Teachers, librarians, SF, and fantasy

Extollager

Extollager

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Have you had a teacher who contributed to your excited discovery of fantasy or science fiction books? Tell about him or her. We're not necessarily talking about teachers or professors who taught courses in imaginative literature. Perhaps it was a matter of one book. In some way, though, this person contributed to the connection you have made with this branch of literature. Similarly, perhaps a librarian is part of the story of your involvement with sf or fantasy.

Also, when we're youngsters or college students, teachers and librarians can matter in terms of affirming our interest, even if they don't introduce us to great stuff we didn't already know.

I hope many Chronsfolk will post to this thread. If you write at all, how you write is up to you; but maybe you'll want to consider describing the person's appearance, the classroom, office, or library involved, specific authors or books, and so on. I expect to post something later today.
 
Really, it was the Chrons that massively got me into SFF, but teachers and librarians have had a big effect on me.

When I was just about to start Sixth Form, to do my A Levels, my parents started going though a long, angry, loud divorce. I started spending more time staying after school, usually in the library. It's because of this that I became very good friends with the librarian (we also had a similar sarcastic nature). She didn't really introduce me to SFF in particular, but she did recommend many many books to me over the two years. Including the Handmaid's Tale at one point. She was also really nice about my writing. Always said that when I make it as a writer, she'd have me back as a guest speaker.*

My English (and also taught my Politics classes) teacher was absolutely brilliant. He was a really likeable, passionate teacher. Hardly ever shouted, but my god when he did...I remember being in the library and some kid dropped a heavy book onto the head of another kid who was wearing a neck brace. So a really silly thing to do. English teacher exploded at him. Silenced the whole library. First and only time I heard him shout like that and boy do I remember.

I ended up getting offered a part-time job as English department Admin Assistant by him which made my year; more time spent at school and time hanging around talking to him!

He introduced me to Edgar Allen Poe. We were talking after class one day and he asked my favourite author (then Stephen King) and he asked if I'd read any of the people who influenced him. He gave me a print handout of a couple of Poe stories. That was my first dip into Poe.

I miss these two people a lot. I dream about returning to school (something I did even when I was home from university) to see them a great deal (including the past two nights) and I really need to do something towards actually getting back into contact with them before my subconscious kills me.


Oh, and probably unsurprisingly, no doubt due to their influencing my love for the subject, I went on to do an English Literature degree and a Creative Writing Masters.

*It was also through her doing that Mark Robson came to do a workshop in the library for the younger years and that was how I got introduced to this site, by him.
 
I started reading science fiction very young, possibly due to a grandfather who was an engineer and technically minded to the nth degree. That's another, related, thread - who introduced you to SFF.

I got into fantasy later and that was due to a teacher in primary school. She was a big buff of Scottish folklore and Celtic mythology. I devoured the stuff. One thing led to another and she recommended The Owl Service, by Alan Garner. I never looked back and have been reading science fiction and fantasy ever since. A brilliant teacher. On the down side, though, she also taught Ceilidh and Highland dancing*. Gah! :eek:

*That said, it wasn't her fault I have feet that don't answer brain commands. That might have coloured my view of that class. ;)
 
Extollager said:
Have you had a teacher who contributed to your excited discovery of fantasy or science fiction books?
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No! :D

Well, not quite. My favourite teacher taught physics and maths. She was young, enthusiastic and you could talk to her like she was a real human. She suggested (to a group which was 90% male) that we should give up an hour of football for extra maths and we said "Sure!" It probably helped that we were a hard core of nerds (even the girls) but she was as much a facilitator as teacher; we had debates about maths; we argued over equations on the blackboard; we revelled in working out calculations.

But my SFF love began when I started reading the comic 2000AD from about eight years old. By the time I got to secondary school, it was well-established. My English teacher wasn't much of a help. He was an intellectual who couldn't quite get the teaching part right, and was the butt of the mean girls' humour for five years. He had the knowledge but couldn't impart the love of it. He kept setting us essays and I kept writing stories. He said "write an essay called June" and I wrote one about a woman of the name, not the passing of the seasons.

Still, I wore him down. I wrote a post-apocalyptic story and he recommended On The Beach to me (thank God I waited until I was in my 30s before reading it). It was a nice touch that I still remember fondly. Years later I heard he killed himself -- it was a shock, but not a surprise, and it makes me quite sad. I kinda wished I had met him once after schooldays, so we could have had a chat as equals.
 
I was the youngest in the family and tended to pick up whatever books where lying around, and one of my bros read a bit of sci fi. I ended up reading Heinlein's Starbeast and being blown away. Then Star Wars came along, and I read(yes, read, the first book by Lucas is quite good fun).

Devoured Dune, Eddings, Shannara (one was enough for me) moved on to Card. Big into King at one stage. Also, tv shows, I loved Blake's 7 (so sad, I know, but I still love it :eek:). Moved on to a lot of mythology.

The sad thing is, I can't remember being encouraged to read/watch any of it at any stage. We did study Lewis at school, cos he was local, and read out of the silent planet, but it seemed the teacher was going through the motions. (why didn't they start with Narnia - we were at the right age, and when I reread Out of as an older reader, it awed me.)

So, I grew up thinking I was a bit weird for liking all this stuff, but knew I really, really did.... (I have been left with an overriding love of space opera, though, for which I blame B7, heinlein, star wars and dr. who in that order)....
 
As promised, here's an account of the great college teacher I had, back in the Seventies at Southern Oregon College:

Brown hair falling to his shoulders, face swathed in moustache and shaggy beard, garbed in a worn turtleneck shirt and corduroy pants, young Brian Bond would have looked like a hippie to my grandma. On the first day in his World Literature class, I saw that seats had been arranged in a circle: there was no “front” of the classroom, and Brian sat at a desk like everyone else. There was no back row for students to hide in. He said that the class was all about participation, and, in the days ahead, discussions were lively. Everyone, he added as he introduced the course, would create a term project in any medium: one could write a research paper if one wished, but he would welcome an original story or poem, or drawings or paintings; or one could give a reading or perform a musical piece related to the course. The second time I took a course from Brian, I created a suite of pen-and-ink illustrations for the books we read: pictures of scabby devils from Dante’s Inferno, the threatening Elvish warrior from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the rascally Monkey making a stir in the celestial realm by blotting out the names of mortals due to die, and an angry living-dead character named Killer-Hrapp sinking into the ground, from Laxdaela Saga. In one of Brian’s American lit courses, a guy read one of Walt Whitman’s poems, “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” to the taped accompaniment of ocean wave sounds. Looking back, I wonder why ballerina Mary Molodovsky didn’t do an interpretive dance as her project in one of his classes. Brian consented to be my cooperating teacher for independent study courses on some of my favorite authors, including G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. During casual visits to his office, I’d chat with Brian about books and his days with the Peace Corps in exotic Afghanistan, and enjoy the aroma of his pipe tobacco.

As I mentioned elsewhere at Chrons recently, he let me take home books from his personal library, including: the original edition of Kenneth Morris's Book of the Three Dragons (praised by Ursula Le Guin in her "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," this wasn't reprinted till the early Eighties, I believe it was, by Hyperion -- then I ordered a copy promptly); Maeve Gilmore's memoir of Mervyn Peake, A World Away;
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Meade and Penny Frierson's HPL
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copies of his Mythopoeic Society fanzines, including the one to which he contributed an article on C. S. Lewis's space trilogy, and more. He introduced me to the F&SF Book Company -- such a great source in those pre-Internet days...

He also introduced me to numerous "mainstream" authors or books that I liked a lot, ranging from ones mentioned above to Isaac Bashevis Singer. (I didn't always cotton to things he liked; I did read all of the Anais Nin diary that he assigned, but that book didn't prove to be a keeper! -- and I never did read the astrological novel he assigned for one of his classes.)

It turned out he'd known Paul S. Ritz, who was a correspondent of mine, when he was at Bowling Green, and we even talked him into joining the fantasy apa Elanor for a brief time!

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Book of the Three Dragons

His office was in Central Hall.
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My sixth form English teacher, despairing of getting me to read anything worthwhile and after hearing I had read On the Beach and a number of Heinlein YA books, started shoving John Wyndham books at me. I didn't instantly become a confirmed SFF bookworm but he certainly sowed the seeds.
 
I wonder what you would think of Brian Bond’s selections for three undergrad-level term-long (i.e. about 10 weeks) courses in fantasy and science fiction, circa 1974-5. According to the reading lists I've reconstructed, they seem to have been:

[first course -- fantasy] Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea, Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, Peake's Titus Groan, and, I think for extra credit or as something in place of a term paper, reading and discussing Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion. This class was my first reading of the Peake and the Williams.


[2nd course--fantasy] MacDonald’s Lilith, Tolkien’s "Leaf by Niggle" and the Fairy-Stories essay, Evangeline Walton’s Children of Llyr and Song of Rhiannon (these were quite recent publications at that time), Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites, Beagle’s Last Unicorn, and (optional) Williams’s Descent into Hell. The class was my first reading of the Williams.


Russell Hoban’s Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz was included with one of the above courses. (Somehow I didn't finish this one.)


[3rd course—sf] Childhood’s End, More than Human, Canticle for Leibowitz, Left Hand of Darkness, and Disch’s anthology Modern Science Fiction (we read many, but not all, of the stories). All of the novels were new reads for me, and most of the short stories also. I think Brian also attached to this course an astrological thing that I didn’t read, Dane Rudhyar’s Return from No-Return.

Contents of Modern Science Fiction (the Spinrad items are editorial contents, except for his story "No Direction Home"):

*Foreword · Norman Spinrad · fw
 
My fav teacher that i havent forgotten,always remember fondly is the one that made the reader,person i am today who enjoy books so much im becoming a librarian. She was my swedish language teacher in 7th grade and she didnt let up about me choosing the right book to write a report about. In a time i hated reading, a time i cant imagine now. I always read half short books and wrote decent reviews,reports. She made me read The Count of Monte Cristo that was at 13 years old my first book. I see many adults,friends who never had a teacher like her and im thankful to her!

When i became an avid reader in my early 20s it was because of her.

I get emotional when i think about her because the idea of me not being changed by her persistent and never becoming someone loves reading is scary now. She truly inspired, changed me.
 
Mrs Urch in Primary 5, story time at the end of each day, "The Magician's Nephew,' and, 'The Silver Chair.':)

I'd always had an inclination towards Science Fiction, but she showed me what Fantasy could be.
 
I was reading Enid Blyton from a very early age, but it wasn't until secondary school (boarding) when Tom Keeley, my English teacher, started reading The Lord of The Rings to us in class, that I became interested in 'serious' Fantasy - the new James Bond book, or Angelique would be far more attention-grabbing, up till then. He challenged me to read Stan Barstow's 'A kind of loving' ( he was a Yorkshireman himself), so I did, and loved the characterisation - still do. Funny how you never really appreciate them at the time, isn't it?:)
 
It was fantasy and SF that semented my interest for reading so my teacher had alot to do with me reading alot of quality SF,Fantasy in the last decade.
 
These stories are really nice.

Sadly for most of my teachers it just seemed to be a job, not that I ever needed to be encouraged to read, I was a total bookworm as a child. My dad encouraged me to read sci fi and fantasy, but I will always be greatful to the librarians at my local library for letting me get out whatever books I wanted, I normally had a big pile of adult books, including some possibly unsuitable ones, but they never stopped me.
 
My English Literature teacher in school mostly got us to read stuff like "Of Mice and Men" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" which I hated. I envied those who got to read "1984".

She did get us to read a Ray Bradbury story however, one about time travel and a tourist operation in which people could go back to see the dinosaurs on specially guided tours where one had to be careful not to tread outside of the allotted area. One character does and whilst only disturbing a bit of mud, irrevocably changes the future in subtle but noticeable ways. That one stuck with me, but I guess this just shows I had a predilection for SF.
 
When I was about 10, I had an English teacher who was a massive fan of Tolkien and put up pictures of various scenes around the room. I can still remember Eorwyn fighting a pterodactyl-like beast with a Nazgul on the back. He took an active role in looking after the school grounds, possibly inspired by Ents, and was known to strictly forbid the reading of Dragonlance. I can't remember if he actually got me to read The Lord of the Rings, but I can remember quite clearly a class discussion of Lord of the Flies.

Later on, when I was about 17, I had a rather eccentric teacher who was very tall and thin and had a strange, wheezing laugh. He lent me a book of Sir Thomas Mallory, which had a great effect on me, and knew a lot about Mervyn Peake. It was around that time that I started reading Gormenghast and Orwell's books, and began to find that there were books that were not just entertaining but about things that interested me personally.
 
Toby Frost said:
When I was about 10, I had an English teacher who was a massive fan of Tolkien and put up pictures of various scenes around the room. I can still remember Eorwyn fighting a pterodactyl-like beast with a Nazgul on the back. He took an active role in looking after the school grounds, possibly inspired by Ents, and was known to strictly forbid the reading of Dragonlance. I can't remember if he actually got me to read The Lord of the Rings, but I can remember quite clearly a class discussion of Lord of the Flies.
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Ah, Toby, is that what gave you the deliberately crossed reference to Lord of the Flies instead of Lord of the Rings in God Emperor of Didcot (and the Acquaintanceship of the Ship - you heretic, sir!). Apart from the obvious word association of the two titles that is. Must admit I nearly choked on my tea (none of this foriegn coffee stuff) at that point! :)
 
Has anyone read Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads? That was a book that Brian Bond recommended but that I haven't read.
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Fried Egg said:
She did get us to read a Ray Bradbury story however, one about time travel and a tourist operation in which people could go back to see the dinosaurs on specially guided tours where one had to be careful not to tread outside of the allotted area. One character does and whilst only disturbing a bit of mud, irrevocably changes the future in subtle but noticeable ways. That one stuck with me, but I guess this just shows I had a predilection for SF.
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That's "A Sound of Thunder," one of the stories from this book:
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Mr Burnett who introduced us to LOTR in year 7. He was a really well liked teacher, and I had a lot of respect for him. He moved from our school pretty quickly (as did a lot of the good teachers).
 
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