Eos Online Launch Convention

Photo of Severna Park Severna Park
The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Severna Park recalls a childhood haunted yet enriched by tales of the European war zone, concentration camps, and death-defying escapes. "My father and grandfather wandered around between France and Northern Italy, living in caves and relying on strangers to elude capture and death.
HAND OF PROPHECY by Severna Park "His three sisters and mother were slaughtered in the concentration camps. When we were growing up at night we'd ask him to tell us his war stories. And he'd tell us about his time in Italy, how he outsmarted and escaped the Germans or how, working for the Resistance, he was nearly killed."

Listening to the stories paid off. "When I feel the book matches the intensity of his experiences," she says, "then I think it works."

Perhaps that's why, in high school, she was so drawn to Dhalgren, the novel by Samuel R. Delany. Besides the language, settings, and creativity of his writing, she adds, "the Big Thing I got out of the book was it's all right to be gay. I was just coming out to myself, and although there are no lesbians in Dhalgren, there are plenty of gay guys. It was just such an affirmation."

That affirmation spilled into her personal life as she graduated from college and entered the working world. But then, in June 1988, says Park, "my wife was diagnosed with cancer. She recovered from it after a year and a half of treatment. But there was a lot of leftover tension in our lives. I had these stories building up in my head, and I thought there was something wrong, and that I might need therapy. My wife said, 'Why don't you just write them down instead.' "

And the rest is history. The product of her early influences and the vicissitudes of life, Park's first novel, Speaking Dreams, as well as her short stories and the upcoming Hand of Prophecy, focus on strong lesbian characters fighting against the odds. Park sold Speaking Dreams to a small press, Firebrand Books, a year and a half after she wrote it, and Avon published it in 1997. "I never expected to see it in print," she admits. "I was writing because I had to. Four years later, Avon bought Hand of Prophecy, too.

Today, Park teaches high school and is a regular lecturer and reader for the Women in Science Fiction program at the University of Maryland. She is a past winner of a Jenny McKean Moore Award for Washington, DC area writers and was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction in 1992. Park grew up in Columbia, Maryland, where she attended an experimental open-space high school. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and took writing courses at The Johns Hopkins University.

The working title of her next book, still in draft form, is The Annunciate. "It is about the end of violence, and also has to do with the Great Mother. Maybe she's not that great a mother . . . !" she laughs.

Avon Eos: Life Begins Here



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