User:Tillman/Nicola Griffith

NB: draft for a rewrite of Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith (/'nick ə lə 'grIfIð/; born September 30, 1960 ) is an English author (and now a dual U.S./U.K. citizen ) of novels, short fiction, essays, and memoir. Her first novel, Ammonite (1993), won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Subsequent novels have received a wide variety of honors and awards—as have her multimedia memoir and the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction she co-edited from 1996 to 2001. Although she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has devoted significant time to various causes including LGBT literature and multiple sclerosis research and support. Her most recent novel, Hild (2013), has brought her widespread critical praise.

Early Life
Griffith was born in Leeds, U.K., to Margaret Mary and Eric Percival Griffith. Her parents—whom she describes in her 2007 memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, as wanting “to belong to the middle of the middle class … to fit in” —reared Griffith and her four sisters in the Catholic faith. Her earliest surviving literary efforts include an illustrated booklet she was encouraged to create to prevent her from making trouble among her fellow nursery school students. At age eleven she won a BBC student poetry prize and read aloud her winning work for radio broadcast.

As a pre-teen Griffith felt same-sex attractions, and by sometime in her thirteenth year, she knew: “I was a dyke.” She also felt cautioned by her parents’ punishing response after one of her sisters acted on such desires at age fifteen. Thus her conclusion that “no hint of how I felt must be allowed …. Not until I reached sixteen,” when she would no longer be a minor. To cope she began to drink—alcohol served as a useful suppressant. She drank, smoked cigarettes on the sly, and immersed herself in reading and music in search of escape. In addition to the classics of English literature, she read the works of such novelists as Henry Treece and Rosemary Sutcliff; fantastic fiction including the works of E.E. Smith, Frank Herbert, and J.R.R. Tolkien; nonfiction about life sciences and history—Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a particular favorite; and such poetry as Homer’s Iliad and John Mansfield’s Cargoes. Her musical choices showed a similar divide: the classical canon, traditional church compositions, and folk music offset by David Bowie and other glam rockers. During that time a visit to relatives in Glasgow, Scotland—in particular a behind-the-scenes tour of a power station, with its efficient water recycling system—left Griffith feeling “terribly alert.”  She paid more attention thereafter to the occasional school course that interested her—chemistry, physics, and biology especially—and at age fourteen broadened her artistic tastes to encompass the works of William S. Burroughs, Led Zeppelin, and early Pink Floyd.

When Griffith was fifteen, she recognized her love for a female friend, Una  Fitzgerald. Once the two girls were of age, they embarked upon an all-consuming romance. After almost two years, they realized their differences, and Fitzgerald left Griffith.

At this point Griffith began an extended tour of Leeds’ after-hours underbelly, even as her sister Helena developed a drug habit. During this phase Griffith met Carol Taylor, and the two became longtime partners. Griffith moved out of her parents’ household in Leeds and relocated to Hull, where she and Taylor initially lived a marginal existence. Recreational drugs became Griffith’s default setting. Nonetheless she states that in Hull, “My real education began.”

Griffith got to know “feminists and intellectuals … bikers and drug dealers, and dykes pimping out their girlfriends.” She found her first women’s community there, and she read “earnest feminist fiction” as part of her regular use of Hull’s central library. After the 1981 founding of the band Janes Plane, Griffith began to write her own words as its lead singer and lyricist. The group, a five-woman ensemble, played its first gig at an International Women’s Day celebration in 1982. Janes Plane achieved some local notoriety and performed in several North England cities and on national TV.

Griffith attempted her first fiction after the group disbanded. In 1983 Griffith wrote a diary entry detailing her dreams of becoming a “best-seller.” She was writing her first (unpublished) novel, called Greenstorm. Griffith began studying the physical art of self-defense the next year, and in August 1984 she smoked her last cigarette. The following month she gave up hashish and amphetamines. She received rejections of her manuscript from two publishers. Elements later to appear in Ammonite arose in a second unpublished (this one also unsubmitted) novel, "We Are Paradise" (ca. 1985).

Griffith suffered some personal setbacks that had roots in 1985. By that time Helena had gone from addiction to also dealing heroin and amphetamines. As the year ended, Griffith (already sick with influenza) was hurt and briefly hospitalized after helping another women in a bar assault. Delayed reaction to the attack contributed to what she later characterized as PTSD in June 1986. Her writing and a women’s self-defense course that she was teaching sustained her amid these difficulties, and Helena’s counterexample helped persuade Griffith that the time to abandon all recreational drug use—including “magic mushrooms,” which she had relied on extensively—had come.

By late 1987 Griffith had made her first professional fiction sale, of a short story, “Mirrors and Burnstone,” to Interzone. She was also experiencing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, though her illness remained unrecognized. Before her starting a job at the Unemployed Advice Centre, Griffith traveled with Taylor to Whitby Abbey, which she names as the site of one her happiest days ever. But traditional life made Griffith restless. To escape, she applied for two different international courses of study: one at a women’s martial arts camp in the Netherlands, one at the Clarion Workshop at Michigan State University.

Clarion accepted her—with the added inducement of a scholarship. Griffith crossed the Atlantic to attend Clarion in 1988. There, while she was studying with such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson, Kate Wilhelm, Tim Powers, and Samuel R. Delany, Griffith met and fell in love with writer Kelley Eskridge. A quarter-million-word correspondence between the two women ensued.

Personal Life
Nicola Griffith was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. in March 1993. She lives with her wife, author Kelley Eskridge, in Seattle.