In mid-July I got an email which invited me to attend a 50th anniversary reunion for the Clarion Workshop, and that sparked this entire trip. I attended in 1989. The only person anyone talks about from the 1989 class is Ted Chiang.
In the last 30 years, he’s become one of the most-skilled and awarded science fiction writers out there, but when I first met him, he and I were two weeks after graduating college and he was four weeks from his first professional sale. Yes, he made his first story sale during the workshop. This man is a rare talent.
Being a writer of near-total unknown, with decades of experience at being the weirdo, I did my thing. I had brought a camera with me to Clarion, you know, one of those things that shoots film, and you had to wait a week for it to be developed and sent back then. I dug out my Clarion photo album, full of 30 year-old pictures, and packed it for my trip.
A bit of scanning, @calyxaomphalos faked in some shoulder for me to eliminate a face, and I had it over-size printed on paper at a copy shop. Not expensive at all. Some cardboard from the recycle pile, some household art supplies, two Exacto blades and, voila, Time-Travel Ted circa 1989 was ready to go.
I figured that a few folks who might know Ted might find it funny. I did not expect a close friend of Ted’s (Yang-Yang Wang), who happened to eat burritos with Ted at a Mexican restaurant a week and a half ago, IN MY SEATTLE NEIGHBORHOOD, to be there, and he sure as hell didn’t expect 21-year-old Ted. He selfied and texted that shit right to Ted in seconds. (the guy in the green shirt above)
Ted Chiang completely was not expecting that. I’m pretty sure he’d never attached so many question marks to the word “what” in a text before last night.
