Confessions of a Metamorph

I In Which the Author Recounts the Surprising Circumstances By Which, After Having Started Out As a Poet, She Became a Science-Fiction Writer in Mid-Life

I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania and its program in creative writing in 1978, fresh from a year of teaching poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and already signed up to run a freshman seminar I’d decided to call “Science Fiction and Science Non-Fiction.” The course kicked off with C. P. Snow and The Two Cultures, worked its way through Jacob Bronowski, Loren Eiseley, and The Double Helix, and concluded with John Gardner’s Grendel, novels by Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, and the book that remains my favorite sf novel of all time, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.