Cherry Wilder and her American Guest

Today marks the release date of the first e-book edition of Cherry Wilder's book A Princess of the Chameln. To mark the occasion, we will be posting a series of blogs about her life and works. The first is by Jim Frenkel, about first meeting Cherry Wilder and her family. Stay tuned for more posts about A Princess of the Chameln, as well as the other books in her Rulers of Hylor and Torin trilogies!

I met Cherry Wilder in 1979, at a reception during the Nebula Awards weekend in New York City’s Warwick Hotel. I’d heard of her before that, but had no idea who this “Cherry Wilder” person was. With a name like that, I wondered if it was a pseudonym for another writer, or perhaps Cherry Wilder was an actress, or a writer of sweet romances.

The photo shown here is not from that reception, but it is a fairly good photo of Cherry Wilder at the time. They say you can’t tell a book by its cover, and that’s true, especially in this age of mass-merchandising hype, sensationalistic cover art and the irresistible lure of superlatives in cover copy. I could not have predicted what a huge influence the pleasant, mild-mannered-looking woman in that photo would have on my life. When I met her at that party, introduced by her Pocket Books editor, David Hartwell, I was charmed by her New Zealand accent and impressed by her bluff, frank manner of speaking. She was new to the United States, to the Science Fiction Writers of America, and to New York City, but she didn’t seem at all intimidated.

She was also very funny, but I can’t really tell you any of the jokes she made that night, because this blog post is supposed to be appropriate for readers who might enjoy her fantasy novel, A Princess of the Chameln. And while that novel is quite suitable for Young Adult readers, Cherry’s jokes were not. They were quite funny, though.

That night, she told me and Joan Vinge, who I was dating at the time, that we should come to visit and stay with her sometime in Germany. That sounded great, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to take her up on her offer. I’m happy to say that I was wrong.

Flash forward to 1984. I had been married for four years, had left Dell Books, where I had worked for five years, and had recently started Bluejay Books. I was going to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, by far the largest gathering of publishers, editors, agents and others involved in publishing around the world. More than 250,000 people would be attending the book fair that year. I wrote Cherry to ask her if her offer of a visit and a place to stay was still good, and much to my delight, she wrote back, enthusiastic. She lived with her husband and two daughters in the small city of Langen (Hessen), around fifteen miles from Frankfurt. It was, she said, a relatively easy commute to the book fair from there.

She was right. Our daughter was by then almost three years old, and Joan was busy writing her own books, having just had her novel Worlds End published, by Bluejay. So I got my things together, my catalogs and book jackets for upcoming books, got on a plane, and arrived, after an overnight flight and my first ride on German mass-transit, on Cherry’s doorstep early in the morning the day before the fair started.

Every morning, starting the next day, Cherry called me to breakfast, fed me, and pushed me out the door. Then, after the forty-five-minute-long journey by bus, tram (S-Bahn) and subway (U-bahn), I spent the next eight hours at the Messegelände once “Fair Grounds” but now Frankfurt’s enormous convention center where the book fair and many other events are held). After meetings with foreign agents and editors, and some days a dinner or party sponsored by a German publisher, I would trek back to Cherry’s house.

When I got there, I was finally home.

Staying with Cherry felt a little strange at first. Cherry's husband Horst Grimm, a typesetter by trade, was German, and I didn’t know him at all. But he was, in his own way, as friendly and welcoming as Cherry, and their daughters, Cathie and Louisa, who were in their late and mid-teens, respectively. Before I knew it, I felt like I had been living with them, quite companionably, for a long, very pleasant while.

We would drink tea, have biscuits (cookies, to Americans), watch German TV—which they were all kind enough to translate for me so I could really enjoy what we were watching . . . and we would talk.

Cherry had very recently had A Princess of the Chameln published in the U.S., and she wanted to hear all the trade news and publishing gossip from the U.S., because she hadn’t been there since her visit five years earlier. So we talked and talked, as late as I dared, because the next morning it would be back to the book fair again.

This went on for the next six nights, until I had to get ready to return to the U.S.

I’m not sure how Cherry managed to be as cheerful and engaging each morning as she was the night before, but somehow she did. This was but the first year of what would turn out to be a run of more than ten years that I stayed with her and her family during the book fair. And all the while she was writing new books, the rest of the Rulers of Hylor trilogy, the science fictional Torin trilogy, then Second Nature and other books, as well as many short stories.

Cherry was, like her friends, sisters in science fiction and fantasy--Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton and Diana Paxson-- remarkably very well read in more than one cultural tradition. The Hylor books are steeped in Western European myth, legend and traditions, whereas her science fictional Torin trilogy is very much influenced by, among other elements, Maori myth and folklore of her native New Zealand, and elements from her Australian background. The combination makes her work—all of her fiction—a rich brew, both in language and in the depth and diversity of the characters she brought to vivid life on the stories and novels she wrote.

But you never would have known just how special she was, until you started talking with her. She wasn’t shy, and she didn’t hesitate to voice her opinions, but she never was someone who took for granted that anyone would think her special because she wrote great science fiction and fantasy. Nonetheless, she did just that. All while raising two daughters and being married to a Grimm, she crafted a solid body of distinctive and uniquely appealing works.

Now that the e-book of A Princess of the Chameln will finally be published, I can’t help wondering what Cherry would think of this event. This isn’t the first e-book of one of her works, but it’s the first e-book edition of this novel, and more than thirty years after the original publication, there’s an entire generation of readers who are just now about to discover her fantasy and science fiction. I think she’d be very excited. A little nervous, but mostly very excited. It’s a little like entering a new world . . .

This is my first blog about Cherry, so I’m a little nervous too. But I am also excited, because I have lots more fun stories to share, about Cherry and Horst, about immersion in Tolkien; meeting Diana Paxson on a train platform; partying with Sir Edmund Hillary; schmoozing with science fiction fans who worked for the U.S. Army in Germany; and German Reunification, as well as other fun had with Cherry Wilder and her family during our years together during the Frankfurt Book Fair. Can’t wait!