2/2/2024 0 Comments Storme delarverie partnerOver the last year, I’ve gotten to know Chip at a pivotal period of his late career, at the age of 77, as he takes stock of his life from a new vantage point. Downsizing and giving away the majority of his library, of course, was hardest of all for a writer who has lived in and through literature. If leaving his longtime Upper West Side New York City apartment was difficult enough, the transition away from his regular Philly coffee shop, Greenstreet Coffee, was perhaps even harder. In the years prior, Chip had undergone not only a bout of prostate cancer but also four displacements and relocations, finally parting with his beloved apartment in the Gayborhood of Center City, Philadelphia, to settle with his partner, Dennis, in the Fairmount neighborhood, across the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When I first met Delany (informally known as Chip) over a year ago, he had only recently sold his archive and book collection to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. In the new millennium, Delany is often celebrated as a godfather of the gay literary community, but his open and indefinite self-expressions likewise remain compartmentalized, separate from their deep connections with his lifelong investment in the science fiction genre. While Delany became celebrated at an early age by the science fiction community (winning his first Nebula Award at the age of 24), in the post-Stonewall period, as his writing became increasingly radical, he often found himself writing at the margins of the SF genre in his queering of the genre. Delany’s fiction and nonfiction has always been dedicated to defamiliarizing what his society takes to be “normal”: in his speculative fiction and memoir writing alike, Delany gave voice to dispossessed perspectives, charting previously unimagined territories of social relation through a queering of language, thought, subjectivity, and speculative world-building of all kinds. While he’s currently working on a new project to create an illustrated children’s book, Delany is also the author of what he calls in this interview “the last pre-Stonewall work of gay fiction,” Hogg, a novel so obscene that Maurice Girodias, the famous publisher of Lolita, said it was the only book he refused to publish solely because of its sexual content (drafted by 1969, Hogg was not published until 1995). Over his long and generative career, Delany has not only written such classics of science fiction as Babel-17 (1966), Nova (1968) and Dhalgren (1975), but also such hybrid works of memoir and criticism as Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999). As documented in the feature-length documentary The Polymath (2008), Delany’s work as a teacher, thinker, and writer stretches the boundaries of literature and criticism. DELANY (born April 1, 1942) is one of the most - if not the most - important science fiction writers and critics alive today. Author photo: Tom Kneller art director: Spencer Singer
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