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A symposium for James Tiptree, Jr.
Dec. 4th, 2015 11:12 pmThe James Tiptree, Jr. archives are being donated to the University of Oregon, which also has the archives of her correspondent-friends Ursula LeGuin and Joanna Russ, and today was the first day of a Tiptree symposium in her honor. I haven’t read her work since the early 1980s (R. had been a fan), but I’m definitely a fan of “feminist science fiction” in general, so off I went.
First (after the requisite bureaucrat talks about how wonderful it is to get the collection), we had a talk from her biographer, who told us many wonderful things about the correspondence between Tiptree and LeGuin (who was sitting in the front row) and Russ. Then, graduate students who have been working with the archives read selections from her letters. The last of those, read by the biographer, was the letter in which she told LeGuin that she was actually a woman. Then LeGuin read her response to Tiptree. These letters were all wonderfully crafted pieces – writers whose relationships with others are through letters can take great care in showing off their prose – and the letters about “The Revelation” were especially moving, because they were about a vulnerable woman fearing she had lost her most meaningful relationships, and LeGuin reassuring her that this was hardly the case.
After that we had an audio to listen to, of someone reading one of her stories, but this overlapped with the walking tour of the archive selection on display in the library, and we were encouraged to head over there, so I did. Many of the people there were Tiptree scholars and/or dedicated fans, which made it especially interesting. We learned about her childhood in Africa, her debutante coming-out and immediate first marriage, her years as a WAAC, then chicken-farming with her second husband, then brief CIA career, and then she started writing fiction. She had a different typewriter for each of her three writing personas – herself (Alice Sheldon), Tiptree, and her female pseudonym, Raccoona Shelton. The Tiptree typewriter always had a blue ribbon. She had special things she kept on her desk, and she had told others that if ever there were an archive of her work, she would like those things displayed, and there they were.
So… now I get to go back to the library and actually read all those manuscript pages on display, and I get to order and read the biography, which according to the Amazon.com ratings is truly exceptional, and perhaps I’ll reread her work too. And possibly I’ll have time for day two of the symposium, but no guarantees.
First (after the requisite bureaucrat talks about how wonderful it is to get the collection), we had a talk from her biographer, who told us many wonderful things about the correspondence between Tiptree and LeGuin (who was sitting in the front row) and Russ. Then, graduate students who have been working with the archives read selections from her letters. The last of those, read by the biographer, was the letter in which she told LeGuin that she was actually a woman. Then LeGuin read her response to Tiptree. These letters were all wonderfully crafted pieces – writers whose relationships with others are through letters can take great care in showing off their prose – and the letters about “The Revelation” were especially moving, because they were about a vulnerable woman fearing she had lost her most meaningful relationships, and LeGuin reassuring her that this was hardly the case.
After that we had an audio to listen to, of someone reading one of her stories, but this overlapped with the walking tour of the archive selection on display in the library, and we were encouraged to head over there, so I did. Many of the people there were Tiptree scholars and/or dedicated fans, which made it especially interesting. We learned about her childhood in Africa, her debutante coming-out and immediate first marriage, her years as a WAAC, then chicken-farming with her second husband, then brief CIA career, and then she started writing fiction. She had a different typewriter for each of her three writing personas – herself (Alice Sheldon), Tiptree, and her female pseudonym, Raccoona Shelton. The Tiptree typewriter always had a blue ribbon. She had special things she kept on her desk, and she had told others that if ever there were an archive of her work, she would like those things displayed, and there they were.
So… now I get to go back to the library and actually read all those manuscript pages on display, and I get to order and read the biography, which according to the Amazon.com ratings is truly exceptional, and perhaps I’ll reread her work too. And possibly I’ll have time for day two of the symposium, but no guarantees.