Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Last Thoughts On Kelly Link
So I know that today was pretty much our wrap up of Link for a while but I just thought of a couple of last minute things. We talked today about Shelley Jackson's illustrations for Link and what they meant but I have read a couple of Shelley Jackson's works (Half-life, Patchwork Girl) and I see so much of their writing styles in each other. I am not sure of who inspired whom because I don't know the respective dates of their works but each other incorporates the surreal and fantasy, if you will, with as much relative ease as talking about a toaster. When I was reading Link I found it so much more adorable if I read her work in a Jackson-like manner: just take what she says at face value and then let it absorb after you finish the story. If I focused too much when I was reading on the details of plausibility and even possibility then I lost the magic of the story, but if I waited until the end to ask all the questions then I wasn't so irked. Both authors just leave me with such an intense feeling of knowing their characters and stories that at the same time I felt as if I could have opened the book at any random page and quit at just as random a page and still have gotten the same amount of understanding of the plot had I read it sequentially, I was still so satisfied at the end. So basically, I am a total Link convert. Thanks Andy!
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2 comments:
Thank you, Laura, for pointing out that Jackson is quite a well-known writer in her own right. I don't know who influenced whom, but I suspect the influence is mutual. Jackson's pioneering hypertext Patchwork Girl was published in 1995, the same year Link attended the Clarion writers' workshop and had her first story published ("Water off a Black Dog's Back" in the now-defunct magazine Century). Jackson's 2006 novel Half Life won the James Tiptree Jr. Award for science fiction that addresses gender issues.
This Jackson comment may be relevant to Link's fiction as well: "I guess you could say I want my fiction to be more like a world full of things that you can wander around in, rather than a record or memory of those wanderings."
Someone should do a paper sometime looking at the works of Link and Jackson, or one work by each. Jackson's own story collection is The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002).
I definitely agree with you, Laura, that suspending questions until the end and accepting the world for what it is while reading is the way to read Link. Unfortunately, because I'd been reading Link and Thomas Kuhn (for Blount) at the same time, it took me a little while to start doing that...
But yeah, the more I read Link's stuff, the more I liked her too!
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