Read Carol Emshwiller!

Today is the 103rd birthday of Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019), and it provides me with the opportunity to say something I am happy to say every day: “You should read some writing by Carol Emshwiller.”

I have a few more things to say, but I am perfectly happy if you skip the rest of this and just use these links to go read some Carol Emshwiller:

There are more Emshwiller stories online — I just grabbed a few from different sources. You also can’t go wrong with any of her books, many of which are still in print, all of which are worth seeking out.

There are also some good pieces of writing about Emshwiller. Just this March, Rich Horton wrote an overview of her novels. The archives of Strange Horizons are full of Emshwilleriana, including this discussion of her work between Helen Merrick, Pat Murphy, Gary Wolfe, and Ursula Le Guin. L. Timmel Duchamp has also written well about Emshwiller multiple times: a 2001 deep dive into two Emshwiller stories, a 2003 appreciation, and a 2011 review of the first volume of the Collected Stories.

I first wrote about Emshwiller almost 20 years ago, in June 2004. For her 90th birthday in 2011, I created the online Carol Emshwiller Project to celebrate her. The capstone to that was one of the most wonderful nights of my life, where I got to interview her in Brooklyn, an interview that still lives on YouTube.

It’s possible that I dreamed it, but I have a memory of a well-known writer recently saying something to the effect of, “Carol Emshwiller was a notable influence on many writers of the early 2000s, but she seems to be unknown by the writers of the next generation.” Regardless of whether I dreamed that anybody said that, it does seem to be the case that younger writers don’t know her work, but there was a group of us in the late ’90s and through the first decade of the 2000s for whom she was the polestar, the model, the GOAT. This is obviously the case for Kelly Link, since Kelly and Gavin Grant published Emshwiller’s books, new and old, via their Small Beer Press. But it’s true for so many others, as Karen Joy Fowler noted in her 2011 essay “The Emshwillerians”:

I asked a handful of writers if they had written anything they wouldn’t have written, or written something in a different way, because of reading her. The following writers answered yes: Christopher Barzak, Jonathan Lethem, Jim Kelly, Gregory Frost, David Schwartz, Eileen Gunn, Pat Murphy, Meghan McCarron, John Kessel, and Kelly Link. Many of these went on to talk very specifically about the ways and places of that influence, but some of them are writing their own statements about Carol, so I won’t preempt them here. Instead, I’ll note that though this is only a list of writers I happened to ask, it is also a list of writers whose own impact is, or is likely to become, substantial.

That’s a couple of generations of writers there. Because we’ve talked about it with each other, I know from the folks who are within six or seven years of my age (Link, Barzak, Schwartz, McCarron) that the influence was one of liberation. Carol Emshwiller was publishing in genre magazines and in literary journals. She won a Pushcart Prize before she ever won a genre award. She published stories in the ’90s journals that most influenced me and, I know, some of my friends in how we thought about contemporary short fiction: CRANK! and Century (indeed, she’s got a story in Century issue 3, the same issue that includes Kelly Link’s first published story). We were folks who loved genre writers and Franz Kafka and Grace Paley and wackadoodle postmodernists like Donald Barthelme — and so, clearly, did Carol Emshwiller. By being nothing but herself, she showed us a way to be ourselves.

So here’s to Carol Emshwiller on her 103rd birthday. Go read her stories and her books!