mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

While collecting the necessary materials for my Le Guin reading project, I found she had a story which appeared only in the 1973 anthology Clarion III. This was a product of the 1972 Clarion Workshop, an annual six-week course for aspiring speculative fiction writers, taught by a rotating slate of guest instructors. Le Guin was a Clarion instructor that year, and while most of the instructors contributed essays on writing or on the workshop itself, she instead wrote a story.

Since I'd bothered to acquire the book, I figured I'd read the whole thing. But I took my time about it since Le Guin's story didn't seem important to the general arc of her career, though obviously it's significant that her stature had grown to the point where she was invited to teach. So although my reading of her work has progressed in the meantime to 1979 (and will continue from there if the person who currently has The Language of the Night checked out ever returns it to the library!!) we're going to take a short trip back to 1973 here.

Le Guin's story "The Ursula Major Construct; or, A Far Greater Horror Loomed" is a fictionalized version of an exercise she gave the students, using them as the characters and reimagining the whole thing as a SF experiment. I guess in reality she built a mobile out of found objects (the titular construct) and told the class to write about it. I'm sure her story was amusing to the people who were there, but out of context I found it impenetrable. (And hold that thought, because I'm gonna circle back to it.)

As for the student stories, I liked a handful of them, but most were either not to my taste, or seemed underdeveloped in some way, or were so steeped in 1970s gender politics and/or sophomoric "dirty joke" humor that the generation gap was too wide for me to cross. To be fair, these are student stories, but none of them sent me running to look for the authors' later work.

The students were awarded prizes through some method that isn't explicitly explained in the book. First prize went to Vonda McIntyre, whose story "Mist, Grass and Sand" unfortunately doesn't appear in the anthology—I assume because there was a conflict with her publishing it elsewhere?

Second prize was F.M. Busby's "Road Map", a story about a widower who dies and is reincarnated as his own wife, living through her entire life and seeing events from that point of view. It's like Andy Weir's story "The Egg", but more personal in scope. I think Busby was trying to take a feminist perspective, noticing how the protagonist is socialized in restrictive ways to behave as a girl, and in that way becomes a girl. The presentation does feel kind of narcissistic and male-centric, though; it takes the male experience as neutral, presents woman as an offshoot of man, and is about a character falling in love with himself and becoming his own perfect mate because he knows himself so well. It is trying to sympathize with women, but ends up framing women's lives as meaningful only in terms of their relationships to men.

Third place was a tie between Dvora Olmstead's "The Teardrop" and Mel Gilden's "Everybody Loves: In a Circular Motion". I couldn't understand what the Olmstead story was trying to do at all; something about an old woman trying to sell a self-pubbed story about a dying unicorn, and a girl tries to talk to her about it, and then nothing happens? The Gilden story was the one I disliked the most in the whole book. It's about a guy who keeps coming back to buy more wives because they keep annoyingly having personalities and preferences. It's supposed to be funny, and I guess at the time some people thought it was, but I found the misogyny and racism too repugnant to successfully land as satire. The punchline is that the guy gives up and decides to sell himself as a husband instead. The 1970s sure were a decade that happened.

Of the four honorable mentions, I really enjoyed two: I was delighted by Mildred Downey Broxon's charming "Asclepius Has Paws", in which a telepathic feline alien therapist experiences a transporter malfunction and ends up on Earth, mistaken for a housecat, and attempts to treat the hapless humans' neuroses. I also liked Lin Nielsen's "When Pappy Isn't There", which has a woman envying her aging father's mysterious ability to time travel, but then realizing that the present moment, the time she gets to spend with her dad, is what really matters to her.

The other two honorable mentions seemed undercooked. "Servants" by David Wise is a character study of an alien on a doomed planet who sees the end more clearly than others, which I thought was well written, but it could have used a plot. "Say Goodbye to the World's Last Brothel" by Robert Wisner follows the last five people on Earth after a vague apocalypse: a pimp and twin sister sex workers, a lunatic veteran who eats lemons thinking they're oranges, and our protagonist, a rando who is in love with one of the twins. The other twin wants to kill him because he interrupted her trying to get it on with the pimp, who can very rarely keep it up because when he's about to fuck he gets so excited he foams at the mouth and loses his erection. This is supposed to be funny and it did make me guffaw a couple of times, but I have no idea what it means or what possessed the author to write it. Maybe it's satirizing tropes I'm not familiar with?

Of the stories that garnered no award, I liked "The Breath of Dragons" by J. Michael Reaves, where alien dragons are hunted for the explosive contents of their flame bladders, but one hunter realizes they are sentient and sacrifices his prestigious career (and maybe his life) to try to save them. I think I'll also remember Dennis R. Caro's "Cantaloupes and Kangaroos", where an office drudge wakes up with a lioness following him and his life is transformed. Other people have animal familiars too who represent some hidden aspect of themselves. Very Pullmanesque.

A lot of the other stories had an interesting idea but didn't flesh it out enough, or hadn't thought through its implications. I was especially frustrated by "Till Human Voices Wake Us..." by Lisa Tuttle, about a reporter doing a "where are they now?" piece on an aging mermaid who was once a newsworthy sensation but is now forgotten and miserable. The story is almost saying something incisive about ephemeral celebrity and how women are devalued as they age, but the problem is that the mermaid got to where she is by always saying yes to whatever men ask of her—and the "happy ending" is that she says yes to the reporter asking her to run away with him. So she never actually gains any agency or self-worth separate from male desire.

Of the instructor essays, I appreciated Kate Wilhelm's "The Source". She argues that all the ideas a writer needs are found in childhood emotional milestones that are common to us all; you have to look there to find the universal that will resonate as true for readers. I can see how that framing might be helpful to new writers. But I mostly found the other essays pretentious and condescending, as if the instructors had let the experience of teaching go to their heads.

Which leads right into the final piece of the book, Harlan Ellison's essay "When Dreams Become Nightmares: Some Cautionary Notes on the Clarion Experience", in which he offers some pretty damning criticisms of how the workshop is run. He calls out the fact that the instructors can get up their own asses about having all these starry-eyed students hanging on their every word, and that favoritism and extracurricular parties and hangouts can make it more about feeding egos and forming cliques than about honing the students' craft. He says that every year there's some stupid inside joke that everybody submits a story about, which is a total waste of time since it won't make sense to readers who aren't in on the meme. I suspect that he has a point and that Le Guin's story—which is indeed a self-indulgent and incomprehensible inside joke—is an example of what he is talking about.

So I think Ellison is probably correct in the facts of what he's saying, but god, he is such an asshole. He goes on and on about this drama that happened at a con where an attendee broke something and the organizer couldn't pay for it, so he (the Great Harlan Ellison whom everyone loved and adored) heroically got up on stage and asked everyone to contribute a dollar each, but then they contributed too much so he suggested donating the excess to Clarion, and then some jealous fools in the grip of "hysterical paranoia" dared to boo him for lining his own pockets and a fistfight broke out, and then someone set off a firecracker in the convention hall and so you see that's why Ellison stopped going to cons for a while. Wait, what was this essay about again? Oh yeah, don't forget we have to talk at great length about another writer Ellison has a beef with over some hairsplitting difference between "unknown writers" and "amateur writers", and make absolutely sure he gets the last word on that too. He seems to be trying to present himself as a naive innocent around whom drama mysteriously swirls through no fault of his own, when in fact he is obviously going out of his way to stir up shit and cling to grudges for dear life. The conclusion, in any case, is that he's not doing Clarion workshops anymore, which might have been for the best.

So that's Clarion III. Kind of interesting, kind of exhausting, not really sure it was worth it, but there it is. Here's the full list of included works:

"Road Map" by F.M. Busby
"Everybody Loves: In a Circular Motion" by Mel Gilden
"The Ursula Major Construct; or, A Far Greater Horror Loomed" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"Asclepius Has Paws" by Mildred Downey Broxon
"The Word 'Random,' Deliberately Repeated" by John Shirley
Essay: "Why?" by Theodore Sturgeon
"The Teardrop" by Dvora Olmstead
"Bus Station" by William Earls
"Say Goodbye to the World's Last Brothel" by Robert Wisner
"Flat Hatter" by David Wise
"Baby Makes Two" by Gerard F. Conway
Poem: "Thrangs and Other Wonders" by Leonard Isaacs
"Cantaloupes and Kangaroos" by Dennis R. Caro
"The Breath of Dragons" by J. Michael Reaves
Essay: "The Source" by Kate Wilhelm
"Servants" by David Wise
"When Pappy Isn't There" by Lin Nielsen
"More I Cannot Wish You" by Jean Sullivan
Essay: "The Deep Well of the Unconscious—Well, Well..." by Damon Knight
"Give My Regards to the Czar" by David N. Williams
"Molten Core" by Donnel Stern
Essay: "Science Fiction, Archetypes, and the Future" by R. Glenn Wright
"The Diggers" by Donnel Stern
"Play It Again, Sam" by F.M. Busby
"Till Human Voices Wake Us..." by Lisa Tuttle
Essay: "When Dreams Become Nightmares: Some Cautionary Notes on the Clarion Experience" by Harlan Ellison