Shannon Phillips

Whoops, I’ve really been neglecting my blog lately. We had a really nice Thanksgiving in the company of family and friends, and we are full steam ahead for Christmas: stockings have been hung, tree has been procured, and I’m getting my holiday baking on.

Meanwhile there’s a thing going around Internet asking people to list “ten books that have stayed with you.” The idea is not to rate books or put out a list of The Greats or anything, but just to name ten that have for whatever reason had a lasting impact on you. I’ve gotten some good reading ideas from other people’s lists, and I thought I would give mine.

1. Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin

This is my favorite book by my favorite author. I tend to like books that break the fourth wall, that engage the reader directly or that play with the relationship constructed between author and reader…kind of like in “The Neverending Story.” Always Coming Home does that. It’s a utopian novel where the reader is put in the position of an anthropologist, assembling various cultural artifacts to get a better understanding of the people whose stories are being told. I love this book immensely.

2. Ulysses, James Joyce

Ulysses does the Neverending Story thing too, which is why I like it so much. It’s a heroic journey set in the modern age, where the reader is forced to voyage along with the characters. When things are bleakest and hardest for the characters, the text itself becomes thorny and difficult: reading it is a painful experience. This is why a lot of people hate Ulysses. But there is still a narrative, still a story moving forward, glinting like a fish through the chaotic swirls of language, and if you can follow it through the rapids then you are rewarded with what might be the sweetest homecoming in all of literature. Or at least tied with Samwise marrying Rose and having thirteen children and being mayor of the Shire.

3. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

See above. Formative for me in the same way it was for so many others.

4. Tehanu, Ursula K. Le Guin

The Earthsea books are also among my favorites and shaped my love of reading as a kid/young adult. But Tehanu, the fourth book in the series, is something fairly special because it’s a product of the author returning to her world and taking a critical look at some of the generic tropes she’d used in earlier books. Where the first three books are cracking good fantasy, Tehanu is brutal and lived-in and real. And again, it’s a book that puts you through the wringer but pays off with a lovely, generous, transcendent ending.

Also, really awesome dragons.

5. Sandman, Neil Gaiman

Am I cheating by listing the whole comic series as one “book”? Starts off fairly weak, picks up steam as it rolls on, and ends like a thunderclap—or maybe the lash of a whip, since the ending is as precise and controlled as it is grand and powerful.

I like books that stick the landings.

6. Promethea, Alan Moore

Okay, here we’ve got another comic-book series that hits several of my literary kinks: fourth-wall-breaking, grueling story with a powerfully redemptive ending, plays with fantasy and mythic tropes. Promethea is also special to me because I was actually more than halfway convinced, as I read it, that Alan Moore was speaking to me directly. He is a wizard, you know.

7. Serpent’s Reach, C.J. Cherryh

C.J. Cherryh is an enormously prolific author. She has a tendency to write one story over and over again, with different setting and characters, but it’s okay because it’s a really good story. The Ur-Cherryh story goes like this: a human is for whatever reason sent alone into an alien society, where they must adapt to a foreign culture. The human ends up assimilating and serving as ambassador back to the humans, often in order to broker peace between the two species. Serpent’s Reach is my favorite iteration of this story because the majat (insectoid hive-mind aliens who communicate through pheromones) are so cool.

Cherryh is also really really good at writing relationships with power differentials and a lot of sublimated yearning, which I find hot.

8. The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley

Okay, so there’s actually a lot of books out there that feature a heroine who’s overlooked by everyone but through her smarts, grit, and Unappreciated Intrinsic Worth ends up saving the day. This is the one that landed hardest for me. Aerin Firehair, you will always be the psychic redheaded dragonslaying polyamorous chemist-princess of my heart.

9. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia A. McKillup

Reading Patricia A. McKillup is like staring into a dragon’s eyes. Her writing is mesmerizing, sentences jewel-like in their crafted beauty, and it’s easy to lose track of exactly what’s going on. The story is good, old-school fantasy, but it’s McKillup’s dreamlike language that makes it so haunting.

10. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

While Holmes and Watson are obviously wonderful and enduring characters, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing doesn’t particularly send me over the moon: the ending is kind of lame, actually, and there are no dragons. But The Annotated Sherlock Holmes introduced me not just to Holmes and Watson, but to fandom.

The Sherlockian Game (or just “the Game”) is a body of scholarship that takes as its founding principle the notion that Holmes and Watson were absolutely real people. The fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite cavalier in his approach to research and accuracy (even to the point of forgetting his own characters’ names!) only makes the Game more fun, because there are thousands of inconsistencies and apparent authorial errors that must be “explained” in order to keep the primary conceit going. The annotations in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes are a product of this Game.

I found The Annotated Sherlock Holmes in a library when I was a junior high school student, and while the stories were delightful, what truly nourished my spirit was the knowledge that there were other nerds out there. This was before the Internet; I was vaguely aware that “Trekkies” existed and I might be one, but I had never been to a convention, didn’t know what fanfic was, had never really met another of My Kind.

And yet in this book was evidence that someone—in fact a whole society of someones—could get really obsessive about fictional worlds just the same way I did, and that they could together build up a whole secondary world of supporting literature and metatextual analysis that was smart, insightful, poignant, and really, really funny. Throughout my teen years I was a paid-up subscriber to The Baker Street Journal, which is basically a ‘zine, although I didn’t know what those were either. I just knew that every time one arrived in the mailbox I felt less alone.

Anyway, what’s become really obvious to me as I wrote out this list is that I like myth and fantasy; I like writing that plays with language and with the structure of narrative; I like novels that take the reader on a difficult journey but end with uplift and redemption. And dragons. I really like dragons.

“Those who constituted the upper economic classes of the south believed themselves to be living a version of the British outpost life, an emotional affiliation that was to draw them reciprocal British sympathy during the Civil War. If a handful had actually experienced upper-class British life (and were in America on government assignment, in hopes of making a fortune to take back–or because they were no longer welcome at home), the difference was soon lost between them and those who had not but who were quick studies, both financially and socially.

“More subtly, so much so that they failed to notice it themselves, southerners were learning to practice African manners. It is not from the British that what came to be known as southern graciousness was developed, with its open, easygoing style, its familial use of honorifics, and its ‘y’all come see us’ hospitality. The higher the southern family’s pretensions, the more likely the children were to be receiving daily etiquette instruction from someone whose strict sense of the fitting came from her own cultural background–the house slave who occupied the position known as Mammy. Charles Dickens was among those who noticed that southern ladies spoke like their black nurses.

“Some house slaves had been of high social class in Africa, as the slave trade had recognized no distinctions, and the fact that virtually all other people had come to America out of dissatisfaction with their lot at home obviously did not apply to those who were brought by force. The aristocracies of other countries were therefore more likely to be represented among them than among the general population, and the background of a slave might be seriously above that of his or her owner.

“British visitors were quick to pick up on this, although without making the connection between the aristocratic manner they were astonished to observe in house slaves and the likely explanation of its being these people’s heritage. Instead, the kindly inclined, such as Fanny Kemble, attributed the courtliness she observed in Africans to ‘a natural turn for good manners.'”

–Judith Martin (Miss Manners), Star-Spangled Manners

I never heard anything like this thesis advanced before, but as a Southerner, I’m in love with it.

The other day Robin brought home a kitten.

He was walking back to the house with Sam when he heard it crying: he called to it and it came running up to him, he petted it, and it followed him home. It was a little Siamese boy-kitten, thin and flea-ridden but so friendly and sweet. Robin said his name was Endor.

We all fell in love with Endor immediately. We took him in, fed him, cuddled him—he wanted nothing more than to curl up with a person and snuggle and purr.

Only one member of our family did not love Endor, and that was Thora. We kept a baby gate up between the two of them, but she barked and growled from her side of it. On the “shall we adopt a stray kitten” question, her vote was an emphatic NO.

Meanwhile I posted to the neighborhood mailing list, asking if anyone had lost a kitten. I got an immediate answer from a nice lady who said it wasn’t her kitten, but she’d been looking for a companion for her three-year-old female Siamese, and she would be happy to give him a home…

So we said goodbye to Endor. I loved that sweet beautiful little purring creature, but he will be happier in that home than he would have been in ours. He’s just a baby, and he needs an older kitty around to show him how to be a cat.

Endor’s new human tells me that he has already settled in. She sent a picture of him, all cuddled up to his new mama:

And that is the story of the day Robin brought home a kitten.

I found the flightsuits on Amazon, and bought the patches, stickers, and old toy “neutron throwers” separately. So this year’s costumes are not exactly storebought and not quite home-made…more like home-assembled. The kids are delighted, anyway.

Sol is nominally Slimer but I didn’t make a costume for him. He’s too young to feel left out!

I’m really touched by the outpouring of sympathy I got after my last post. Many of you seem to have experience with depression and I’m grateful for the expressions of community and solidarity.

I’m doing okay. I mean, our whole family got some kind of virus and neither Sam or I are getting much sleep and I’m kind of staggering around in a woozy haze, but at least my brain has stopped presenting me with thoughts along the lines of “you know what would solve this problem? BEING DEAD” when I’m just trying to clean up the baby and get dinner on the table. There’s a really bent kind of logic that I associate with depression, circular patterns of thought that spiral into insanely dark places with the least provocation, and thankfully that seems to be receding.

I still don’t have much in the way of extra energy, but I wanted to put up a quick post just to say that I am still muddling along and things seem to be getting better.

So the past couple weeks have been kind of a rollercoaster.

I found myself, very suddenly, feeling awful. Of course every parent has moments or days of exhaustion and overwhelm, and at first I thought that’s all I was going through. But I would wake up swamped with a sense of despair, with thoughts like “there is not one single thing about this day that I am going to enjoy” pushing into my mind. The kids were sources only of frustration and stress, and I was unable to access any of the joy and humor that their company usually brings me. I felt like I was constantly running on empty, like I couldn’t recharge my inner battery no matter what I did.

And I was bewildered by my own sudden unhappiness. It came on so quickly, it didn’t seem to have any rational source, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it.

I started to tell some people, tentatively, that something was weirdly wrong. I posted on Facebook: “This week has left me feeling like a passive observer of my own mental health. And I’m all like, ‘whoa, that went bad quick.'”

I also told some people that I was daydreaming about committing some sort of major crime just so that I could be sent to prison, where there would be plenty of time to read and write and nobody would be depending on me for anything. I could even laugh at myself as I said it, because it’s obviously such a ludicrous fantasy. But at the same time what that daydream really says is “I would like to escape from my life now, please.” And it’s a short step from a fantasy like that to others that aren’t funny at all. I caught myself wishing for a terminal illness—so that I could go to the hospital and be cared for and absolved of all my responsibilities. And I was angry at myself for having such offensive thoughts, but they kept intruding.

It was very scary to me when I found my mind circling around dark topics in this way. I could not understand it. I like my life! Like anybody I get stressed sometimes, I have bad days, but at bedrock I feel incredibly lucky to have a warm, loving family and a sense of deep purpose to my daily work. Why did I suddenly feel swamped by despair? Where had this darkness come from and why was it drowning me? Sam of course tried to be supportive, but he didn’t understand it either.

Eventually it occurred to me that, hey, I did have a baby not so long ago—could this be linked to that “post-partum depression” I’ve heard so much about?

And suddenly the confusion and the bewilderment dissolved. I could stop asking “but what is wrong with me” and start asking a much more helpful question: “so what’s the treatment”? I did the responsible thing and scheduled an appointment with a doctor to talk about the pit that seemed to have abruptly opened up beneath me.

And as it turns out, the doctor was kind of hilariously uninterested in the question of whether or not I should be diagnosed with post-partum depression. He was all like: “Well, you’re obviously depressed. Post-partum or not, know what? Doesn’t matter. Treatment’s the same either way. And frankly, lady, after hearing about how you’re the primary caregiver for three kids including an infant with no extended family in the area or other support and how you haven’t had a solid night’s sleep in seven months, I think it’s a wonder you didn’t crack sooner. Have some Prozac and call me in two weeks.”

So I am writing about this the same way I would write about a sprained ankle or a bout of the flu. Because I think it’s important to destigmatize mental health issues, and because I was truly surprised by how quickly this settled on me. I have every expectation that a short course of anti-depressants will solve the problem. I even feel a little bit proud of myself for being adult enough to seek treatment right away instead of grimly slogging on. My family deserves better than that, and so do I.

I’m pleased to share that one of my short stories, “The Witch’s Daughter,” is included in the current Hallowe’en-themed issue of Rose Red Review (a literary webzine).

This is actually a story that I wrote back in college. I recently dusted off some old files recovered from floppy disks, and this was one of them. Amusingly enough, it shared a title with one of my current novels in progress—I guess I really liked that title!

I hesitated about sending the story out, because frankly I’m not sure that it’s up to the quality of my current best work. But in the end I decided to go ahead and share it with an audience. Partly because it’s the closest thing to a horror story I’ve ever written. (I would probably call it dark fantasy, but it definitely includes disturbing themes and graphic imagery.)

But mostly, I just really like the last line.

Bubbles were blown! Babies were bounced! Nonna made an incredible array of delicious foods and we all chowed down! At one point I passed Sol to somebody friendly-looking and didn’t get him back for two hours, which is the hallmark of a well-functioning extended family gathering if you ask me.

Bonus pictures: vampire baby! You can see his first teeth coming in.

And here he is just making a funny baby face:

My sister is expecting a baby near the beginning of February: my first debut as an auntie! I’m so excited!

She’s in Portland and feeling a lot of pressure from the anti-vaccine crowd. In her words: “They make me feel like an awful person [for choosing vaccination], they tell me my child will hate me forever.” She knows I am a strong proponent of vaccinating for most preventable childhood diseases, so she asked me to put together some links and information for her.

Let’s start with the claim, often heard on Internet messageboards or sometimes from celebrities, that vaccines cause autism. They don’t. This claim began with a fraud, a paper published in The Lancet (a famous and well-respected medical journal) that was later withdrawn after it was found that the author had manipulated data and had multiple undisclosed conflicts of interest. That paper was a hoax and the author was later stripped of his medical license. But it set off a panic.

Since that time there have been a lot of studies—involving millions of children in several countries—and it turns out that there’s simply no difference in autism rates among those who are vaccinated and those who are not. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Institute of Medicine all agree that there is no link between vaccines and autism. The scientific consensus on this question is so strong that it is, frankly, no longer a question. It’s a settled fact. Vaccines do not cause autism.

Vaccines do sometimes have side effects, though. Sometimes they have serious side effects. It’s rare, but some vaccines can trigger seizures or cause very high fevers. So in considering whether or not to vaccinate, we have to do a risk trade-off analysis. Which is riskier, the vaccine or the disease?

Several years ago, many parents were able to look at diseases like measles and whooping cough and say, wow, these diseases are really rare. I’m not sure that I want to give my child this vaccine when they probably won’t even be exposed to the disease in the first place.

That reasoning is not irrational, but it depends on assumptions that are no longer true. Measles and whooping cough are both surging back. Other diseases, like polio, are worth vaccinating for even though the disease remains very rare in the U.S., because the polio vaccine has no serious side effects and in an age of global travel, a resurgence of polio is only one plane ride away.

I think the rational thing to do is to research each vaccine and consider the risk/benefit tradeoff separately. This is a fantastic website that goes through each vaccine and explains the risks associated with the vaccine versus the risks associated with the disease. In most cases the best choice is to vaccinate. For instance, on the pertussis vaccine:

Do the benefits of the pertussis vaccine outweigh its risks?

This question is best answered by taking a look at the side effects of the old pertussis vaccine. The old pertussis vaccine had a high rate of severe side effects such as persistent inconsolable crying, fever higher than 105 degrees, and seizures with fever. Due to negative publicity surrounding this vaccine, the use of the pertussis vaccine decreased in many areas of the world. For example, in Japan, children stopped receiving the pertussis vaccine by 1975. In the three years before the vaccine was discontinued, there were 400 cases of pertussis and 10 deaths from pertussis. In the three years after the pertussis vaccine was discontinued, there were 13,000 cases of pertussis and 113 deaths from pertussis! It should be noted that although the side effects of the old pertussis vaccine were high, no child ever died from pertussis vaccine.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, realizing how costly its error had been, soon reinstituted the use of pertussis vaccine. The children of Japan proved that the benefits of the old pertussis vaccine clearly outweighed the risks. The new “acellular” pertussis vaccine has a much lower risk of severe side effects than the old “whole cell” vaccine.

Pertussis is very common in the United States. More than more than 41,000 cases of pertussis and 18 deaths were reported to the CDC during 2012. However because of underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis, this number is likely to be a vast underestimate of the number of cases that actually occurred. It is estimated that most years between 600,000 to 900,000 cases occur in adolescents and adults. Sadly, most of the deaths from pertussis occur in young infants who struggle to breathe against a narrowed windpipe, leading them to turn blue or suffer spells of apnea. Because the pertussis vaccine does not cause death, the benefits of the pertussis vaccine clearly outweigh its risks.

A few things you can do if you remain concerned about risks associated with vaccines: make sure your pediatrician uses thimerosal-free vaccines. Ask the pediatrician about a delayed/alternate schedule for vaccination—I would not, however, delay DTaP given the resurgence of whooping cough. Personally, after doing our research, we stuck with the recommended vaccination schedule. But a delayed schedule is definitely better than not vaccinating at all.

I think the vaccine question is for the far left what the climate change question is for the far right. In both cases there is a very strong scientific consensus, and in both cases there are groups of people who passionately dispute that consensus. I am pro-science in both cases.

Having said that, I want to make it clear that I think there are valid grounds to critique the pharmaceutical industry, the lack of regulatory oversight around vaccines, et cetera. I think coming at these questions from a skeptical point of view, and doing your own research, is not a bad thing at all.

But I do think vaccine refusal is a bad thing.

On most parenting issues I am very “live and let live,” but fighting preventable diseases is an issue that affects society as a whole. In every population there are some—babies, the elderly, the immunocompromized—who are most likely to suffer or die from these illnesses, and sometimes these are people who can’t get vaccinated or for whom the vaccine is less effective. These most vulnerable people have to rely on what’s called herd immunity, and herd immunity only works when a high percentage of the population is vaccinated. So those who choose not to vaccinate are putting not just themselves or their kids at risk, but my baby and a lot of other people as well. I can’t view this issue through the rubric of individual choice. There really is an element here that’s about our responsibility not just to our own kids but to the communities we are part of, and especially to the most vulnerable among us.

And I also think it’s important to remember that these illnesses can be terrible. There was a video going around a while back of a baby racked by whooping cough. I knew I couldn’t watch it, and I don’t recommend you watch it either, but keep in mind that the severe coughing fits caused by pertussis can literally break a child’s ribs. Chicken pox can cause permanent brain damage. Measles can cause blindness. If you’re dwelling on the risks associated with vaccines, force yourself to dwell a little bit on the risks associated with the actual disease as well. Because none of these illnesses are trifling.

Vaccination is a hot-button topic, so I will be moderating comments closely. Respectful disagreement and friendly debate is always welcome, but I won’t hesitate to delete comments that veer toward personal attack.