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L. Timmel Duchamp
| Full Name: |
Linda
Timmel
Duchamp |
| Born: |
January 1, 1950 |
| Occupation: |
Writer, Editor |
| Nationality: |
American |
| Links: |
|
Biography
L. Timmel Duchamp is an American author of science fiction. She is also an editor for Aqueduct Press. She was born in 1950, the first child of three, to very young parents. Family friends and relatives lavished nicknames on her at home, and at school, her peers (two of whom shared her first name) bestowed a series of nicknames on her as well. Sad to say, her first name never suited her personality and just about everyone knew it. Which is why, when she went away to college, she asked everyone she met to call her "Timmi."
Duchamp discovered feminism in the early 1970s when she read Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and science fiction a couple of years later, when she picked up Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection off a display table in the bookstore in the Student Union.
Duchamp's fiction writing first began in a library carrel at the University of Illinois in 1979, for a joke. But the joke took on a life of its own and soon turned into a satirical roman a clef in the form of a murder mystery. When she finished it, she allowed the novel to circulate via photocopies, and it was a great hit in the academic circles in which she then moved.
Duchamp so enjoyed writing fiction that she decided to try her hand at writing a literary novel suffused with magic realism. By the time her manuscript had reached 950 pages, though, she realized that it lacked a narrative shape and would simply go on and on and on if she continued working on it. Obviously she needed to learn about narrative construction, so she spent the next year or so trying to figure it out. She was still working on it when one night in the fall of 1984 she sat down at her mammoth Sanyo computer with its green phosphorescent screen and began writing Alanya to Alanya.
Duchamp spent the next two years in a fever, writing the Marq'ssan Cycle (5 novels). When she finished it, she realized that she didn't know how to market it to publishers, and decided that publishing some short fiction (which she had never tried to write before) would be helpful for getting her novels taken seriously.
Duchamp is often grouped together with Kelly Link and other contemporary women authors who use genres like fantasy, horror, and science fiction to explore themes of feminism and gender politics. Until recently Duchamp's output focused primarily on short stories and critical essays, with publications in anthologies like The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases and magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction. Beginning in 2005, she finally got publication for the 5-novel series she had written back in the 80s.
In the late 1990s Nicola Griffith convinced Duchamp to try her hand at writing criticism and reviews. In 2004, Duchamp founded Aqueduct Press; since then editing and publishing books (her own as well as other writers') has claimed the lion's share of her time and effort.
Duchamp lives in Seattle.
Works in the WWEnd Database
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