Geoff Ryman, Author of The King's Last Song, on Teaching in San Diego

In celebration of award-winning novelist Geoff Ryman's latest US release The King's Last Song (Small Beer Press), we're running a series of exclusive short essays from the author. Check out all of Ryman's fiction available through Amazon.

Ryman currently teaches at the University of California at San Diego, and did a stint as an instructor for a week at the famed Clarion Writers Workshop, also at UCSD.

As he told Locus in an earlier interview, “Making your living from a nine-to-five job rather than from writing wears thin after a while. If your job feeds your writing...it's great. Mostly it doesn't, and then you have maybe ten hours a week to write on Saturday and Sunday. That works as long as everything in your personal and professional life is fine too. But sooner or later, all you've done for 20 years is work. When do you have time to read? These days, any job you have, you work overtime. So I've changed it, and I'm working part time as a writing teacher.”

         
         (Geoff Ryman; photo from Gaylaxicon site)

On Being at UC San Diego
Geoff Ryman

Lots of space.  Lots of sparse shade from eucalyptus trees.

A palimpsest of different architectures: prefabs which look like World War II temporary buildings that smell in sunlight of rubberized paint.

Interlocking low bungalow boxes overgrown with trees from the days of maverick professors and surfboards.

Eighties monuments, crowned with post-modern structures, slats that keep out neither sun nor rain.
Art everywhere. A giant teddy bear made of stone. A series of large, rather satisfying polished stone balls. At twilight a student in skinny jeans and rucksack chalks a giant Pinnochio face onto the sidewalk.

A tall woman in jeans and fluttery print shirt walks my way, smiling. Her face says both You can’t fool me and Isn’t this fun? It is the face of my generation. All around us walk the next and the one after that, cooler, more self contained on skateboards or skooters, whizzing.

This is a great place to be. Its chemistry department just won a Nobel Prize. 

At my visiting scholar orientation, I meet a new media artist from Australia called Tracey. Getting lunch at the coop I meet  Richard Chiem a writing student, serious, informed who’s starting his own press. We talk about graphic novels I don’t know and later he sends me stories to look at.

Heads of Schools and Deans agree to talk to my SF class about cloning, nanotech, IT, global warming, religion. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is going to give a talk at Mysterious Galaxy, the nearish genre bookshop.

The place is diverse, Latin faces, Asian faces. There are very few black people.The LGBT center has a rainbow flag, a small but very useful library, large meeting rooms, offices, a kitchen to cook in, a lounge for hanging out. At the Centre I meet an intern, an Afro American student. She wants me to come an evening she’s organized about older gay people. Flattering. Well, actually, yes. It conflicts with the free film shows of Chinese cinematic masterpieces, but I’ll try to do both.

There’s an old fashioned, honest to God, left wing bookshop on campus. I bought a beat up history of hip hop and wanted to get Queering India, but the spending has to stop somewhere.

Last week Tania, the Clarion co-ordinator, gets me a free ticket to ‘The Third Story’, a play commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse from Charles Busch. This is not just another on-campus theatre.   The La Jolla Playhouse  does things well. This has crafted sets, superb lighting, original music and Broadway acting. It combines a 40s gangster-Frankenstein melodrama, a Russian fairytale, and the story of the 1940s female screenwriter who is writing the 40s chiller. And it works. This week I organized a party of students to go see it, and it was just as good a second time. Before I went I squeezed in a book reading by Sarah Bynum.

It’s worrying. I’m finding everyone delightful. They’re putting something in the water.