Author Archives: Alyx Dellamonica

About Alyx Dellamonica

Alyx Dellamonica lives in Toronto, Ontario, with their wife, author Kelly Robson. They write fiction, poetry, and sometimes plays, both as A.M. Dellamonica and L.X. Beckett. A long-time creative writing teacher and coach, they now work at the UofT writing science articles and other content for the Department of Chemistry. They identify as queer, nonbinary, autistic, Nerdfighter, and BTS Army.

Juneau

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Continuing the theme of fragmented Alyx vacation posts, I’d like to note that Skagway has about 900 people.

Our ship had nine hundred staff and more than two thousand guests. And when we ambled out into the town that day, there were two comparable ships and a piker at the dock. Six thousand plus tourists at once. I think that qualifies as an invasion. I certainly wanted to run away from us all, and I was part of the hoard.

Juneau, by contrast, is home to a cozy 30,000 souls. You could actually look around and see people there who looked like they might not be tourists or those pandering to same. Our look-around had a couple of highlights–local bookstores with prominently-displayed posters of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Sarah Palin memorabilia, and a store with some lovely prints by local artists, of whom my fave quickly became David W. Riccio. There were also non-human residents, who found us boring:
Juneau

After we checked out downtown, the cousins and I caught the Mount Roberts Tramway up, way up, eighteen hundred feet, I believe, enough so our mammoth home of a Carnival Spirit looked tiny!

Juneau

The mountaintop had some nice trails, the usual restaurant/gift shop/bathroom configuration, and the Juneau Raptor Center’s resident Bald Eagle, a bird whose name I didn’t catch but who’s there for good, since someone shot her through the beak, which also took out one of her eyes, which in turn caused her early, permanent retirement from the hunting grounds:
Juneau

We did a short hike (time wasn’t quite as abundant as it was in Skagway), took some shots, yakked and yakked some more, and generally enjoyed the scenic walk, the sunshine, and the glorious fresh air. It was sunny and temperate (I gather that it was sweltering in Vancouver and Seattle). The ship’s crew had made a point of telling us, repeatedly, that we’d had the best weather of the season. When you get a gift like good weather and this kind of scenery, you just get out and appreciate it.

Juneau

Skagway: is it real, or is it Playstation?

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A couple years ago, I went with friends to see The Magic Flute, as directed by Julie Taymar, via The Met in HD, which is–as you may guess–a satellite broadcast of a Metropolitan Opera show to a local movie screen. We walked into the theater, and they had a live feed from the house–the curtain, the stage, the people filing into their places, chattering with anticipation. The sound was perfect, the crowd infectious. I started to get excited. Then weirdness set in. The gorgeous red ranks of the seats, rising to the balconies, up, up, up, were not merely lovely. They were also familiar.

I stopped dead. “I’ve been here,” I said. But I hadn’t. This was before our New York trip.

“Me too!” Kelly agreed.

(Irrelevant pictorial interlude.)

Skagway

We looked more closely. The memory sharpened. Flames. People burning… what the hell? Then, one of us, I’m not sure who, said: “Parasite Eve.”

Parasite Eve is a horror video game we owned back in our pre-Wii days. It opens with a beautifully animated sequence (which of course can be had on Youtube, Chaos but I loves me my Intrawebs) set at the Met. After the carnage, you scramble around the theater, killing monsters and hunting for clues backstage. That’s right: cartoon memories of a virtual experience were intruding on… well, another virtual experience. I was still in Vancouver, after all, experiencing the opera at a remove.

Constructions of reality. Fake memories of real places, formed in one’s living room. Real memories of simulated real places? Untangle that knot for me, Gordian.

Later, after Parasite Eve, there were MMORPGs. Asheron’s Call, first and most–I played so much I was in game when I learned about the 9/11 attacks.

I am the kind of player who sets their character to running and then bumbles around the landscape, checking the map a lot and hoping I’m not too lost. In the real world, I build up landmarks and figure out where I’m going… if not easily, at an acceptable rate. Computer worlds have a little too much repetition, I suppose. Anyway, I learn the fake contours of these game landscapes quite slowly.

Maps, on the other hand? Can barely read ’em. I can use one to navigate from place from place once I have a route worked out, but I essentially lack the gift for looking at a map and being able to imagine the terrain in 3d. Or any other d, for that matter.

What does this have to do with our recent cruise stop at Skagway? (Mmmm, Skagway. Check out their Tourist Info Center.)
Skagway

Nice, huh? Okay, here comes my point: Google Street View rocks the universe.

GSV looks to my gamer brain like a slower, more varied, disappointingly monster-free version of Worlds of Warcraft. You can tool around in the real world from the comfort of your couch, using your iPod. How cool is that? In the past month, I’ve spent just enough time in virtual Skagway that I knew what it looked like before I ever got there. I was able to tell where a few key things were located before we ever landed. I knew we would be able to walk off the ship and straight into the funky smalltown cool.

Street View doesn’t take all the fun out of exploring, at least not for me. It doesn’t go into buildings or down the various little wooded paths. We and one set of cousins hiked off their grid pretty quickly on our way out to the Klondike Cemetery, where I got my favorite shot of the day:

Skagway

Behind the cemetery was the waterfall. I did in fact shoot the waterfall, but the thing I found really compelling was the colony of Daddy Long Legs on this bunch of Devil’s Club berries (sorry, arachnophobes):
Skagway

Finally, as we reach the end of a very rambly post, here’s a tourist tip for the caffeine-addicted: if Chowhound says an Alaska coffeeshop has the real goods in 2009, there’s no guarantee the same place will exist a year later. However, the Ketchikan Coffee Company looks like it’s there year-round, and they brew very well indeed.

Cruising through the bookpile…

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Kelly’s brother turned up on our doorstep out of the blue some weeks ago. He was on a business trip to Vancouver, and had ended up at a big fancy dinner at Federico’s Supper Club, which is just around the corner from us. So he ducked out and came to visit.

Part of catching up involved his telling us about a recent trip: he and his family had just come back from a Disney Cruise to the Mediterranean. They came back more tired than they were before they left, he said, because they went on so many shore excursions. (And, really–the Mediterranean? How could you not?) Still. The prospect of spending my downtime getting exhausted did not appeal. I vowed then and there to sit on my butt as much as possible while I was cruising.

So last week, amid the visiting and the wandering around various Alaskan towns, I finished Adam Nicholson’s Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War, reread the oft-mentioned Tana French novel In the Woods
and got two thirds of the way through In Triumph’s Wake: Royal Mothers, Tragic Daughters, and the Price They Paid for Glory.

The Nicholson book was rough slogging at points. English history isn’t my strong suit, and this covers several generations of Pembroke family history, with regard to their relationship with the Crown. It goes from Henry VIII through to the Revolution. The best part, for me, was Nicholson’s lovely descriptions of the terrain around Salisbury. Here’s a snip:

Early on a summer morning–and you should make it a Sunday, when England stays in bed for hours after the sun has risen, the chalk downland to the west of Wilton slowly reveals itself in the growing light as an open and free-flowing stretch of country, long wide ridges with ripples and hollows within them, separated by river valleys, with an air of Tuscany transported to the north… At first, the larks are up and singing, but everything else is drenched in a golden quiet. Shadows hang in the woods, and the sun casts low bars across the backs of the hills. You will see the deer, ever on the increase in southern England, moving silently and hesitantly in the half-distance. It is a place of slightness and subtley, wide and long-limbed, drawn with a steady pencil.

I think if you already have a background in this era, it’s a delight. Otherwise, consider waiting on it until you know more. I might still try God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (P.S.), but not soon.

I have been trying to sell Kelly on Tana French, so as soon as she wanted In the Woods, I handed it over. (I finished it yesterday.) My initial reaction to the book is here. I was so ambivalent I gave it away, only to realize after the fact that I’d loved it, so we bought a copy for Kelly to read on the cruise.

In Triumph’s Wake is rocking my world, and will get its own post after I’m finished with it. Meanwhile, here’s a preview of tomorrow’s post about our day in Skagway:
Skagway

Ask the writer…

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I am uploading holiday pictures of a fjord, glacier and various icefloes today, which is tempting me to make puns about to-do lists as long as Tracy’s Arm Fjord, or the tip of the To Do iceberg. What’s true is that while I’m physically back at the desk, my brain seems to be coming online in very small pieces. This makes the pile seem bigger than it is. (I am really hoping this is true.)

One of the more interesting items on the list has to do with the fact that the mass market paperback edition of Indigo Springs will be coming out in November. This is another first for me. It reminds me of all the times, as a reader, that I had to weigh the agony of waiting for a paperback against the cost of shelling out for the hardcover. It’s a strangely romantic feeling, believe it or not.

In any case, Tor has asked me to write an article for their e-mail newsletter, to tie into the release. This would be a sort of behind-the-scenes DVD extra type of thing: what kind of research went into the book, for example, or something about the experiences was I drawing on. Given that it’s been all of a day since this came up, I haven’t narrowed the topic down, and I thought that before I did commit to something, I’d see if there was anything all of you might like to know about the book.

Is there? Any brilliant ideas that don’t get scooped up for the article (or questions that aren’t quite related, because you can ask me anything) will be answered here in a later post.

Tracy Arm Icefloes

The good ship Lollipop

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Some of you have no doubt seen the interior of a cruise ship before, but Carnival Spirit was my first. The artist friend who saw the pictures described them as ‘fin-de-siecle hell-in-a-fancy-handbasket tone to it!’ kelly-yoyoKelly, meanwhile, called it a floating mall. And it did remind me of West Edmonton Mall, a bit. What do you think? (Click the pic for the whole set).

Carnival Spirit Decor

This spot is in the lounge we staked out as our reading area; within a couple days, all the loved ones knew they could look for us here. As you look, try to add in a very short CD on continuous loop; we heard “Dee Doo Doo Doo” by The Police so many times I’ve carried it home as a permanent earworm (slightly less fun than tinittis). The other five songs were unknown to me but sounded far worse.

Comfy chairs, though, and a view of sea and sometimes whales, won out.