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WORTHY OF OUR DREAMS, by James P. Blaylock

Here’s a collection of stories and poems that astonished me when I read them and which I believe will astonish you. I’ll admit right off the bat that Amy and I are friends and colleagues. Both of us teach at Chapman University in Orange; both of us write science fiction and fantasy and whatever else comes into our heads; both of us come from a literary rather than science background. We met a couple of years back when Amy was chasing an MFA in creative writing and signed up for three units of independent study. I hadn’t read anything of hers at the time, but she made it clear that she wanted to write science fiction, and she gave me a copy of a story she’d recently written titled “The Stuff of Legend.” I don’t know what I expected, but whatever it was, I got something else—a short story sequel to Beowulf—exquisitely written, atmospheric, sad, spooky, wise. After that it was “Jenny, With the Stars in Her Hair,” a story as irresistible and beautiful as its title. Virtually every week it was something new again—a fresh story, chapters from her first novel—and always she’d tell me that she wasn’t writing enough, that between school and work and being a mother she couldn’t find the time she needed.

It was evident to me when I first read her work that she must already be publishing stories, and in fact she was. She was more prolific than I was and with a wider range of story types, so to speak, and I’ll say quite truthfully that I learned as much from her work during that independent study class as she learned from my comments, which were almost always approving. As a teacher I often go looking for trouble when I read a student’s work, and I suspect that I’m not earning my pay unless I find it, but with Amy’s stories there was rarely anything of the kind, and reading them was a sort of holiday from teaching. Amy’s a naturally and refreshingly humble person, and she’d deny that if you asked her about it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

She stopped by the office the other day, and we chatted, as usual, about what we were doing with our lives. She was busy with work, teaching more, commuting an hour to school and with some sort of publishing-related internet job on the side, and of course her activities as a mom went on as ever. She regretted not having the time to write as much as she should, and yet she has three or four stories coming out from respectable magazines and more stories in the works. I’d had an uncommonly prolific three months, having finished two stories myself—a personal record: over the last twenty-five years I’ve averaged about one a year—and so I was feeling particularly proud of myself. What I did after talking to Amy was to go home and launch another story, and now I’ve got three.

Robert Louis Stevenson tells us that “we’ve never made a statue worthy of our dreams,” and that’s happily true, because it keeps writers like Amy hard at work carving new statues. And as I said, watching her work, and seeing the results, has sent me down to the quarry for a new block of marble myself more than once. I’ll finish up by saying that as a writer, Amy’s a prodigious dreamer, and that she’s got some statues in here that are about as worthy as they come.

—Jim Blaylock