Student Spotlight: Sam Chapman

Short answer: Because I want to read stories that haven’t been written yet. Long answer: It is a truth uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged that a weird child living in a lonely suburb must find all of his best friends in books. When I had nobody, I still had Lyra Sil­ver­tongue, Rook Bark­wa­ter, Percy Jackson, and Will Stanton. I’d take the books to the grassy drainage ditches at the end of my cul-de-sac (it was Texas, so they were never wet) and hide in the pages for hours. I’m now a weird adult with real friends and many nicer places to read, but I’d never have made it this far without stories to help me take the first steps. I want to make sure others have what I had. Plus, to para­phrase what Neil Gaiman said about Terry Pratch­ett, I just love writing. I love sitting at a key­board and making things up. I love that I can conjure any­thing in the mul­ti­verse with a budget of prac­ti­cal­ly $0. How could I ever quit?

Is there an author who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

Why did you choose Stonecoast?

I first learned about Stonecoast from Jasmine Skye, an alum and dear friend with whom I’ve been writing since we were both in high school (and who recent­ly secured a pub­lish­ing deal for her extreme­ly deserv­ing YA fantasy Daugh­ter of the Bone Forest. Look it up! I gave her the idea for the title). I’ve always written genre fiction, so it was won­der­ful to find a program that takes genre writing seri­ous­ly. Other pro­grams make space for popular fiction, but only Stonecoast builds it into the foundations.

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

“Idle Days on the Yann” by Lord Dunsany. Over just a few pages, this story takes you through wonder, beauty, sus­pense, joy, terror, and grief with hardly a pause for breath — all without any­thing resem­bling a tra­di­tion­al plot. Dunsany is a vir­tu­oso as both a dreamer and a sto­ry­teller. He’s like if Bach and Yo-Yo Ma were the same person.

The Ancient Mariner

by Sam Chapman

             After he received the diag­no­sis, Griffin O’Far­rell returned to a grove house teeming with as much life as any forest floor. As his planet, Itzamna, approached its spring equinox, prepa­ra­tions for Mabon com­menced with much squeak­ing, scur­ry­ing, and bloom­ing. The druids flung open the windows and doors, though with their cloaks pulled tight, as the chill in the air hadn’t heard about the turning of the cal­en­dar. Like any good grove house, it looked like a hedge all year round, but in spring it flow­ered. Every sill and eave sprout­ed a garland of big-petaled calen­gold or prof­li­gate rose­cross, fixed in place with wooden pegs by the ini­ti­ates and first-degrees. Inside, the seconds would be prepar­ing the offer­ing feast, heavy on the apple-like fruits they called apples for the sake of simplicity.

            Griffin planted the tip of his staff in the dirt path. His eyes watered, feeling like an old man’s at long last. Itzam­na’s orbit was Earth-similar; seasons passed at the famil­iar rate. How strange to think, the day before the spring equinox, that he would not see the autumn.

            Instead of enter­ing, he trod through the hol­loway to the back of the house. Creyr­glas the Grove­keep­er would be super­vis­ing the prepa­ra­tions. A prac­ti­cal man, he’d want to hammer out the details: Griffin’s health in his final days, his funeral arrange­ments, his burial in the grove. It would poison the joy of Mabon beyond saving. Fur­ther­more, Griffin had always been honest with himself–it was a point of great pride–and he could admit he wasn’t ready to have that conversation.

            At the back of the grove house, three flights of stairs rose to a rooftop shaded by a stand of straight-trunked, long-limbed spire­wood trees. Griffin raised his staff and haw-ed a greet­ing to the dwarf alba­tross chicks who’d nested there over the winter. They would be fledged soon. That, at least, he would not miss.

            The rooftop patio was adorned with several Adiron­dack chairs, built and cush­ioned by the druids of the house. Griffin dropped into one in the corner far­thest from the stairs. He felt twice as heavy since the clinic, his joints redo­lent with aches that must have been lying in wait for his first moment of weakness.

            Through the gaps in the needly branch­es above him, he could make out the vivid blue and orange of the plan­et’s rings, which were visible both day and night. He’d ges­tured to them during his first lesson after arriv­ing on Itzamna a few months before. “Look upon those rings,” he had declared, “those signs in the sky. Look every single day, every hour if you have to–how often you look is less impor­tant than looking with inten­tion. They’re a con­stant reminder that every­thing, every­where, all the time, oozes and spits and bellows divinity.”

            He hoped that if he looked long enough, that divin­i­ty would have some­thing to tell him.

            Con­ven­tion­al wisdom dic­tat­ed that those given six months to live should spend that pre­cious time with their loved ones. But Griffin didn’t have any loved ones. He’d out­lived two life part­ners, both star-buried with no graves he could lie beside. Most of his stu­dents remem­bered him fondly, but he’d never had the faculty of some teach­ers who formed life­long bonds with their pupils. The idea of remain­ing here to die among people who barely knew him was too bleak to con­tem­plate, but where else would he go? What had been the point of an entire life teach­ing a return to the wisdom of the soil, if he could­n’t even say where he’d be buried?

            The res­i­dents of the grove house, even Creyr­glas, seemed a little afraid of him. As often as Griffin stressed that every­one in the third degree should be equal in respect, his rep­u­ta­tion out­paced him every­where he went: a druid in the old Tal­iesin tra­di­tion, coun­selor to a hundred worlds. “The man who brought the gods back to the uni­verse,” as a banquet host had once intro­duced him. Griffin had wanted to grab the man’s lapels and shout: They were always there. All I do is bring people back.

            The only res­i­dent he could­n’t awe into silence was an ini­ti­ate who went by the ritual name of Tick, a free­wheel­ing explor­er, con­fi­dent speaker, and poor med­i­ta­tor. A few minutes after Griffin sat down, Tick shoul­dered back­wards through a trap­door onto the roof, car­ry­ing two sweat­ing glass bottles of mint tea. “Aderyn,” she greeted him, using his rite-name that meant seabird. No other sign of respect was needed.

            “Tic,” he returned, inward­ly bless­ing her coming. As it turned out, he didn’t want to be alone. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

            “Bring­ing you a drink counts as a chore.” She sat down on the next chair and opened her own bottle. “And of course some­one’s gotta attend on the great O’Far­rell. Who knows when you’ll need some­thing else?”

            United in avoid­ing Creyr­glas, they each drank deeply. The mint sun tea was a bit cold for the day, but its flavor was insis­tent­ly lovely, a gentle tug of feeling.

            “Where’d you go this morning?” Tick asked. “You took off right after dawn invocation.”

            Griffin tech­ni­cal­ly had the priv­i­lege of refus­ing to answer anyone of a lower degree, but that priv­i­lege was only to be used for con­ceal­ing mys­ter­ies the younger ones weren’t ready to hear. He wasn’t in the habit of pulling rank to lie about per­son­al matters.

            “To the clinic,” he said. “I’ve been diag­nosed with a brain tumor. Impos­si­ble to operate on without destroy­ing the cham­bers that hold my soul. The doctor–one of our siblings–recommended that I allow my spirit to escape in its natural course.”

            Tick took another long drink of her mint tea, punc­tu­at­ed with an emphat­ic, “Fuck.”

            Griffin chuck­led. “There are faiths that would­n’t permit you to swear in front of a spir­i­tu­al leader.”

            “Well, that’s why I’m in this fucking faith, isn’t it? I’m sorry, Aderyn, but that’s bull­shit. We can turn planets into gardens, we can tinker with your genes in the womb to make sure you’ll live ’til 120, but we’re still getting fucked over by shit that killed people back on Earth?”

            “Enough,” said Griffin, firmly but not harshly. “You know as well as I that the gods do not create worlds of bal­anced scales. Balance does not concern them. Nor should it us.”

            “I’m sorry.” Tick capped her bottle and slammed it down on the carved wooden table between the chairs, stain­ing a bas-relief bear with a dark ring. “I…I lost my mother. New virus on Ence­ladus. Took her before they came up with a vaccine.”

            This decade’s doctors boasted that the human body was prac­ti­cal­ly solved (as though it had ever been a mere puzzle). Most people were now able to age until their bodies simply stopped working. But disease still took people before their time. Griffin felt his old eyes water again. He turned and poured his tea over the side of the roof–partly to offer a liba­tion for Tick’s loss, and partly so she would­n’t see him wiping away tears. “May her soul rise to the sun and return to you.”

            “Thanks.” Tick sniffed. “It was good to be here, anyway. Good to have the work to get on with. Y’know my dad ini­ti­at­ed here.”

            “I didn’t. Is he…”

            “Retired into greater seclu­sion, is the phrase. I think he was just pissed they hadn’t made much progress on meeting the gods here.”

            As the people of Earth spread across the uni­verse, they main­tained their tra­di­tion of naming planets after Terran gods. The con­ven­tion per­sist­ed even when the Druid Broth­er­hood and its sibling orga­ni­za­tions led the Great Heathen Awak­en­ing, teach­ing that each new planet had its own ancient gods, who must be dis­cov­ered and named by those who worked the soil and lis­tened in the forests. The Mayan Itzamna was the distant patron of this lush, newly dis­cov­ered garden world, but its native gods were not yet named. Griffin had come here in part to help with the work of doing so.

            The all-impor­tant names had been elusive. Itzamna was even more ancient than Earth, all wine-dark seas and low hills speck­led with hidden dales and pools. Such complex ecosys­tems that two similar-looking land­scapes miles apart yielded com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sets of data. Such old gods that they spoke only in whis­pers each a century long.

            Griffin found himself attempt­ing to grasp hold of a slip­pery idea: the first thing that had truly dis­tract­ed him since the clinic. “Tic, I wonder if you’d help me. I need an interlocutor.”

            “ ‘Course.”

            “We founded our faith on old gods. But old gods retire to seclu­sion just like fathers do.”

            “Sure,” Tick said uncer­tain­ly. “I mean, maybe. Not all planets are as old as Earth and Itzamna. What about the terraforms?”

            “Yes, the ter­raforms.” Griffin gazed over Tick’s shoul­der to the dwarf alba­tross nest. The mother had just returned with a mouth­ful of half-chewed grubs. One of the million sloppy inevitable process­es by which life grew prof­li­gate. Human ter­raform­ing, when one thought about it, was not so different.

            “You plan to get into ter­raform­ing? Now? It’s just that it takes a four-year degree at least, and–”

            She turned bright red, but Griffin forgave her instant­ly. Like her, he’d almost for­got­ten why they were having this conversation.

            No faith could exist unless it grap­pled with death. Through wor­ship­pers’ ques­tions, deathbed vis­i­ta­tions, ill­ness­es, burials, every druid on every world or between worlds built a theory of the beyond. Griffin had once thought he didn’t much like to ponder it. “It’s far on the other side of what we should spend all our time con­cerned with, the dan­ger­ous­ly present,” he’d say to anyone who asked. If pressed, he’d repeat the stan­dard line that death was the cat­a­lyst which allowed life to exist.

            Here on this roof, facing a hard horizon drawn across his future, he was forced to admit that neither of these state­ments was accu­rate. They might be the beliefs of Griffin O’Far­rell, but Griffin was only the mask worn by Aderyn Mor. And the seabird had only one con­sis­tent thought about his death.

            “It will be in the pres­ence of the gods.”

            Tick pon­dered as though Griffin’s words had been some koan, instead of a state­ment of fact. “Aren’t we always in the pres­ence of gods?” she asked.

            “Aye, ancient gods who’ve grown too big to speak lan­guages mortals can hear. I’ve never minded that. They would­n’t be gods if they could speak to mortals. But there’s one moment that has always obsessed me.” His fingers brushed the carv­ings of bear and salmon and wolf. “When are gods born? What are their birth cries?”

            Tick drew out each word, perhaps wary of its impact. “If you could see that…you’d rest easy?”

            “I would only need a few ques­tions answered. If you are willing.”

            He regret­ted having to ask Tick for help. She said yes right away, glad to have a tan­gi­ble way to assist, but Griffin knew he’d sucked out some of her light. Seabird was the perfect name for him, the dwarf alba­tross the perfect totem: he was an Ancient Mariner, and Tick his Wedding-Guest. When Griffin depart­ed for the space­port three days later, and all the grove house turned out to bid him farewell, his eyes lin­gered on Tick at the back of the crowd, a sadder and a wiser woman through no fault of her own.

Sam Chapman came to Port­land, Oregon via Min­neso­ta, Wales, Texas, and Wash­ing­ton, with brief stints on Cape Cod and in the Hudson Valley. He pri­mar­i­ly writes sec­ondary-world fantasy, though he can be found dab­bling in con­tem­po­rary fantasy, space opera, and cre­ative non­fic­tion — any­thing that lets him indulge his inter­est in enor­mous ancient things. A utopian realist, Sam wants to publish novels attack­ing the Game of Thrones thesis that human nature makes a better world impos­si­ble. His influ­ences include Ursula K. Le Guin, Guy Gavriel Kay, Susanna Clarke, Annie Dillard, John Crowley, Lord Dunsany, and Li Bai.

 

Sam is also a writer in his day job, pro­duc­ing copy for tech star­tups and venture capital firms. When not writing, he can be found playing RPGs (almost exclu­sive­ly bards), cooking incred­i­ble souf­fles, fencing with rapiers (poorly), playing the clas­si­cal guitar (ade­quate­ly), and hiking the Wild­wood Trail with his partner. His favorite book so far this year has been The Min­istry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.