(Cover Mike McGann)
The Mentor No: 34 - Oct 1981
Letter
The correspondence in The Mentor is quite amusing. Where do all those letter writers get the idea from that I have a thing about naked ladies?
Talking of naked ladies I saw something, this year, at Granite Bay that impressed even me as being odd. I quietly reading one of the novels that I was supposed to be judging for the PEN/Peter Stuyvesant Literary Competition when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw four young people come down to the beach. There was a man, wearing shorts, two girls in beach wraps and the third wench in a frilly bathing costume that was really more of a play suit. She was the only one who did not immediately strip. She went into the sea for a swim, in her hampering clothing. I sneeringly thought, Not one of us.
She came out of the water, removed her wet costume and went clambering, bare-arse naked, over the rooks to find a smooth one on which to sunbathe. And, to judge -by the absence of a "phantom bikini", she was a practicing nudist.
Since I've mentioned PEN I'll write a few words about their Golden Jubilee Banquet and two day Symposium. At the banquet I wee pleased to learn that the majority of the Short List judges saw eye to eye with me regarding which novel should get the $1,000 prize. It was Blanche d’Alpuget's Turtle Beach. During the Symposium I was press ganged on to two panels, the second one, on the second afternoon, being on Translation. It was a well-balanced panel, with equal numbers of writers and translators and of men and women.
Some time later this year I am supposed to give a talk to PEN on Science Fiction. I shall sort of harp on the fact that International PEN's second president was a science fiction writer - no less a person than - H.G. Wells. (Who remembers Wells’ mainstream novels?)