Connie Willis

CONNIE WILLIS
A biographical essay by
Anne Ogan

In April 2011, at the Renovations annual science fiction event, Connie Willis served on a panel called "Chronological Dissonance:  Modern Archetypes and Morals in a Historical Setting." One of her comments, “Any of us traveling back in time would be caught as impostors within seconds.”
Connie Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband of 45 years, Courtney Willis, a retired university physics professor. Their adult daughter, Cordelia, studied forensic medicine at Washington University.
There is little biographical information about Connie Willis on the Internet, but there are many pictures of her smiling broadly, the picture of enthusiasm, wearing bright colors and bold patterns. Evidently, it's in the blood: Willis wrote in her 2010 Thanksgiving blog that she is a descendant of the 17th century governor of Massachusetts, William Bradford, who was a Pilgrim -- not to be confused with the Puritans. Willis says, “People always get the two confused. Pilgrims wore colors and had a sense of humor. Puritans didn't. “ 
Connie Elaine Trimmer was born on December 31, 1945 in Colorado. At age 12, setting out to read her way through her library alphabetically, Connie came across Peter Beagle’s fantasy A Fine and Private Place.”I absolutely adored it … and was astonished to find out it had been written by a twenty-year old.” And that got her started writing science fiction. Willis confesses that she fantasized at age 13 to someday winning a Nebula award. She also wrote "tawdry confession" stories (her adjective) for True Romance and True Confessions magazines. These were, said Willis, "great fun to write. ... You get to use stuff you read in the newspapers … they're great for learning to plot, write dialogue, do scenes and transitions.”
Connie attended Colorado State College, later renamed the University of Northern Colorado. There is now a building on campus called the Hansen-Willis Dormitory, named after her and the first female editor of the Greeley Tribune, Mildred Hansen. In 1967, Connie received her BA in English and elementary education, she married, and she got a job as an elementary school teacher.
"Then I had a baby, quit to stay home with the baby and thought that was a good time to write. Ha ha ha." In 1971, she published her first science fiction work in Worlds of If, a story about sentient Inca frogs, called “The Secret of Santa Titicaca." In 1982, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts enabling her to leave teaching and become a writer full-time. She has written 15 novels or novellas, six short story collections, and 57 short stories. In addition, she has collaborated on two major books and edited several anthologies of science fiction.
She said an online chat in 1998, "I think SF is the most free and open of all the genres. Romances, you’re tied to a single plot with a couple of variations. Westerns, you’re tied to a locale and a lot of conventions of detail. Mystery, the mystery has to be central, not the characterization. But in SF you can do anything!"
In an interview in 2010, Willis said that she got interested in time travel not just through reading Robert Heinlein but also through Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie and episodes of The Twilight Zone, a television show I'm sure many of us remember. Other influences include Jack Finney's novels and stories and the works of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. She said, “I am also a serious student (not the same thing as an influence) of P.G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome and Preston Sturges, all of whom helped me learn to write comedy...”
Again, from the 1998 online chat "[Robert] Heinlein is probably the biggest influence on my writing…I love his sense of humor, his down-to-earth approach to the future, and his clever plots." And in a later interview, “Heinlein I think was the primary influence not only for me but for everybody of my generation -- his futures were so funny and full of science and bursting with ideas (even if he did have a tendency to rant).” Other authors she calls “demigods” are Jack Williamson, Ray Bradbury, and Joe Haldeman.
Her own favorite book is Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, about whom she has said "Nobody’s ever heard of her, even though she won the Nobel Prize in 1920, but her books are wonderful." Obviously Connie does not hang out with members of The Novel Club.
Willis writes in longhand on lined tablets using Bic pens. She normally starts her four hour writing day at Starbucks or Margie's Java Joint and then moves on to one of the three libraries in town. Her description: “Regimen is the wrong word, implying as it does discipline and order. …My writing environment is chaotic, which works well when I'm dealing with chaos theory. I don't listen to music or watch anything while writing, though I do drink café latte.” She describes writing as”… grueling, awful, wretched virtually every day. I will do anything to avoid it, including washing windows … “
Nevertheless, Willis has said that, “writing is great fun,” and that she is very enthusiastic about her work. One gets the impression that her favorite part of the process is doing research. The wide range in the subjects and settings of her books is evidence of her eclectic interests. In her acceptance speech for the Hugo award for her book Blackout/All Clear, a book she worked on for eight years, she referred to it as “a labor of love. I have always adored World War II and especially the London Blitz.” She visited England many times in doing her research for the University of Oxford novels, and said in a radio interview, “I've never actually lived in England, but I've been there lots of times, and before I ever went I was in love with the place. Every book I ever loved (except for Heinlein, I guess) was set in England, and going there for the first time was just like going home.”
For Remake, Willis said that she spent two years lying on the couch watching old movies and “nobody could say a thing.” She was watching musicals over and over again so that she could record the dance steps exactly right. Preparing to write “All about Emily,” a novella about the psychology of a robot who wants to be a Rockette, involved spending hours studying the architecture, layout and Art Deco interiors of Radio City Music Hall in the months before it was to be torn down, which happily did not happen.
It is her thorough and meticulous research that enables Willis to add perfect trivial details and to she write convincingly about many different periods, from the Middle Ages, where her novel Doomsday is set; through the Victorian era of To Say Nothing of the Dog; on to the Blitz, the setting of Blackout/All Clear; and on to the future, where much of the action of University of Oxford novels takes place. A number of her characters are academics or research scientists and at least one is a robot. Almost all of the protagonists are obsessive, or, as one blogger put it, “single-minded people pursuing illogical agendas.”  (Deb Geisler)
Willis is said to have an aversion to political correctness, evidenced in her rebuke of the over-appreciation of indigenous cultures in Uncharted Territory, anti-smoking stances in Bellwether, censorship of "addictive substances" in Remake and censorship of an English class in the short story "Ado".
Several things make her writing appealing. In addition to writing science fiction, Willis writes romantic comedy, and there is a lot of humor in her science fiction work, too. The settings are many and varied, as are the subjects and themes. “It is (important) to be excited about what you’re writing and not just write the same thing over and over.”   She writes about human psychology, the social sciences, fads, political correctness, reincarnation, near-death experiences, the psychology of dreams, old movies, intellectual property and the computer graphics revolution, the question of public domain, and digital copyright issues.
In one interview, Willis stated that “Loss has always been a very important theme in my work,” and reviewer Deb Geisler says in Wikipedia, “the constant presence of trying to come to terms with grief, loss, and death; … is often attributed to her mother having died while Willis herself was still a child.” [Citation needed] According to a commentator at CapClave 2010, a sci-fi and fantasy writers’ forum, “The closest thing to a universal theme in her work is a rage against injustice and unfairness.”
But perhaps what readers enjoy most about Connie Willis is that she leads them to her sources. How many of you treated yourself to the pleasure of reading or rereading Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men and a Dog after reading Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog? This book also led many readers back to Dorothy Sayers. Passage, Willis’s novel about scientists studying near-death experiences, leads readers to A Night to Remember, arguably the best book about the Titanic ever written, although dozens more appeared recently, due to the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic last month. One admittedly movie-loving blogger named “girliejones” wrote in delight that reading Willis’s Remake sent her back to watching wonderful old Fred Astaire movies. She says that Remake is “a glorious tribute to the movies and also a harsh commentary on Hollywood. It's funny and nostalgic and cutting all at the same time. “
Since 1955, the central focus at the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society has been the awarding of the Hugo Awards for the best science fiction or fantasy works of the previous year. Connie Willis has received 11 Hugos – more than any other writer.
The Nebula Award, given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), is regarded by some as even more prestigious. It was in 1965 that Frank Herbert's Dune was the first book to win the Nebula in the Best Novel category. Other notable authors who have won include Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, who have both won twice. Connie Willis has won seven times. Moreover, she has won the “Grand Slam,” a Nebula award in every category: novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories. In addition, she has won two Arthur Clarke awards, two World Fantasy awards, and a John W. Campbell Memorial award. Later this month at the Nebula Awards Weekend in Arlington, Virginia, she will be receiving the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in the field.
Although some critics have said that her work is not sufficiently “science fiction,” it may be that the character development, psychological insights and grounding in reality are what make Willis's books popular with general readers. Willis is a sought-after master of ceremonies at sci-fi events and a popular teacher in science fiction writing workshops.
In one interview, Willis was asked, and “How did you get interested in time travel?” I thought you would all be interested in her answer:
“All I know is that as soon as I heard about time travel, I fell in love with the idea.  I loved the possibility that we could go back to the past and change mistakes we made – which I am always wishing I could do – and that we could go see the St. Louis World's Fair or the Colossus of Rhodes or Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address.  And that we could change history – shooting Hitler in Berlin in 1934 or knocking the gun out of John Wilkes Booth's hand. You can do so many things with time travel – go to the past (and future), change history, jumble up the pieces, mess with events and people in all sorts of fun ways, fix your mistakes, experiment with all the might-have-beens, cause never-thought-of consequences, and play mind-twisting games. Best of all, you can use time travel to illuminate the way time and memory affect – and trap – us.  And to gain an understanding of history and time itself.  It's no wonder I love it.”

Sources
Girliejones.livejournal.com 10/26/10
Hour of the Wolf (radio show) virtual interview w/ Connie Willis December 4, 1997 interview with Jim Freund  -- at which time to say nothing of the dog was her latest novel
Locus Online   10/26/09
Publishers Weekly, December 21, 2009 and January 2010
Russell, Jesse and Ronald Cohn, Connie Willis.  Edinburgh, LENNEX Corp., 2012
Taos Toolbox  Notes 7/23/07
World Fantasy Con 11/21/11: blog update (1/16/12?)