HUMANITY SERVED UP
IN A BUFFET OF STORY
BY
KEN SCHOLES
One of my favorite parts about being a writer is the other writers I’ve met along that path, and one of the highest honors I’m ever paid is when I’m asked to introduce a writer’s work to the world. So imagine my delight when Jim asked me if I would introduce The Best of James Van Pelt, bringing together the very best of nearly three decades of his published work.
Now, I see these books scattered throughout my popular library of around 6,000 volumes. Most are second-hand hardcover Science Fiction Book Club editions. Best ofs bringing together around 20 or so of the very best of all those giants we all read growing up in the genre. I was pretty excited to see what this book by my friend would look like and I was ambushed by it in the best of ways. This is no slender volume of a few of his best, lifted from his six collections. No, my first file for this showed it coming in at around 800 pages. This is a big chewy book full of wonder and life in motion and I am pleased to introduce it—and its author—to you.
I’m going to talk a bit about the writer and then I’ll talk a bit about his work.
Jim Van Pelt will tell you he’s essentially lazy.
Because of this fact, he says, he’s written 200 words per day, every day, without exception, since September 1999. (I’ve reached out to Merriam-Webster to suggest updating their definition of lazy.) At about a page a day, every day, that will lead to a lot of pages and still leave plenty of time for a career in education, teaching high school students how to tell stories of their own.
I first became aware of him and his stories back in 1997 or 1998. I was reading through contributor copies while submitting my own short stories in the mail and ran across some of his earliest sales. He was one of the writers I was reading and learning from as I made my path. I remember running across “Plant Life” and “Miss Hathaway’s Spider” before making my first sale in 1999 and being impressed enough to send him a note. When my first short story came out in Talebones’ Winter 2000 issue, we shared our first of many tables of contents. Then, in 2001, when my story about the walking bear came out, Jim dropped me a note, and we became more regular correspondents. He was one of the first pro writers I looked to—and became friends with—on my own journey into print. In 2006, when his first novel Summer of the Apocalypse came out alongside my first standalone project, Last Flight of the Goddess, we finally met in real life and signed books together for Fairwood Press. Later, in 2008 when I had finally sold enough short stories of my own to merit a Fairwood Press collection, Jim did me the honor of introducing my work to the world. Being asked now to write this is a wonderful closing to a beautiful circle in my professional life.
Over the years, I’ve watched Jim’s work roll down from Colorado, a steady river of story. I have no idea what his first decade yielded before laziness required a change, but at 200 words a day, 365 days per year, for twenty one years . . . that is a lot of story. All written about a page at a time while working as a school teacher, filling young minds with the words that sparked his own. You’re holding quite a bucket full—the best so far—and I can tell you that it springs from just three ingredients: one portion of Hard and Constant Work, one portion of that Curiosity Driven Wonderment Lens through which artists Bend Their Lives into Story, and one part Living a Life Out In The World Open Enough to see Story Unfolding Everywhere in Everything and Everyone Around You.
You’ll see how well Jim did in these pages. As I wandered through, I saw slices of humanity served up in a buffet of story, seasoned with honesty and hope. I saw hard questions raised from the dead matter of our darker impulses, and I saw language unfolding—well chosen and lovely words that march to the cadence of life.
When I traced my trail back to those earliest stories I remembered, I was pleased to discover the same chills showing up in the two I mentioned earlier. Jim’s career spent in the classroom yielded quite an imaginative crop of stories beyond that spider no one wanted to deal with: a cascade of stories only an educator caught up in the U.S. education system and twisted slightly in a speculative manner could conceive. He shows us human desperation in “The Last of the O-Forms” and human invention in “Of Late I Dreamt Of Venus,” both in language reminiscent of our patron saint, Bradbury. The best of thirty or so years harvesting stories from his imagination.
Along the way, the work has picked up the nods one would expect from Jim’s steady pace of production. Collections of short stories garnering awards like the ALA’s Best Book for Young Adults and The Colorado Book Award. Individual stories picked up like gems for our industry’s Year’s Best anthologies or listed as honorable mentions. Again, at 200 words a day, along with the will to write, you land a good bit of practice.
One of the big connecting points for Jim and me is that we both share the same inspiration in Ray Bradbury, who we both cite as our largest influence in bringing us to writing. Bradbury played at his work with great delight, and a sense of wonder deeply grounded in the human experience inspired so many of us. There are 24 stories in this collection inspired by Jim’s Bradbury Challenge of one story per week for 52 weeks straight back in 2016. Those alone would be worth their very own collection. [And they were! In Van Pelt’s The Experience Arcade. --ed.] So you are getting quite a bargain here, Constant Reader.
One day soon, I’ll have The Best of James Van Pelt up on my shelf with the other “Best ofs” I’ve picked up during the decades of loving and collecting speculative fiction. This volume will take a place of honor and be full of places to visit from my friend Jim’s heart, reminding me what it means to be human, to face fear, to find love, to solve problems, to experience . . . life.
I am over the moon with how tickled I am to introduce Jim’s mightiest collection yet to you.
Ken Scholes
Cornelius Oregon
August 2020