I requested She is Here from Edelweiss in advance of publication because I have read this author, and thought I'd like an anthology of Nicola Griffith's work. The books that I have read by this author are the novels Ammonite and Hild. Unfortunately, I read them so long ago that I have no record of them, but I do have a good impression of these books which is why I decided to review She is Here.
Griffith tells us that a writer is "a kind of shaman" which she defines as being able to "explore unknown territory and bring back maps". Shamanic trance is an alternative state of consciousness. Your mind is elsewhen. There are no maps.
Griffith continues from her author perspective to discuss immersion. This means experiencing what a character experiences. It's not only thoughts and feelings, but the sensory aspect--what the character sees, hears, smells and tastes. In order to accomplish this, the writer must not only do research, she must be able to live within the book's context herself.
In an article about branding for books and authors that appears in She is Here, branding is defined as "knowing who you are...and showing it". I dispute this definition because it's author oriented and implies authenticity. If you write a novel, self-publish it, and it has a few reviews on Amazon, you may be thrilled that anyone has read your book. Yet such a book doesn't even require branding.
Branding is really about selling a concept of a marketable product. If you have a self-published book that only sold a few hundred copies, then it won't interest a major publisher. They would say that there is no established market for this book. The marketing department at a major publisher develops the brand. Branding is a commercial concept. It involves what the marketing department can sell to the audience who is the market for the product. Major publishers want your book to sell hundreds of thousands of copies at the very least. They spend money on advertising their products, and they want to make a profit. Authenticity doesn't even enter the equation. In fact, commercial marketing inflates the value of a product through branding. Authenticity goes out the window.
I was reminded in this book that the Bechdel Test involves works that contain at least two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. Griffith tells us that the disabled version of the Bechdel Test is The Fries Test which was developed by Kenny Fries. The disabled characters can't be cured or killed. Fries is a memoirist, poet and librettist. Since I am interested in opera, I'd like to note in this review that he wrote the libretto for The Memory Stone for Houston Grand Opera which premiered in 2013. For more about Kenny Fries see his Wikipedia article.
Griffith put out a call for book length manuscripts intended for adult readers that pass the Fries Test toward the end of 2017. Eventually, she had a list of more than fifty submissions. Of those fifty some were written some time ago, some were out of print and a few were in a foreign language. Based on my own reading of fiction by disabled authors, I believe that most have dealt with the blind. I don't know if a seeing individual in a wheelchair feels represented by fiction centering on blindness. At that time, there were five million novels in English. Griffith says that a census from a non-specified year recorded that one in five people were disabled. So in order to represent the reality of English speaking people, the proportion of novels with disabled characters passing the Fries Test should be one in five. There would need to be one million novels that pass the Fries Test. I don't think that will ever happen because the publishing industry is controlled by non-disabled people.
Griffith claims that a million novels centering on disability are needed to "overwrite the corrosive influence of "ableism". They wouldn't necessarily do that because the Fries Test doesn't require that disabled characters be positively portrayed. Some readers might say that positive portrayal is implied by the Fries Test, but I think it should be specified because non-disabled authors may be trying their hand at dealing with disability themes with no background in these topics. They should immerse themselves in positive work by disabled authors before attempting their own works on this subject.
I was glad to learn from this book that Griffith intended her novel Ammonite to challenge the science fiction writer Doc Smith's misogynist assumption that women aren't human without men.
Her novel Hild deals with the 7th century Abbess of Whitby Abbey which was founded as a double house that separately included both nuns and monks. Griffith tells us that Hild means battle in Old Norse. A search revealed that on Wisdom Library the name is associated with the Valkyries. This Abbess hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664 C.E. (Common Era) that dealt with trying to resolve the differences in the practices of the Celtic Church and the Roman Catholic Church. Hild was baptized in a mass conversion. She probably wouldn't have known very much about Christianity then. The only biography of Hild is five pages long. It emphasizes her visions and the miracles attributed to her. We also know that she advised royalty. It isn't known where Hild was buried.
Griffith realized that she wanted to become a writer at Whitby Abbey. She thinks of the Abbess Hild as having made both Whitby Abbey and her. She was named the 2025 Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers Association.
Despite this recognition, I have to say that I liked this anthology, but didn't love it. I'm giving it a B which will be three stars on Goodreads.
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