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AMY STERLING CASIL…WHO DAT? STUPID AMERICAN GIRL! by Amy Sterling Casil

Once upon a time in 1979, Amy Casil (who wasn’t called that then) walked into high school chemistry class wearing skintight yellow Ditto jeans, a French-cut T-shirt and Candies high-heeled sandals and met her lab partner, Bernard Bang. He spoke little English, yet he was good at chemistry. All he said for the next two weeks was, “don’t do that, stupid American girl!” She almost flunked chemistry. Thought she couldn’t do it at all and she believed Bernard until they let her switch partners and classes. Then, when she was in college, she confessed to her boyfriend the genius electronic engineer and Harry Harrison fan that she wanted to write science fiction.

“But you have to be smart to write science fiction,” he told her.

Even amid science failure, there were bright moments in her writing life. She wanted to be a writer since she was five or six years old. She remembers cutting sheets of pale red construction paper to make a book, chewing on Fig Newtons and drinking apple juice, as she folded and stapled and colored each page with a happy butterfly. That book was about ten pages long, whatever she had the patience for, and it was called “Freddy the Friendly Butterfly.” A few years later, her dreams were colored by watching Highway Patrol after school, along with awful Mexican horror movies and wretched retread “sci-fi” flicks featuring helmet-haired 60’s women with artillery-shell breasts. And she read A Wrinkle in Time and The Lord of the Rings and Dandelion Wine. She read Mark Twain’s novels and short fiction and De Maupassant’s collected stories: the latter because she’d heard adults whispering that it was a “dirty book.” (It’s not, she says.) Her grandmothers had both given her books of myths and tall tales and she took them literally. Pecos Bill was a real cowboy as far as she was concerned, and she lit worshipful leaf pyres for the Norse gods. This was before anyone paid too much attention to modern safety campaigns like “Smokey Says Don’t Play With Matches.”

She lived pretty far out in the country as a young girl and she remembers going out to feed her menagerie of animals and imagining that she was a Norse maiden with artillery-shell breasts and long blond braids. That she would marry Thor or some other brawny God and that they were happy because they were both smart, honest, brave and true and these fantasies became more and more elaborate. About this time, she watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon while drinking cold skim milk and eating a plate of Oreos. Regular thin ones with sugary white filling. There was not a thought in her mind as she sat in her striped pajamas coating her teeth with black Oreo goo that she would not, for certain, someday put her own feet right there where Neil Armstrong’s had been.

The “Little House” books were popular at that time and the show was on television. She and her best friend read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books out loud to each other, chapter by chapter. They tried Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but those stories didn’t hold the charm of making candy by pouring maple syrup in the snow, like Laura did. Nancy Drew was somehow “fake.” It was Laura who was the real hero.

It seemed to Amy, though she never said this to anyone, that just about the best thing that anyone could do would be to tell stories like Laura Ingalls Wilder did, or Aesop or Homer or Mark Twain or Ray Bradbury. In the high school, she found Harlan Ellison and thought, “my God, the coolest person, the most incredible writer in the universe.” She didn’t care if he was a guy or not. She dreamed that she could be as free as he seemed. As quick, and as bright.

Though Amy read a lot of SF and fantasy in high school, she didn’t really write it. These were the days before D & D and computers were the size of eighteen-wheelers. She wrote stories about her family and about the country she grew up in. She grew up in an orange grove and in a ranch house far out in the countryside near the San Bernardino Mountains and what used to be the Santa Ana River. She wrote and read poetry. She imagined that she might someday be loved, or love someone as fiercely as Poe loved beautiful Annabel Lee.

In college, she hid her SF magazines and books inside “better” things, like Trollope’s The Claverings. In Asimov’s (the issue with Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild), she read an article by A.J. Budrys about the Clarion SF Writers Workshop. When she graduated college, she had a choice of continuing in academia, going to UC Irvine’s writing program or going to work and trying Clarion. She was tired of school, and A.J.’s article seduced her, convincing her that Clarion was for real writers, not scholars. She wrote the first plotted story she ever wrote, as well as the first SF story, and sent it off to Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, and Glenn Wright at Clarion. And they admitted her. 1She was twenty-one years old, newly-married, and she somehow got the money together to fly to East Lansing. Where she ate pizza with KETCHUP instead of pizza sauce on the crust, was gently hazed by Harlan, drank herself to a giggling stupor every night, shot her mates with water pistols, hurled water balloons, wrote ten execrable stories and observed and heard and learned stuff that did not begin to register with her another decade.

After Clarion, she did other things. She became a nonprofit executive and fundraiser, building homeless shelters and trying to help abused children. She had her daughter Meredith, who’s now 7½.

She quit writing when she was about twenty-four or twenty-five, and she did not write for eight years.

Part of this was believing the mirrored reflection of “Stupid American Girl” and “too dumb to write science fiction.” It became dumb; it felt dumb to her. Dreams fled. She forgot Thor and Neil Armstrong and Pecos Bill and Ray Bradbury and Harlan and the magic of a cloudless Southern California night with the stars so close and bright you could reach up and touch them.

Always backward, she started writing again when her daughter was born, rather than stopped. Not from martyrdom, but from necessity; she wrote every day from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m. for the first three or four years of Meredith’s life. At a certain point, stories began to sell and she decided to go back to school, recalling the dream she’d had since she was five or six years old. What she had forgotten: that the telling of stories was important, that it had value, and that it could bring something good into the world.

* * * *

My influences as a writer are numberless. My friends know that I went out and lived life and did ten years of hard service with poor people, as well as my share of partying, etc. It’s not as though I’m Emily Dickinson.

I find that non-writers or semi-writers often advocate the “live life” thesis; you can’t write well until you “live life,” but most of what I figured out about how I write and what I write, I learned from reading. I read voluminously. When I read, I read one or two books a night. I feel like I read about a billion books to get my MFA. It wasn’t quite that, but I read classics that I had never read before, or refreshed my memory of books I read when I was too young to really comprehend them, like The Brothers Karamazov.

When I was young, of course, I read SF constantly, particularly every short fiction collection I could find. Much of this was during first period “library study hall.” I read the classic stories five, six, seven, eight times. I can recite the plots of vast numbers of classic SF stories; I internalized everything I loved about them. Most of all, from a very early age, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, with certain stories by Harlan Ellison, and with Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon,” which spoke to me about everything I most enjoyed about short fiction.

In college, of course, this addiction was a bad idea. I was made fun of and vilified for being interested in SF. Yes, my friend said, “you’re not smart enough to be an SF writer.” Well, at least he was a Harry Harrison addict and didn’t make fun of SF in general! Yes, Stephen King - most of my familiarity with him comes from that time; we all read Different Seasons and talked about “The Body” and the rat man and the other scary things in that book. I was forcibly made to read Trollope’s The Claverings, a horrible, dull 19th century novel that almost made me blind. Even so, I adored the Romantic poets and have had a lifelong fascination with Dickens. American “literary” education is so heavily weighted toward British literature. I think I had far more familiarity than I should have had with Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis, Lords Tennyson and George Gordon (Byron), Shelley, Keats, and the Bronte sisters. I read 20th Century American and British poetry voluminously; I discovered a fondness for W.S. Merwin. Now I know it was probably because, as people often say in my stories, “I liked his face.”

On my own, I read Paul Bowles because I picked up a beautiful Black Sparrow book of his collected stories and read the introduction by Gore Vidal, not knowing of or understanding the gay connection: he was the best American writer of short stories, Gore Vidal said. OK, so I did Paul Bowles. I have the Paul Bowles Shrine Shelf; I spent far more time than was truly necessary reading about nails driven in people’s ears and guys’ tongues getting cut out by merciless desert bandits. My Clarion story was a Paul Bowles/Star Trek pastiche, if that can be believed. I also always read and loved the great California mystery writers, especially Raymond Chandler. I found an appeal in these tales of betrayal and loneliness and honor. I’d already driven off many times into the starred Mulholland night.

As an adult, when I went back for my MFA, having not read anything much of substance for years, so much more came clear.

I saw what a different thing the Russian novel was; how much better at it the Russians were than any English novelists except maybe Dickens. There was a quality of hugeness and universality—an interest in everything and a spirituality you do not find in American or British novels, for the most part. Enduring rejection, enduring a “B” in a graduate course for the story that later became my first cover story of F & SF, I thought of Pierre crying “How can they take from me my immortal soul?” at the end of War and Peace. I learned about language again. I read beautiful writers. I made it through Tristram Shandy, laughing all the way. I understood how high the bar really is. How far one has to climb. Out of what depths things need to come. Little by little. Story by story.

I realized who and what Shakespeare was. He helped me understand just about everything. I stood and stand in awe of his language and his humanity.

“The most human of the great writers,” they call him. I think that was Pope, giving a whack, comparing him negatively to the more “transcendent” Milton.

And the younger me hated the hell out of “Paradise Lost,” though I’d probably like it now.

It bothers me that character is shortchanged in so much SF. I dislike the thinness of that approach and I don’t believe in its necessity, because after all, aren’t all great stories about what it is to be human? Whether they’re set in rotten Denmark or on the flaming surface of Venus?

Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare “invented the human.” Through characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, the Bard gave us all an idea of what people really were. I wonder if Hamlet and Falstaff aren’t even more than human, for they are after all quite immortal.

I wonder, since I do believe Harold Bloom’s thesis, if this might make Shakespeare a kind of 16th century Victor Frankenstein; except his people are a lot more functional than the Monster ever was. And even more ironic; the poor Monster was so much more human than his creator.

It’s a chase. Always chasing after some kind of invention. Some flicker of a dream, trying to make it flesh.

These poor players, strutting and fretting on their stage, looking for absolution.

And I’ve found, after this time, that the stories themselves are the way to find it.

* * * *

Amy Casil’s short fiction has appeared, among other places, in Talebones, the Writers of the Future Anthologies, Zoetrope: All Story Extra, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She has more novelettes upcoming in F & SF. Her novelette “Chromosome Circus” was the cover story of the January 2000 issue of that magazine. Last year, she finished her first novel, The Golden Age, and is working on her next, Live Forever. She is the Science Fiction/Fantasy writing instructor for iUniverse’s Writers Club University, Novel Advice site for writers, and Writers.com. She also teaches composition and literature at Chapman University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman in May 1999.

1 An aside: she learned not long ago that the reason she’d seen A.J.’s life-changing article was that 1984 was the year Damon and Kate got desperate and had to advertise for students by having A.J. write such things.