The text of my acceptance speech for the MWA Grand Master Award is here–I’ll publish some photos from that magical exciting evening in a little bit.

I went to my first Edgar dinner in 1982.  I watched the icons of my reading life talking and joking, but I was painfully shy and didn’t try to introduce myself to anyone. I was seated at a table at the outermost reach of the Sheraton ballroom, and the highpoint of the meal was when a waiter slugged one of my tablemates for not relinquishing his salad plate on schedule.

I’m amazed, and grateful, to join the company of Grand Masters whose work I have long admired, but it is unsettling to realize how quickly 29 years have passed.

Many people helped me reach this point.  Stuart Kaminsky, whom we mourn, mentored me as I wrote my first book.  My agent, Dominick Abel, agreed to represent me all those years ago; he has never faltered in his support.

Thanks to my editor, Chris Pepe, and my publishers, Putnam, for their hard work, and their presence at the banquet.  (Although the company is known as GP Putnam’s Sons, it was George Putnam’s daughter Mary who was a leading 19th century writer and feminist.  It seems fitting that my novels bear the name of the woman who forced England to accept women as doctors.)

I have been fortunate in the friendship of Dorothy Salisbury Davis.  Her advice as a writer, and her guidance in the business of living, have been my lodestar for many years.

Above all, I thank my husband, the distinguished physicist Courtenay Wright, who has listened to 29 years of fears and self-doubts; his steadfast support has kept the wind beneath my sails. To him and to Dorothy, this award and these remarks are equally dedicated.

The world of books has seen major changes since my first Edgar dinner.  It had been hard for me to find a publisher for a woman PI in America’s heartland; now, as a result of the revolution I helped start, detectives of all stripes and locations are commonplace.

I was lucky: in 1982, there were many more publishers to approach than exist today.

We live in a world of conglomerated publishers and distributors; we writers are often told that we are not creating stories or characters, but brands, as if the chief difference between our stories and toilet paper is that you can’t upload Charmin to your iPad.  At least, not yet. In such a world it is hard to remember that we are storytellers, not accountants, marketers or vending machines.

This is not a new problem.  When Melville published Moby Dick in 1851, the reception by both public and critics was hostile: he had left his brand, his travelogue novels.  During Melville’s life, this astonishing masterpiece sold 500 copies.  In a bitter weariness, Melville wrote Hawthorne:

The silent grass-growing mood in which a [person] ought to compose – that can seldom be mine.  Dollars damn me.

Melville lived through times as turbulent as ours—slavery, the Civil War, the changes wrought by industrialization.  But ours is also a time that thrives on slick one-liners, and on lies, made easier to swallow because we devalue literacy.

Today, close to one in four American adults can’t read or write well enough to handle a job application, let alone read a novel.

It took a 12th-grade vocabulary for Melville to follow the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but our most recent presidential debates use the language of sixth graders.  Some candidates have devolved to the pre-school level.

We writers owe a duty to our gifts.  We’ve been given the gift of language, and we need to dig deep into words.  We need to relish wordplay, not rely on clichés as we stumble toward the marketplace, or settle for the slick, repackaged street-talk we pick up from rap and TV.

And we owe a duty to our other gift, our stories.  In the cacophony of sound that fills our broadband waves, amid the lies and shrill self-promotions, it is essential that we writers return to Melville’s silent grass-growing place and find the truths that fiction can lay bare.

Our fictions are myths, of course, not histories: they show heroes vanquishing monsters. Theseus versus the wicked Minotaur, Marlowe versus the wicked temptress, V I Warshawski versus the wicked corporation, they’re all the same story.

But these fictions tell essential truths, about our emotional lives, what we fear, what we want, what we need. Writing is a form of auto-surgery: the closer we cut to our own bones, force ourselves to emotional truth, the more authentic will our voices become.

As the poet Sappho wrote, more than 2600 years ago,

Although they are only breath

Words, which I command

Are immortal.

What we remember from Sappho’s time, and from Melville’s, are not brand-names nor spreadsheets, but poets. For in the end, it is that word which is only breath which endures.

I just came from seeing Black Watch, a play about the famed Scottish regiment put on by the National Theatre of Scotland.  The play is about the deployment of the regiment to the so-called Triangle of Death during the early years of the endless war in Iraq.  It’s about why young men join armies, about the history of the Black Watch regiment, and about what it’s like to serve in a war where the opponent’s main weapons are suicide bombers and IED’s.  Much of it was thought-provoking, and it was certainly well-acted.

My caveat was with the dialogue, which lacked shades of color, both in volume–almost all was shouted–and in content.  The dialogue was probably meant to mimic barracks dialogue,  but most sentences were so heavily laden with “fuck” and “cunt” that the tone of the piece became monochromatic.

I was wondering on the way home about writing dialogue.  My own view is that authentic recorded speech may not  get  you to the heart of your characters.  To show the inner mind of a teenage boy who is choosing between being a miner or a soldier (a choice the play presents) requires more subtle language than “fucking cunt fucking came to the fucking bar”.  That may be what the boy says, but it doesn’t show us what he thinks.

Black Watch on duty in Iraq

What do you think? Do you convey emotion with literally recorded speech? Can you convey authentic character with imagined speech?

I’m just back from a great trip overseas, touring in the UK for Body Work.  I did a few posts on Facebook along the way but I’ll try to share a few highpoints here.

Dogs.  Knowing how much I missed my Golden, Kerry Hood from Hodder brought Maddy into central London one morning so that I could have some dog time in Hyde Park.

Also in Hyde Park is a large human-made pond, the Serpentine, filled with all manner of water birds.  People come down to feed the birds, and dogs frolic nearby in the shrubs and lawns round-about.

Swans on the Serpentine, Hyde Park

Maddy circled the pond without a lead.  She eyed the bread put out for the ducks but on Kerry’s command abandoned it, and never once tried to jump into the Serpentine.  I realized that if Callie and I lived in London, we would spend all our time in Magistrate’s Courts, paying fines for jumping in among the birds.

Other dogs: a working dog in Glasgow that stood up and took applause any time Denise Mina or I roused a laugh.  An old man walking along the river in Carlisle, with his dog frolicking around him.  I followed as long as I could, thinking the scene looked straight out of the opening of Mill on the Floss. A lost dog in Toulouse, trembling with fear because it couldn’t see its mistress.  I handed her over to the park maintenance crew, who found her address screwed into a cylinder around her neck and promised to take her home.

Events Natasha Cooper helped me launch Body Work at Waterstones Piccadilly and Denise Mina did the same favor at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.  Both women were as interesting and generous in person as they are in print and the audiences responded warmly to the warmth they could feel on the stage.

Reading Room at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow

Two sisters in their eighties attended the Glasgow event.  During the Q & A, one commented that the acknowledgements in my books are so long she couldn’t understand why mine is the only name on the jacket cover.  However, she stood in line, very erect despite a cane, and bought a book for her baby sister’s 80th birthday.

Bookwitch came to the Mitchell event, and took some lovely photos; thanks to her I can let you see Denise and me in all our glory.

Bookwitch's photo of Denise Mina and Sara Paretsky at the Mitchell Library

From there we went to Peebles for the Borders book festival, where Alistair Moffat did a Q & A.  On his first trip to Chicago, Mr. Moffat was put into Cook County Jail overnight until his wife posted $500 cash for a fender-bender.  Myself, I think they were shaken down–I never heard of anyone being locked up in County for a fender-bender.  Even so, he generously likes Chicago.  And was the most thoughtful interviewer I’ve encountered since the late great Studs.

We finished in the south at the Sandhurst library, where a great audience included a 14-year-old Emily Miles, who kindly helped me out of my windbreaker when the zipper stuck, and found my passport and wallet on the library office floor.  I was a tired and lucky writer to have her on board.

Reading on the Road Nancy Pickard’s Scent of Rain and Lightning. Nancy writes elegiacally about the landscape of the Great Plains as she tells a gripping story.  Emma Donoghue’s The Room; disturbing, hard to drain the troubling images out of the brain.  Edith Pearlman‘s Binocular Vision.  These are short stories, exquisite, haunting, satisfying. I started the Tiger’s Wife (not to be confused with the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) and the Uses and Abuses of Literature.  As we grapple with a nation where a quarter of adults can’t read and most people don’t read books, this is a thoughtful look at what literature does and doesn’t do in our lives.

The weather couldn’t have been more glorious for the whole trip.  Flowers bloomed, grass was green, trees were in leaf.  It was a terrible shock to return to Chicago, where it’s all still brown and cold.  In fact, when we landed and the pilot announced that the local temperature was 26 F I wanted to curl up in my seat while the cleaners prepped the plane and return to London.  But I climbed off, and now, after going through a 2 1/2 week pile up of mail, dust and laundry, will return obediently to work.

America’s great first Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote, “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Today, the power to refuse to levy taxes is proving a more potent tool of destruction.

The arts in America cost roughly 29 cents per capita to fund. The arts did not cause our financial meltdown. Yet along with reproductive health, education, and care for the disabled, the arts are the first programs to be cut by the Draconian hands of our right wing congress and state legislatures.

In Kansas, one of the newly-elected governor’s first acts was to eliminate the state’s entire arts budget, thus saving approximately $522,000. I was in Kansas on March 3rd to receive the Kansas Arts Commission Distinguished Artist Award. This was a bittersweet evening, since it is the last time the state’s Arts Commission will exist, unless the legislature overrides the governor and restores funding. Many people in the state spoke eloquently on what the arts do for their small communities. I left the event awed by the hard work and dedication that people brought to making art possible in places remote from professional theaters, symphonies, or major art museums. A number of people have asked for a copy of my own remarks, and I am attaching them here:

I am proud to stand here tonight as a Kansan, with our long and strong tradition of freedom.  Our pioneer forebears brought this state free into the union 150 years ago this winter. We were fortunate in our first governor: one of Charles Robinson’s early acts after statehood was to establish the University of Kansas.  Coming into statehood after a long and bloody battle over slavery, Sara and Charles Robinson and their friends knew that the difference between slave and free was the difference between literate and ignorant.  They knew that an educated citizenry was our best guarantor of continued liberty.

The governor’s arts award, given in the spirit of those founders, has high value in my eyes. At the same time, I am sad that this may be the last occasion where Kansas celebrates the arts, because of the governor’s decision to end arts funding.  It is in this state, in our schools and in our soil, that my own craft was nurtured.  It is in this state and in this soil that William Inge and Langston Hughes were reared, the artist Louis Copt, the writer Nancy Pickard.  If we end support for the arts, we cut off a lifeline for our citizens.

I recently saw a museum exhibit on the history of writing.  I felt a sense of awe as I saw myself, one small person, one small voice, connected to a chain of storytellers that stretches almost 6000 years into the past.  The buffalo were roaming widely in eastern Kansas when the ancient Sumerians brought the written word to life.  Every poem we read, every equation we solve, sadly, every hate-filled message we post to a blog, we owe to that Sumerian miracle.

Writing probably developed so accountants could keep track of land and livestock ownership, but it quickly became the purview of poets.  And it is to poets, to musicians, to artists that we turn when we celebrate our joys or need help in enduring our sorrows.

We are enduring bleak times, indeed, in these United States, and we need the arts today as we never did in our prosperity.

In the aftermath of 9.11, musicians from America’s great symphonies went to Ground Zero, where they played through the night to support the hard work of the  first responders.  No one sifting through rubble for fragments of human bodies wanted to hear someone read an accounts payable list, much less an ideological diatribe.  They needed music, they needed poetry.

One of the first acts of totalitarian regimes is to control the arts and the written word.  In John Calvin’s Geneva, writers who disagreed with Calvin’s Protestant vision were burned at the stake. Nazi Germany moved quickly to outlaw, imprison and kill controversial writers and painters.  Last year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Liu Xiaobo, spent the awards ceremony in a Chinese prison for writing verse that didn’t uphold state-sanctioned values.

Here at home, we don’t murder or imprison our artists.  We starve them. About 275,000 books were published in the United States last year.  Despite this vast number, the Wall Street Journal estimates that fewer than a thousand writers earn enough from writing that they don’t need a day—or maybe a night—job to support themselves.  That’s about 2 out of every thousand writers.  Most writers earn around $28000 a year.

What do our artists have to say that merits public support?  Only a word that sustains life, that sustains hope.

My own most moving moment as a writer came one evening at a reading I’d given in a Chicago library.  A group of women stayed after everyone else had left.  They told me they were married to steelworkers who’d been out of work for over a decade.  These women worked two and three jobs to support their families.  They came to hear me read, they said, because my words gave them courage to face the hard hand life had dealt them.

That my work spoke to them in such a way does me more honor than I can rightly express.  This art’s award is a shorthand for every writer, every storyteller, poet, painter, singer, whose art has helped another person endure the dark night of the soul.

Around 600 BCE, the Greek poet Sappho wrote, “Although they are only breath/Words, which I command/Are immortal.”

We don’t today know the names of Lesbos’s accountants, nor what they had to say about poets and poetry.  (We do know the name of Pericles from nearby Athens, not from his spreadsheets, but because he funded some of the greatest art the world has ever known.)

Sappho lived through times as turbulent as our own.  Indeed, Governor Robinson founded the publicly-funded University of Kansas in times as turbulent as these, in the wake of the Civil War, the country in ruins, the future uncertain.

What we remember from our recent past, as well as ancient Greece, are not the account books. We don’t know the names of the brothers who controlled Greece’s fuel and precious metal industries.  Nor do we know how many billion drachmas they gave to this or that politician or judge.  We remember sculptors.  We remember Sappho.  For in the end it is poetry, that word which is only breath, that endures.

From Chapter 30 of the book with no name

My dreams were filled with Miles and Iva Wuchnik.  Iva climbed onto the catafalque to lie next to her brother. The top of the tomb was so thick with blood that she had to do the backstroke to keep from sinking in it.  Iva pulled the rebar from Miles’ chest and stuck it in her ear, where it turned into a giant cone for eavesdropping on cellphones.   Somewhere in the background I could hear Leydon chanting, In death they were not divided. Wade Lawlor appeared, holding a microphone.  Shame on Shame Lunski, he cried, murdering a hard-working vampire.

It was a relief to wake up, to find myself in my bedroom with sunshine seeping around the edges of the blinds, rather than swimming in Miles Wuchnik’s blood.  I sat in bed, hugging my knees to my chest, trying to remember the important points from my encounter with Iva.  I’d been too tired to write them up when I got home last night.

She’d gone on about Chaim Lunski: she saw him on television all the time, she’d said, wanting to fill America with illegal immigrants.  I didn’t think Lunski was on television—he wasn’t a publicity seeker.  Iva saw his face or heard his name on Wade Lawlor’s show.  Miles had been doing some dangerous investigations that would show up Lunski, Iva said.  And Lawlor would heap fame and glory on her brother.

I walked slowly to the kitchen to put on water for coffee.  Did that mean Lawlor had hired Miles Wuchnik?  The two-bit Berwyn PI and the man with the thirty-million-dollar annual contract from Global?  Wade Lawlor had hundreds of investigators at his command, but maybe he was spreading his net wide, trying to snare Lunski.

On a whim, I logged onto Lawlor’s website, to see if he was offering some kind of reward for nailing Lunski.  I didn’t see a header that said “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” but he did have a tip line.

If you have information on any topic Vital to the Survival of Our Republic and our Christian Values, email me: Wade.Lawlor@GEN.Net

Photos of some of his loyal viewers were shown, with a little blurb about the vital information they’d supplied.  Other tipsters hadn’t wanted to be publicly identified.  As I scrolled down, my own name jumped out at me.  An anonymous source had claimed that my mother was an illegal immigrant.

The fury I’d felt at the Herald-Star offices last night welled up in me again. How dared they, how dared they, these faceless, mindless, cowardly, jackboot-licking pond scum?  I was shaking with rage, halfway to my closet to collect my gun when I pulled myself together.  Who did I think I could shoot?  Lawlor? Harold Weekes, the head of GEN’s news division? Or just the guts of my computer?  Even if I could track down the anonymous tipster, what could I do about it—it wasn’t against the law to post messages about someone’s dead mother.

A night soon after I’d learned my mother was ill, that she might not get well came to my mind.

One of the women on south Houston whom Gabriella had scorched for her advice on how to control me—your daughter is a disgrace to the neighborhood, the woman had said, and Gabriella had said, she’s growing up to inhabit a larger world than you’ll ever visit.  As I walked past the woman’s house she’d spat out an insult about Gabriella, Melez, she’d called her.  I’d grown up hearing that Croatian word: my mother was a mongrel, a half-caste—half Jewish, they meant.  I’d jumped up the stairs in the dark and been on the point of punching her when my father materialized.

“Come on home, Tory” he’d said.

I was fifteen and as tall as he was, but he picked me up and carried me down the stairs.  He didn’t berate me and he wouldn’t listen to my side of the story.  He sat me down on our back stoop, where we’d listened in the darkness to Gabriella working on her breathing exercises: cancer was not going to still her voice, she was determined about that.

After a time, Tony said, “The worst cops are the ones whose gun is their first weapon, instead of their last.  The best cops go into a situation head-first, not hand-first.  You remember that, Tory: you get yourself into trouble you don’t need with that hot temper of yours.  And anger doesn’t make a bad situation better.  It depletes your strength and it depletes your mind.”

Nisha Susan, who had been using “VIWarshawski” as her twitter handle, graciously gave the name to me. You can now follow VI on Twitter.

I loved the suggestions people sent in as alternative handles before Ms. Susan got in touch with me, and I will be sending galleys of the next VI novel to three people for their creative suggestions:

VITweetFighter – Elizabeth Boskey

PitdogWarshawski – Lee Swerdloff

PIVIWarshawski – Cartsmartbaglady

I’m only about halfway through writing the next novel, so your rewards are someways in the distance, but if you will email me (VIWarshawski@mindspring.com) your mailing address, I will make sure you get galleys as soon as they are available.

Thanks to everyone who took part.

I was thinking of starting a Twitter account in V I’s name, only to find that someone is already using “V I WArshawski.”  The someone is a woman named Nisha Susan who had a rather brilliant approach to some right-wing Hindus trying to assault women.  I’m happy, even flattered, that she wants to tweet in V I’s name, but that leaves me with the question of how to set up V I’s Twitter identity.

Twitter limits the number of letters in a name–I think it’s 24.  I can do “VicWarshawski,” but I’m not crazy about that, or “TheRealVI”–Warshawski won’t fit.  Or I can do “VIWarshawski1.”

None of these seem quite right to me and I’m waiting for the brilliant suggestion that will bring V I into the 21st Century.  If you have the perfect name, you’ll go on a list for an ARC of the next V I book, so put on your thinking caps, my cyber friends.

V I doesn't let the blizzard keep her from her appointed rounds

Winter blues got you down?  I know! Let’s put on a show!
Every January for the last hundred years or so, enthusiastic performers from the University of Chicago community have come together to create a comedy revue.  It’s been my good fortune and a source of high pleasure to take part in the productions for the last six or seven years.  Written by the talented Andy Austin-Cohen, with music by Bob Aschenhurst, Julian Harvey, Noel Taylor and other gifted composers, the show is a light-hearted lampoon of university and contemporary life.

This year, I play Oleana Salamander, producer of raunchy reality TV shows and Dan Friedrichs, my cameraman and I, get stuck in Grimy Gulch when our bus breaks down on the way to film “Naughty Nerdettes; Real Chorus-Girl Co-Eds of Las Vegas.”  The action shifts between the University’s Smart Museum of Art and Grimy Gulch. The singing, by the professional Lauren Miller, Trip Driscoll, and Sara Stern is beautiful, and I do my signature dismemberment of someone else’s gorgeous music, in this case “L’ho perduta” from Marriage of Figaro.  The performance is January 28 and 29 at the University’s Quadrangle Club.  Tickets are on sale now (773-493-8601) and you definitely do NOT need to be part of the U of C community to attend–so please, come one, come all, have a drink, have a meal from the Q Club’s great kitchen, and enjoy the show!

Believe it or not, that's me

Yesterday, January 8, as most of you know, a gunman shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the brain at point-blank range.  She is alive but her condition is critical and the prognosis difficult.  The assassin murdered a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl, and four other people.

I wanted to write today about some lighter-hearted topic, the Mozart fest on Radio 3, the Vivian Maier exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center, but my grief, outrage, sense of violation are too great not to mention this latest atrocious set of murders by U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.  We started the week with the assassination of a moderate Pakistani governor by one of his bodyguards, with appropriate grave head-shakings over extremism in Muslim countries.  But we have our own extremists here, and it’s time we said, “enough” to them.

Rep. Giffords had received many threats because of her support of immigrant rights in a state that is setting the standard for intolerance.  She also voted for health care reform, which led to further threats on her life.  As the New York Times reported on January 9, “Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.”  Although Palin has now taken down this map, it was still up and active at the end of the day when Giffords was shot.

The assassin may be, as some news reports assert, mentally unstable, but it is to the mentally unstable that rhetoric like Palin’s, or Nevada Republican candidate Sharron Angle, speaks.  During her campaign for U.S. Senate, Angle said more than once that it was time for “Second-Amendment remedies” against the Democratic controlled Congress of 2010.

Dr. David Gunn and Dr. George Tiller were both murdered by people who had been stirred by years of violent rhetoric, including “Wanted” posters, and websites that not only urged the doctors’ deaths, but gave details of their schedules, their home addresses, and the whereabouts of their wives and children.  The purveyors of the websites, and religious leaders who proclaimed the violent rhetoric were never held accountable–we only spoke metaphorically, they said.  Not our fault if unstable people took the words literally. Just as in Punjab, where it wasn’t the fault of violent religious rhetoric that led one of Governor Salman Taseer’s bodyguards to murder him.

When Henry II said of his Archbishop of Canterbury, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” (words which, if they were spoken at all, were uttered in Latin or French; the king spoke no English) he was not surprised that his barons took him up on it.  And in their heart of hearts, no bishop, Fox commentator, or politician is surprised when John Salvi or Scott Raeder or Jared Loughner uses a gun against the target of their vitriol.

My only hope is that in their secret hearts they are appalled at the effect of their language, not pleased.

We may be human, but we are not persons under the United States Constitution, according to that militantly anti-female Justice, Anton Scalia. The Fourteenth Amendment defines as “citizens” all persons born in the United States, but Scalia says women are not included in the intent of the text and the amendment does not protect us or our rights.

Here’s the text:”All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

If we are not persons under this Amendment, we do not have the right to the equal protection of the laws.  Period.  We are back to where we were thirty years ago when we tried to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, because each state had its own set of laws defining women’s rights, or the lack thereof, and Scalia is happy to see us struggle state by state to try to establish our rights.

Scalia’s statement foreshadows his decision to back Wal-Mart against the million plus women suing the mega-corp for back pay.  It also underscores his frequently articulated opposition to abortion and reproductive rights for women.  We aren’t persons, we are therefore not citizens with full rights, we are merely the possessors of ovaries and uteri.

I am angry but I also feel helpless.  If anyone out there reading this has suggestions for action, PLEASE write in!