On the day of my induction by, and first visit to, the august institution of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I was shown to the literature section of the portrait gallery and left there alone among the giants. This may have been a kind of hazing ritual, like abandoning someone at the entrance to a corn maze. Cheever. Baldwin. Roth. Faulkner. James. Welty. Morrison. It was overwhelming. I felt like I needed a ball of string to keep from getting lost amid the glory. So I started searching the grid of framed photographs, from the pince-nez era to the present day, for writers of science fiction and fantasy. I’m not sure why my thoughts went in that direction, exactly. Maybe I felt a little guilty about belonging to a club to which many of my personal literary heroes and influences–John Collier, Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft, Cordwainer Smith–had not been admitted. Above all I was looking for Ursula K. Le Guin.

I found James Branch Cabell: yes, arguably a fantasist. Stephen Vincent Benet, who wrote a seminal postapocalyptic short story that is indisputably science fiction, “By the Waters of Babylon.” William S. Burroughs? I couldn’t honestly say if he counted as a science fiction writer or not; I’ve never been able to make head nor tails of the guy. And then there was good old Kurt Vonnegut, imaginer of dystopias, deviser of the global pandemic ice-nine, charter of the planet Trafalmadore. But as I stopped before his photo, I wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t prefer that I just keep moving. That would have been the case with all these dudes, I reflected. Great American writers, if they happen to write science fiction and fantasy, rarely attained the highest honors. They were denied—they were not even considered for—the most prestigious prizes. They were not, finally, taken seriously. As Vonnegut once put it:

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labelled “science fiction,” and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

A writer’s surer, easier path to prizes (and who doesn’t like prizes?) is to steer clear of the genre gutter entirely, and if it can’t be avoided—if one was “born there,” so to speak—to repudiate or renounce it. Ursula K. Le Guin did it the hard way. For decades she consistently produced masterpieces, works of immense thematic, stylistic, structural, conceptual, and psychological sophistication and depth, intricately patterned, vividly imagined, intensely felt, beautifully written, that were also avowedly and unashamedly works of fantasy and science fiction. She rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of genre; instead she expanded them. She never repudiated the genre gutter that had fostered her ambitions and fired her imagination; instead she confirmed Oscar Wilde’s surmise that there is no better vantage than a gutter for looking at the stars.

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Bohumil Hrabal and his cats.

When we’d all made it through the winter, and spring had arrived, a small tabby cat showed up at our place and she was pregnant. By this time, Blackie was pregnant, too. The two cats loved each other and, because they were expecting, they followed me around incessantly. Wherever I went, they went, too, and I was always tripping over them, but nothing upset them as long as they could be with me. They would gaze at me adoringly and I knew they were looking to me to help them when their time came.

My neighbor, Mr. Eliáš, made me a bird feeder, an absurd looking contraption cobbled together from an old radio. He’d removed the guts, staved in the front panel, mounted it on a base that he fastened to a post, then drove the post into the ground outside his window, right where there was a break in the fence. Whenever I arrived at the cottage to tend to my cats and to write, I’d crumble some dry bread and oatmeal into the feeder for the sparrows and the titmice and the occasional jay.

I was horrified at the prospect of the cats having kittens. I was afraid they’d have them in my bed, as Blackie’s mother, Máca, had done. I worried about what we’d do with so many kittens and it killed me to think that if each cat had four kittens, I’d have to drown them. Not all of them, I’d leave the mothers two kittens each, but I’d still have to be the executioner, which is what I used to have to do in Nymburk, when no one wanted to drown the kittens and it fell to me, who loved cats, to be the one to do it, and to dispose of the bodies as well, and it was all because once, we kept all five kittens and when they were old enough to live on their own, no one wanted them, and we ended up with so many cats that we were constantly stumbling over them and then, as the devil would have it, four of the five kittens turned out to be female and within a year all four of them had young ones and we were as unhappy as my wife was later, when she’d complain, whenever she came to Kersko for the weekend: “What are we going to do with all those cats?” Read More

A sometimes brutal journey, the length of which we cannot know: making a book is like life in that way. How long it will run? Because a composed book is so finite-seeming, so finished-looking, dazzling even, trying to deconstruct and remember how it came together feels foolish, as if by doing so it might unravel again.

In 2011, I quit my big executive-director job running a global nonprofit to embark full time making my first book, The Yellow House. I had a book deal, and an advance that I thought would last longer than the year it did. I had no idea what I was doing.

I thought, at first, that I would simply follow the chain of the title to write an autobiography of a house. I had no idea of the tentacles, the ways in which the story would transfigure. I hadn’t known at the outset that I would ultimately need to find a foundation, a structure for the book solid enough to hold the story of my growing up on sinking and subsiding soil. Had not known how excruciating the task!

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