as a girl. Texas in those days had some of the same appeal that Maine did when i first mvoed here fifteen years ago, a sense of a place mired in time -- the Texas of my childhood and adolescence was still in many ways the Texas my mother had known -- and I loved losing myself there. W., who worked as a bartender and thus had a schedule opposite mine, would read my story and line-edit it, and I would painstakingly rewrite it, repeating the process sometimes a dozen times before a story or chapter would improve. I was, without being conscious of it, already deep into the pattern that much of my later writing would take: using my own experience, using people I knew, and casting a supernatural haze over the mostly realistic setting. And through W. I met one of the most important people in my life, my friend and sometime collaborator Paul Witcover, W's cousin. We met the night before Paul left to attend the Clarion Writer's Workshop, at a dinner organized by Paul's mother. For some time she'd been trying to get the two of us together -- we liked the same music, she said, we liked the same writers -- but I was deeply suspicious of the prospect. Wrong again. Paul and I met and it was like two of those little magnetic Scotty Dogs clicking: we loved the same music! we loved the same books! For the first time in my life I had a conversation with someone who knew Patti Smith AND TRITON AND Philip K. Dick AND Iggy Pop. The next morning Paul left for Clarion and I was consumed with envy when at the end of the summer he returned, having already sold his first story. But he read my stories and critiqued them and offered more encouragement; and when Paul sold another story I slowly, slowly began to see that this might really be possible, that, in spite of everything I might be able to get published too. But not yet. I had one completed story, called "King Heroin," that I bounced around to F&SF and various men''s magazines where I knew Stephen King had published early in his career. My favorite rejection letter of this time came from an editor who wrote "I really, really enjoyed your story, but right now we are looking for more Sex-Oriented Material." (I kept the rejection letters in the freezer; I can't recall why.) W. worshipped John Gardner, so I bought and read Gardner's ON BECOMING A NOVELIST, and was exhilirated to learn that, according to Gardner, I had a writer's nature and a writer's instincts, even if mine were crude and undeveloped. The knack for entering what Gardner calls "the vivid and continuous dream" of fiction; an eye for seeing strangeness in everyday life; the belief in the supremacy of character over plot: *I knew this stuff,* even if I was still learning (am still learning) how to communicate it. " "Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked," Gardner wrote: when I read those words I had the same sense I did when I met Paul: that I had, at last, come home. It was around this time, the early 1980s, that a miracle occured. NASM became one of the first places in the country to get word processors for all its employees. I spent two weeks being trained with other NASM employes, and returned to my cubicle to find my own computer. I literally got goosebumps: I knew my life had changed. No more retyping; no more time wasted on revisions that would now take minutes rather than hours or days. I began staying after work and writing. I abandoned my Texas novel and revisions of "King Heroin," instad started or revived several projects -- what W. derisively called my mutant prositute story; something called EIGHTH MOON, about a woman anthropologist finding remnants of an ancient goddess cult; my university story THE AMLETH UNION. One day during my lunch hour I walked to a shop called The Artifactory and spent a huge chunk of my paycheck on a beautiful Balinesian puppet. When I returned to work I set it on my desk, announced to my friend Greg that"This is going to bring me luck," and began working on a story called "Prince of Flowers" (on company time, too: your U.S. tax dollars at work!). I broke up with W., though for several years he continued to edit me, and moved to Capitol Hill. I met N., who became one of the muses for WAKING THE MOON. I quit my job as NASM and briefly took a high-paying job for a UK defense contractor. I started spending weekends in Charlottesville, Virginia, where N's best friend, Eddie Dean (now a journalist) drove an ice cream truck into the strange, archaic countryside of the surrounding Green Mountains, another place where time seemed to have stopped. N. agreed to help support me so I could write, so I quit my job and started doing temp work, taking jobs for a month at a time, then taking a month off to write. "On the Town Route" came out of this period, and "Engels Unaware," "Snow on Sugar Mountain" and "The Boy in the Tree," the novella that became WINTERLONG. I wrote feverishly, knowing I had only a short time to finish a story. I collected more rejection slips, my favorite from the edtior of WEIRD TALES, who told me that "Snow on Sugar Mountain" was too bizarre for him. Ah! I thought. I've written something too weird for WEIRD TALES! But I consoled myself with John Gardner's words: *"Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked."* I had during these months the burgeoning sense that I was, at last, being born; that I was going to break through. But not yet. * * *

In 1986 I took my first writer's workshop, taught by novelist Richard Grant at The Writer's Center in Bethesda. I was still doing temp work, and for a while worked a second job at Second Story Books in Bethesda, another oddly Dickensian experience (I toyed with the idea of writing a play about this, called "Shelf Life"). Richard was the first -- the only -- writer I had ever met, and it was several weeks before I submitted my first story, a revision of "Prince of Flowers. When I received back the copy of my manuscript, annotated with Richard's distinctive penmanship and peacock-blue ink, I almost wept. "A lovely story, almost a tour-de-force of lingustic and sensual prose ... " It was the first time a real writer had read something I wrote.

* * *

I had not yet sent out "Prince of Flowers," but now I did -- to Tappan King at Twilight Zone Magazine, which was a powerhouse in those boom days for horror. After almost a year, the story was rejected. I was devastated. I was also furious, because for the first time I was convinced that I had written soemthing worth publishing. Not a great story -- I knew that -- but absolutely a Twilight Zone story. And this is when someone suddenly really did become the hero of my life: Paul Witcover, who was now reading slush for Twlight Zone. I sent him "Prince of Flowers;" and Paul passed it on to Tappan. Within a few weeks the letter arrived that I had been waiting for almost my whole life, saying that "Prince of Flowers" had been accepted. It was published in the February 1987 issue, first in the series of "Twilight Zone Firsts" featuring newly discovered writers. After that the other stories that I had already written began to find homes, slowly but steadily. And slowly but steadily I began to turn fragments of dreams I'd had into novels, WINTERLONG, the first chapters of WAKING THE MOON. The wasteland remained, in my life as in my fiction; but I had finally found a way to walk through it to the other side.

* * *

The night before I had my surgery, I had a dream. In the hospital I was calm but terrified, convinced that I had ovarian cancer; that the disastrous turning my life had taken on that March night just six weeks before meant that this was the way the story was going to turn out. In the dream I was walking beneath a midnight sky to where a long, rectangular marble pool stretched before me. The pool was like something from ancient Greece: white marble, black water; absolutely still. A number of objects floated upon its surface. As I drew to the pool's edge I saw that these were hyacinth blossoms, white and luminous, inutterably strange and beautiful. I knelt to look at them. That was when I saw that each blossom had been severed from its stalk. They were all dead. Grief and horror overwhelmed me. I began to cry, then reached for one of the blossoms, drawing it towards me. And realized that I was wrong. Because while I could clearly see where the flower had been hacked from its stem, it was not dead. The wound had closed up, and not just with this blossom, but all of them. I gazed out at the pool, black water, white hyacinths; and with amazement saw that they were all still beautiful, every single one of them; and, miraculously, alive.