It's all Corflu's fault

[gerisullivan]

Geri at Scrabo Tower, color tweaked Photo by Walter Willis, November 1989. I was so happy there. The joy is with me still.

[Edit: 4:15 Saturday]
soarhead kindly futzed with this. Interesting. I never have had a good print of it so my eye is getting used to the idea of there being sky to be seen. Thanks, soarhead!

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[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Last week, I sent Pete Weston the current draft of the first section of "He Preferred to Stroll," which is a memoir of my friendship with Walter and, as a result, with Chuck, James, Vince, and, in person, Madeleine, Sue, and Peggy.

I mention it here because I want to quote a short excerpt, to remind or tell you (if I haven't already) just how crucial meeting you and Teresa at Corflu 3 was to my own trips to Donaghadee and environs:

In my Corflu report, I wrote briefly about meeting Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, but didn't mention the startling thing I learned from them. Walt Willis was still alive! Not only was he alive, they'd met him, they'd even stayed at Walt and Madeleine's during their TAFF trip the previous year!

I made lots of assumptions during my early days in fandom, many of them ageist. I was familiar with “The Mimeo Man,” and knew it was written by Moshe Feder. I'd never heard the name Moshe before; it sounded old. Surely he'd spent years, decades learning to write so well, to adapt a story so well. As for Willis, the material had been written decades earlier, he *must* have been old to have written so well, he'd long since dropped out of fandom, heck, he must be dead. I knew the material was brilliant, but it was still inaccessible to me, which made it fit in all the better with the works of any number of dead authors. Like I said, ageist assumptions. These two were the most glaring. In those days, I didn't *know* many writers, let alone the age at which various works were written. I was unaware of how little the writer's age has to do with brilliant writing, thinking instead that brilliance typically comes only after decades of experience. (Except for Mozart, obviously.)

Somehow, knowing Willis was alive, that I knew people who knew him, made him more accessible. I didn't tackle Warhoon 28 when I returned home, but he was suddenly more real. Less legendary, more human. And The Enchanted Duplicator proved to be *very* accessible. I didn't understand every joke or reference, but I knew the dangers of over-inking first hand and how life-saving slipsheets were. (It wasn't until helping with a group reading at a convention that I figured out "subrs" wasn't pronounced "sue-brrrs" but "sub-ers" for subscribers. Fanzine subscriptions were long since a thing of the past by the time I found my way into fandom.)

Later that year, Steve Glennon showed me a postcard of comment from Walt in response to a one-shot produced by a bunch of Minneapolis fans who were tired of waiting for Rune to come out. Willis liked my article! He thought I was a guy! I knew about Lee Hoffman by then. Walt's words were tremendously gratifying and, as David Emerson would put it, "Fannish as Hell." It was an early, first-hand experience with the heady egoboo LoCs can bring.

Thank you for making Walter real to me. Thank you for making him accessible. Thank you for telling me to raise money to bring Chuch over to Corflu after Walter turned down my offer..

It was all such a treasure, such a loss. This is going to get too long for a reply, but 28 years ago, I wrote down a set of goals as a way of pointedly rejecting some corporate nonsense. Those goals, written in annoyance and protest, that have proven to be a permanent guide:

1. Surviving
2. Thriving
3. Doing great and wondrous things.

Due to the financial choices I've made, I'm very much in survival mode these days and I'm likely to be there for a long, long time. Thanks to you, and to your TAFF trip with its visit to Strathclyde, I have a lot of great and wondrous things memories to sustain me through survival times. Better yet, I've learned how to do some of that thriving, some of those great and wondrous things even when I'm mired in the realities of keeping a roof over my head.