Author Biography and Bibliography

Author Biography

I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My dad was a professor, at first in the English Department, and then he founded the linguistic department. My mother was a housewife. She was the life of the family, with a terrific sense of humor. Where she was, there was the action and the fun. I have three brothers. We adore each other. People keep calling me a feminist. Well, sort of, I suppose, but I'm nuts about men!

I grew up mostly in Ann Arbor, but also in France. For a while it was back and forth every other year. I was eight years old in France, nine and ten here, then eleven in France, twelve back here, etc. In school I was hopelessly confused. I can't, even still, spell much of anything. I remember the exact word where I decided I couldn't learn and so gave up: address/adresse. Another was: syrup/sirop. (I had to look those up. I'm still not sure.) It was as if a curtain came down and I didn't bother anymore. I did manage to squeak through with Cs and a few Ds until my last year in college, when I finally started to come out of my fog. I failed freshman English and had to take it over and almost failed again. At that time I hated anything to do with writing until I met science fiction people through my husband, Ed Emsh. (Freshman English had scared me off.) The science fiction writers talked about writing as if it could be learned.

Through Ed I got to know (and love) the sf world and wanted to join it. I began to sell stories almost right away. Later on I took classes with Anatole Broyard and Kay Boyle, but I learned the most from the class with the poet Kenneth Koch. No wait, I learned the most from the Milford science fiction workshops. I attended the very first one and most of them from then on.

I went to the University of Michigan, first to music school and then to art school, where I met Ed. After we married, we went off to France for a year and studied at the Beaux Arts. In the summer we rode all around Europe on a motorcycle. I didn't begin writing until I was over thirty and had had my first child. (I had three, so I had to struggle to get any writing time at all.)

Ed started out as an science fiction illustrator, but then went into abstract expressionist painting and experimental filmmaking. We influenced each other. I went into more experimental writing and became part of what others called the new wave in science fiction.

I live in New York City in the winter, where I teach at New York University Adult Education. I live in California in the summer, the Sierras on one side and the Inyo White Mountains (where the oldest bristlecone pines are) on the other.

About my writing, a lot of people don't seem to understand how planned and plotted even the most experimental of my stories are. I'm not interested in stories where anything can happen at any time. I set up clues to foreshadow what will happen and what is foreshadowed does happen. I try to have all, or most of, the elements in the stories linked to each other. Ed used to call it, referring to his experimental films, structuring strategies. He taught a film course he named that.

How I write is by linking and by structures, and by, I hope, not ever losing sight of the meaning of the story. My favorite writer is Kafka. He kept everything linked and together and full of meaning!

My novel The Mount won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2002. I also won a Nebula Award in 2002 for my story "Creature," which appeared in F&SF and was reprinted in my collection Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories.

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Photograph by Susan Emshwiller.