Dreamsongs, Volume I Read Online Free Page B

thinking it would be cool to study Vikings. Professor Franklin D. Scott was an enthusiastic teacher who invited the class to his home for Scandinavian food and
glug
(a mulled wine with raisins and nuts floating in it). We read Norse sagas, Icelandic eddas, and the poems of the Finnish patriotic poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg.
    I loved the sagas and the eddas, which reminded me of Tolkien and Howard, and was much taken with Runeberg’s poem “Sveaborg,” a rousing lament for the great Helsinki fortress “Gibraltar of the North,” which surrendered inexplicably during the Russo-Swedish War of 1808. When it came time to write term papers, I chose “Sveaborg” for my topic. Then I had an off-the-wall idea. I asked Professor Scott if he would allow me to submit a
story
about “Sveaborg” rather than a conventional paper. To my delight, he agreed.
    “The Fortress” got me an A…but more than that, Professor Scott was so pleased with the story that he sent it off to
The American-Scandinavian Review
for possible publication.
    The first rejection letter I ever received was not from Damon Knight, nor Frederik Pohl, nor John Wood Campbell, Jr., but from Erik J. Friis, editor of
The American-Scandinavian Review,
who regretted “very much” having to return “The Fortress” to me. “It is a very good article,” he wrote in a letter dated June 14, 1968, “but unfortunately too long for our purpose.”
    Seldom has a writer been so thrilled by a rejection. A real editor had seen one of my stories, and liked it well enough to send a letter instead of a rejection slip. I felt as though a door had opened. The next fall, when I returned for my junior year at Northwestern, I signed up for creative writing…and soon found myself surrounded by would-be modern poets writing free verse and prose poems. I loved poetry, but not that sort. I had no idea what to say about my classmates’ poems, and they had no idea what to say about my stories. Where I dreamed of selling stories to
Analog
and
Galaxy,
and maybe
Playboy,
my classmates hoped to place a poem with
TriQuarterly,
Northwestern’s prestigious literary magazine.
    A few of the other writers did submit the occasional short story; plotless character pieces, for the most part, many written in the present tense, some in the second person, a few without the benefit of capitalization. (To be fair, there were exceptions. I remember one, a creepy little horror story set in an old department store, almost Lovecraftian in tone. I liked that story best of all those I read that year; the rest of the class hated it, of course.)
    Nonetheless, I managed to complete four short stories (and no poems) for creative writing. “The Added Safety Factor” and “The Hero” were science fiction. “And Death His Legacy” and “Protector” were mainstream stories with a political slant (it was 1968, and revolution was in the air). The former grew out of a character I’d first envisioned back at Marist, after developing an enthusiasm for James Bond (Ursula Andress had nothing to do with it, no sir, and neither did those sex scenes in the books, nope, nope). Maximilian de Laurier was intended to be an “elegant assassin,” who would jaunt about the world killing evil dictators in exotic locations. His big gimmick would be a pipe that doubled as a blowgun.
    By the time I got around to putting him on paper, only the name remained. My politics had changed, and assassination no longer seemed so sexy after 1968. The story never sold, but you can read it here, only thirty-five short years after it was written.
    The class liked the mainstream stories better than the SF stories, but didn’t like any of them very much. Our prof, a hip young instructor who drove a classic Porsche and wore corduroy jackets with leather patches on the elbows, was similarly tepid…but he also thought that grades were bullshit, so I was able to escape with high marks and four finished stories.
    Though the class hadn’t liked