I Wish I Had a Dark Sea

Artist Brittany Nelson has spent several years researching an archive of letters written between science-fiction writer James Tiptree Jr., who was really a woman named Alice Sheldon, and author Ursula K. Le Guin. Sheldon used a male pen name to get published in the 1970s, and to freely write about her closeted sexuality and desires using alien encounters as metaphors. Tiptree, while in hiding, wrote flirtatious letters to Le Guin, with more than 500 pieces of correspondence exchanged between the two authors in the 1970s before Tiptree was outed as Alice Sheldon.

In this public talk, Brittany will be in conversation with Julie Phillips, who is currently working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin. The two will be in conversation about the correspondence between Le Guin and Tiptree. Brittany Nelson will be joining online. The talk will be moderated by Fiep van Bodegom.

The title of this event is derived from a letter written from Tiptree to Le Guin, which is also part of Brittany’s work in the exhibition, which simply states “I wish I had a Dark Sea,”—alluding to Tiptree’s ongoing depression and referencing an Emily Dickinson poem as well as Le Guin’s story The New Atlantis.

Julie Phillips is an American biographer and book critic and the author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which received several honours including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hugo and Locus Awards, and the Washington State Book Award. Julie is currently working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Brittany Nelson explores 19th-century photographic chemistry techniques and science fiction to address themes of loneliness, isolation, and distance within the queer community and its parallels with space exploration.https://brittanynelson.com/

Fiep van Bodegom is a writer, critic and translator. She is the editor of Extra Extra Magazine and teaches at the Creative Writing department at ArtEZ, University of the Arts. She has published regularly about literature in, amongst others, De Gids, De Groene Amsterdammer, NRC, and De Nederlandse Boekengids. She wrote the foreword for the first Dutch translation of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred (Verbonden, 2022).