she really is my favorite writer, you know (NYT KJF profile)

Just a quick post to point your way to the NYTimes profile of Ms. Karen Joy Fowler today. It spends more than one line on science fiction, and talks about how Karen got started writing.

She tried dancing, learning languages, dropped them all. "I was terrified of failing," she said. Next came writing. If she didn't succeed in a year, she told her husband, Hugh Fowler, an environmentalist for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, she would find another profession.

In 1980 she joined a peer-writing workshop at the Davis Arts Center. A year passed. And only failure, rejections from magazines, the criticisms of her colleagues. "It was going to be more work that I realized," she said.

But "I found out how badly I wanted it." She renegotiated with her husband for another five years. "I won't be stopped," Ms. Fowler said in her very quiet, very determined way.

And doesn't this kind of thing make us all feel better?

"Sarah Canary" tells of a mysterious 19th-century woman in the Pacific Northwest who speaks in incomprehensible sounds and is taken under the wing of a Chinese laborer. After 27 rejections, it was finally accepted by Henry Holt.

All in all, she said, she has received 200 rejections in the course of her career, all of which she has grimly saved. She shows them off with pride to her writing students.

Thanks to Justine and O Elfalan for pointing this out to me.

Tonight we'll be having dinner with and attending a reading by Friend of KJF and Fellow Davis Resident, Stan Robinson. Should be fun.

worm: "Ch-Check It Out," Beastie Boys

check out: IN THE GARDEN OF IDEN, Kage Baker

namecheck: Justine "Queen o SF Lore" Larbalestier