Azusa Pacific University’s Media Relations people have been an enormous help in attracting attention to Diana’s book, The Company They Keep. Thanks to their press release about her Hugo nomination, a local paper sent reporter Evelyn Barge to interview the two of us for an article that appeared April 24.
I liked Evelyn’s well-written article very much, because most of the focus was on Diana and her book — and there was no taint of “crazy Buck Rogers stuff” at all.
Staff photographer Sarah Reingewirtz came by a couple days after the interview to shoot the pictures. She had Diana and I pose in our shared office: I was surprised that she was able to make our fannish mess appear so photogenic. She took another series of photos with me gazing profoundly at my Hugo rockets’ reflection in a mirror. Does it remind anyone else of Jan van Eyck’s use of the mirror in his “Arnolfini Wedding” portrait?
There was one error in the article, for which I am to blame: “But this year, the Monrovia couple have both of their names printed on the ballot, only the second time in the 55-year history of the Hugo Awards that a married couple have been nominated in the same year for independent projects.”
I remembered that in 1977 Kate Wilhelm got nominated for Best Novel and Damon Knight for Best Short Story. However, when the question was posed to the Smofs list, Mark Olson immediately pointed out the many nominations for independent work by two other couples, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.
In 1989, 1990, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 David Hartwell was nominated for Best Editor, while he and Kathryn Cramer also were among the editors of Best Semiprozine nominee New York Review of Science Fiction.
Then, in 1993 and again in 1994, when Kristine Kathryn Rusch was nominated for the Best Editor Hugo for her work on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, also got a Best Semiprozine Hugo nomination for Pulphouse (edited in 1994 with Jonathan Bond).
Other couples may belong on the list. There are several instances where spouses co-edited a Hugo-nominated fanzine, and in the same year, one was nominated for Best Fan Writer. Did Charlie Brown do fanwriting outside of Locus? (Not that I recall.) Did Susan (Glicksohn) Wood write elsewhere than Energumen in the years it was up for the Hugo? (Probably, but the Internet is of limited help in researching fanzines published as long ago as 1972.) What about Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who was a fanwriter nominee in 1984, the same year Izzard was up for the Hugo? (Quite possibly – let’s find out.)
The newspaper headline remains true: “Monrovia Couple in Good Company.” A lot of good company…
