Remembering Joanna Russ
Apr. 29th, 2011 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferJoanna Russ was one of the tallest women I ever met. I am short. I looked up at her during most conversations, except when I looked down on her. She had a bad back, and it was common for her to unroll her mat and lie down at parties while keeping up her end of the conversation.
I read most of her books in the seventies, before moving to Seattle. Her fiction was full of new ways of looking at being a woman, full of political arguments I'd never seen before. When I moved to Seattle in the eighties, we became friends, to my surprise and delight. There were many in the Seattle science fiction community who were closer to her -- Anna Vargo, Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Marilyn Holt, Katherine Howes, Amy Thomson, to name a few. Joanna was crankily gregarious; she liked to have lots of people she could argue with. She had a quick, well-furnished mind, and no patience whatsoever, except in argument. She was great to talk with when you almost agreed with her on some obscure aesthetic or philosophical point; she never failed to see the subtle distinctions, even if she didn't agree with them. I can remember arguing with her about some point in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, though I can't at all remember what that point was.
My spiderworts and Siberian iris are descended from plants in her garden, transplanted here by Katherine Howes. Joanna herself didn't care about her garden; her house had a yard and there were flowering plants in parts of that yard, so she hired people to cut the grass and keep the plants in order. She'd have been as happy with a completely paved yard. Almost all her sensory pleasures had to do with words: reading, writing, talking, and listening.
Seattle became a less exciting place when she moved to Tucson, where the weather agreed with her. The world's a less exciting place without her.
I read most of her books in the seventies, before moving to Seattle. Her fiction was full of new ways of looking at being a woman, full of political arguments I'd never seen before. When I moved to Seattle in the eighties, we became friends, to my surprise and delight. There were many in the Seattle science fiction community who were closer to her -- Anna Vargo, Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Marilyn Holt, Katherine Howes, Amy Thomson, to name a few. Joanna was crankily gregarious; she liked to have lots of people she could argue with. She had a quick, well-furnished mind, and no patience whatsoever, except in argument. She was great to talk with when you almost agreed with her on some obscure aesthetic or philosophical point; she never failed to see the subtle distinctions, even if she didn't agree with them. I can remember arguing with her about some point in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, though I can't at all remember what that point was.
My spiderworts and Siberian iris are descended from plants in her garden, transplanted here by Katherine Howes. Joanna herself didn't care about her garden; her house had a yard and there were flowering plants in parts of that yard, so she hired people to cut the grass and keep the plants in order. She'd have been as happy with a completely paved yard. Almost all her sensory pleasures had to do with words: reading, writing, talking, and listening.
Seattle became a less exciting place when she moved to Tucson, where the weather agreed with her. The world's a less exciting place without her.
