Without Absolution. Amy Sterling Casil

Without Absolution

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Various items in this book appeared elsewhere, over the last so many years; their original copyright dates and publication information follow:

“The Renascence of Memory,” is original to this collection.

All poems included in this volume are original to it.

DEDICATION

For Meredith Sterling Casil.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank all the people who gave me the courage to dream.

First, though he is gone, Glenn Wright, my friend and the leader of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop at Michigan State University when I attended way back in 1984. And my other Clarion instructors: A.J. Budrys, Robin Scott Wilson, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, and Elizabeth Lynn. I must also thank, during my more recent writing career, literary writers and teachers Jerome Brooks and Carol M. Bly for their patient and gentle encouragement, which led me on the path back to graduate school.

And at Chapman University, I would like to thank the people who made my graduate education the experience of a lifetime: Kevin O’Brien, Pilar Rotella, Gordon McAlpine, Tony Garcia, Elizabeth Truax, Myron Yeager, and one of the kindest, warmest friends I’ve ever known: Chapman’s treasure, Joanie Sailer.

Also at Chapman, but more than that, is the man without whom I could never have finished my first novel: my friend and the best mentor anyone ever had—Jim Blaylock.

I owe my career to a man who I am now proud to call friend: Dave Wolverton, who first noticed my work in 1995 as anonymous entries to the Writers of the Future contest and who helped me make my first professional sale.

And thanks to my family and those I love, especially Alan Rodgers, the man in my life, my daughter Meredith, for occasionally allowing me to write and giving hugs and kisses, my aunt Donna, who rubbed several of my early stories for “luck” and they sold, and my grandmother, who is no longer here to see this book, nor any of my stories published. She told me years ago, “you’ll always write well, Amy, because you have heart.”

WORTHY OF OUR DREAMS, by James P. Blaylock

Here’s a collection of stories and poems that astonished me when I read them and which I believe will astonish you. I’ll admit right off the bat that Amy and I are friends and colleagues. Both of us teach at Chapman University in Orange; both of us write science fiction and fantasy and whatever else comes into our heads; both of us come from a literary rather than science background. We met a couple of years back when Amy was chasing an MFA in creative writing and signed up for three units of independent study. I hadn’t read anything of hers at the time, but she made it clear that she wanted to write science fiction, and she gave me a copy of a story she’d recently written titled “The Stuff of Legend.” I don’t know what I expected, but whatever it was, I got something else—a short story sequel to Beowulf—exquisitely written, atmospheric, sad, spooky, wise. After that it was “Jenny, With the Stars in Her Hair,” a story as irresistible and beautiful as its title. Virtually every week it was something new again—a fresh story, chapters from her first novel—and always she’d tell me that she wasn’t writing enough, that between school and work and being a mother she couldn’t find the time she needed.

It was evident to me when I first read her work that she must already be publishing stories, and in fact she was. She was more prolific than I was and with a wider range of story types, so to speak, and I’ll say quite truthfully that I learned as much from her work during that independent study class as she learned from my comments, which were almost always approving. As a teacher I often go looking for trouble when I read a student’s work, and I suspect that I’m not earning my pay unless I find it, but with Amy’s stories there was rarely anything of the kind, and reading them was a sort of holiday from teaching. Amy’s a naturally and refreshingly humble person, and she’d deny that if you asked her about it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

She stopped by the office the other day, and we chatted, as usual, about what we were doing with our lives. She was busy with work, teaching more, commuting an hour to school and with some sort of publishing-related internet job on the side, and of course her activities as a mom went on as ever. She regretted not having the time to write as much as she should, and yet she has three or four stories coming out from respectable magazines and more stories in the works. I’d had an uncommonly prolific three months, having finished two stories myself—a personal record: over the last twenty-five years I’ve averaged about one a year—and so I was feeling particularly proud of myself. What I did after talking to Amy was to go home and launch another story, and now I’ve got three.

Robert Louis Stevenson tells us that “we’ve never made a statue worthy of our dreams,” and that’s happily true, because it keeps writers like Amy hard at work carving new statues. And as I said, watching her work, and seeing the results, has sent me down to the quarry for a new block of marble myself more than once. I’ll finish up by saying that as a writer, Amy’s a prodigious dreamer, and that she’s got some statues in here that are about as worthy as they come.

—Jim Blaylock

AMY STERLING CASIL…WHO DAT? STUPID AMERICAN GIRL! by Amy Sterling Casil

Once upon a time in 1979, Amy Casil (who wasn’t called that then) walked into high school chemistry class wearing skintight yellow Ditto jeans, a French-cut T-shirt and Candies high-heeled sandals and met her lab partner, Bernard Bang. He spoke little English, yet he was good at chemistry. All he said for the next two weeks was, “don’t do that, stupid American girl!” She almost flunked chemistry. Thought she couldn’t do it at all and she believed Bernard until they let her switch partners and classes. Then, when she was in college, she confessed to her boyfriend the genius electronic engineer and Harry Harrison fan that she wanted to write science fiction.

“But you have to be smart to write science fiction,” he told her.

Even amid science failure, there were bright moments in her writing life. She wanted to be a writer since she was five or six years old. She remembers cutting sheets of pale red construction paper to make a book, chewing on Fig Newtons and drinking apple juice, as she folded and stapled and colored each page with a happy butterfly. That book was about ten pages long, whatever she had the patience for, and it was called “Freddy the Friendly Butterfly.” A few years later, her dreams were colored by watching Highway Patrol after school, along with awful Mexican horror movies and wretched retread “sci-fi” flicks featuring helmet-haired 60’s women with artillery-shell breasts. And she read A Wrinkle in Time and The Lord of the Rings

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