Neither Dying Nor Being Cured
This is the essay version of the Ethel Louise Armstrong Lecture I gave last year at Ohio State University. It was first…
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Guidelines for Non-Disabled Writers
Just republishing this for future reference. First published in Literary Hub, August 23, 2016 Recently I have read several articles about disabled…
Read moreLiving Fiction, Storybook Lives
As individuals and societies we are shaped by story: our culture and sense of self literally cannot exist without it because we only know who and what we are when we can tell a story about ourselves. We learn how to tell our story by listening to the tales that are out there and picking through them, choosing some details and discarding others.
Read moreMy Story, Mystery: A Letter to Hild of Whitby
“You were magnificent, I think, but hidden: a black hole at the heart of history. We can trace you only by your gravitational pull.” This essay first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, September 2015.
Read moreThe Women You Didn’t See: A Letter to Alice Sheldon
“You were brilliant, I think, but consumed by the inevitability of the abattoir. In your fiction all the gates are closed; characters are funnelled down a chute to flashing knives.” Epistolatory criticism first published 2015.
Read moreDisability: Art, Scholarship, and Activism
On Friday May 13 I gave a presentation at the University of Washington’s Pacific & Western Disability Symposium. The theme of this…
Read moreWriting Slow River
Is there such a thing as an “essential self”? If so, can it be warped, encouraged, or destroyed? How far outside the moral and physical boundaries of that essential self would I we be willing to step in order to stay alive? And—if we stepped so far out that we became someone we did not recognise or like—would we still be us? I wrote Slow River to answer those questions.
Read moreWriting from the Body
Art and the Body are huge subjects with all kinds of branches and nooks and crannies. In what follows I poke around in those topics that interest me—the philosophy of dualism, cyberspace as nirvana, the concept of genius, the religious right—and see which pieces connect along the way.
Read moreAs We Mean to Go On
An essay about how Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge met at a writing workshop and how books and the written word made their love possible.
Read moreLeigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow
I read Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow for the first time in 2005. Five pages in, I wondered why I’d never heard of this novel. Twenty pages later, I was wondering why it wasn’t universally acknowledged as the first Great American SF Novel.
Read moreDoing the Work
Aud is my commitment to excellence made flesh/word and walking around; she uses whatever it takes to get the job done. She is the tension between the joy and discipline that is my art (or craft or life or bane, depending) filed to a point and stabbed into the tabletop.
Read moreBranding: It Burns
According to an Economist review of Wally Olins’ posthumous Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come (Thames & Hudson, 2014), branding is “about knowing who you are…and showing it.” It sounds simple but for a novelist it is not.
Read moreThe Language of Hild
Most of the Old English poetry I read was West Saxon. It’s round and rich—drumming like apples poured from a tub onto an elm table—and stirring: heroic, alliterative, elegiac. But I’m not sure how representative it is of Hild’s era. Apart from being the wrong dialect, it’s written rather than being oral, which means it came to us through the double filter of form and Latinised/Christian scribes.
Read morePalimpsest: Review of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson’s memoir revisits the people and events familiar from her first and most famous work, the semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The two books cover similar ground, but they couldn’t be more different. The first part of Why Be Happy, twice as long as the second, is a scraped clean, rewritten, and embellished palimpsest of Oranges.
Read moreWar Machine, Time Machine (co-written with Kelley Eskridge)
The golden age of queer sf is 20. Or maybe it was the 1970s. Or perhaps it was in France. It’s all relative, like the notion of ‘queer’ itself.
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Nicola Griffith 