This is the Eulogy delivered by the good Reverend Leisha Wharfield at Damon's memorial service in Eugene, Oregon on April 18th, 2002
Damon Knight
was born in 1922 in Baker City, Oregon. He hitchhiked famously to New York City when he was 19 and joined a writer's group called the Futurians. He published his first story in 1941, and went on to publish more than 100 others, and 13 novels as well.Damon founded the Science Fiction Writers of America and joined Judith Merrill and James Blish in forming the Milton Science Fiction Writer's Workshop, which led to the Clarion Workshop in Science Fiction and Fantasy, where he taught for 27 years. He was rewarded with many honors for his work, including a Hugo and a Grand Master Nebula.
Damon is survived by his wife, Kate Wilhelm, his six children, Christopher Knight, Leslie Saulsbury, Valerie Olney, Richard Wilhelm, Doug Wilhelm, & Jonathan Knight, and not less than seven grandchildren.
Damon Knight was a husband, father, and a grandfather. He was an editor, a critic, a writer and a teacher. I'm sure you've all read summaries of Damon's contributions over these past few days. I'm sure you've all reviewed or perhaps been reminded of your favorite book, story, or memory of him. For you, the story he is most famous for may not be what you remember him for, so I will spare you one more synopsis of that Twilight Zone episode.Instead, I will tell you about Damon Knight, the teacher, who served his students selflessly. The very first thing that people who knew him say about Damon is what a great teacher he was. In fact, Patrick Nielson Hayden, a senior editor at Tor Books, wrote of him: "In the great cosmic index of Homeric epithets, his is one word: 'Teacher.'"
He knew right from wrong in writing, and he taught it to others. This righteousness was informed by a clarity of mind and character that made him honest to a fault. There was no hypocrisy or pretense in him. He said what he thought. And in doing so, he wasn't always kind. But he was honest.
And while he was honest with his students, even to the point of cruelty, he would praise their good work and when he did, they knew he meant it. Damon selflessly worked for and encouraged his students because he loved fine work. He appreciated all good work, not just in literature.
The second thing people who knew Damon will tell you about him is that he had an over-the-top sense of humor. He loved to laugh. Around the house, he sang all the time. Not any music in particular, just whatever popped into his head. And he laughed out loud. He laughed while reading, he laughed with friends and family, and he was well-known for his pranks. He's been called the Merry Prankster of Science Fiction and Jane Yolen, the past president of the Science Fiction Writer's Association, called him a "clown prince."
Jocular and serious, comical and cruel, Damon Knight was gracefully himself. He might attack his students' prose. He might attack his students' prose one minute. Then he'd suddenly attack the class with a super-soaker or throw a handful of Superballs into the room the next.
Both sharp and funny, Damon was a writer and a lover of science fiction and fantasy who could take these genres more seriously than anyone had done before. As a teacher, Damon demanded that his students take their own work seriously. He demanded much of himself, as well, even when he was ill. He gained respect from (and was sometimes feared by) his students, and he pushed them to work harder. He was a good writer and he made his students better writers, too, as many of them will tell you. Damon Knight raised the bar in science fiction, and he will be remembered for that by his students and by many others. His influence as a teacher is something we can't measure.
Damon knew right from wrong in writing; he also knew right from wrong in how authors should be treated. If something was wrong, he spoke out, and he gleefully took down the high and mighty. He wasn't impressed by their power. He wasn't impressed by their wealth. In Kate's words, "He couldn't care less."
Kate told me that she and Damon used to go on cultural exchange trips. The ambassador to Brazil become a friend of theirs, and he invited them to a formal dinner in their honor. Damon, who was a translator of French, was good with languages. He found Spanish easy to learn and had picked up quite a bit of Portuguese as well, enough to nit-pick the menu! He was such a compulsive editor that, while at a formal dinner, in his honor, in Brazil, he edited the menu. In Portuguese.
Damon Knight made a difference with his life. Genius, humor, and generosity are words that have come up often in the past few days as I listened to and read stories and remembrances of him. And if his life has a message for us I think that it may be: Live up to your potential, whatever it is.
And have fun.
I was lucky enough to meet Damon about 14 years ago, when I was at his house to visit his son, Jonathan, who is now my husband. We were just friends then. A few years later, Jon moved in to my place, and my time with Damon was while having dinners with Jon's parents. Some things happened and we found ourselves looking for a place to live. Kate and Damon invited us to come stay with them temporarily, until we found a place to settle into. After we had been staying with them for a month; me, Jon and my two daughters, they invited us to stay for good. In Damon's own words "we are not getting younger, we might fall down and break a hip or something and need to be picked up again." That was about 9 years ago. We have all lived here together, happily, for all that time. My memorial speech was just a collection of memories of living with Damon:
Damon sang a lot. When he went from room to room, he sang, with gusto and flair. He did not mumble or hum, or sing under his breath, he belted them out.
When he cooked, he would follow the recipe to the letter. Down to the last olive and chunk of carrot. He would save the leftover three olives and inch long stump of carrot in the refrigerator. He would not use these saved items, but left them there to get dried up and shriveled.
He would always pour one inch of milk more than he ever drank. The glass with one inch of milk would sit in the fridge for days, until somebody poured it out. He never used them. It was a fresh glass of inch of leftover milk every day. He only drank whole milk.
There were certain plates we own that he refused to eat off of. When he ended up with them at dinner, he would swap with somebody else before the food was served.
Damon could draw and sculpt, as well as create incredible stories.
He would start gross discussions at the dinner table, then act horrified if anybody contributed to the topic.
Damon couldn't resist kittens. He loved animals. He was gentle, and kind to every pet his fatherhood bestowed him with.
He had his own names for all the pets and never called them by what everybody else called them. The cat named Spotty was Shorty to Damon. The dog we all called Speek was Woofle, the cat named Sputnik was Spunky...
In all the time I have known Damon, I have never felt anything but utter acceptance and welcoming from him. I was family from the second we met. To me this was the badge of a father who knew he had done a swell job. His son loving me was good enough reason for him.
He treated his whole family to the same twinkly eyed smile, whether they were in his life by birth, marriage, or a twist of fate.
He liked to eat burned toast with microwaved bacon and a hard boiled egg for breakfast.
He laughed with his whole body. He could easily be heard laughing from across the house when he thought something was really funny. Sometimes the house would fill with his belly laughs. He did not care who heard him or not either. He would laugh in his room over something he saw online so loud that we could all hear him.
He enjoyed sweets like a little kid does. He ate lots of cookies and candy and ice cream.
He kicked ass at Scrabble.
He hung his socks to dry on the shower door handles.
He wore suspenders.
He read a lot of children's books, like the Narnia series and the Oz books. He was reading Doctor Doolittle when he died, because he thought the part where Doctor Doolittle went to the moon on the back of a Luna moth was "Delightful!"
He hated to be told the plots of stories and movies, but that never stopped him from asking.
He liked Laurel and Hardy comedies a lot. He listened to Carly Simon and sang her songs sometimes.
He made the best macaroni and cheese and chicken soup I ever had.
He loved the bread machine and made a fresh loaf of bread every day, sometimes two. The house always smelled of baking bread. He would put strange things in the loaves, like cabbage, cauliflower, tomatoes, or pickles.
When he sang in the shower, you could hear him from across the house.
His favorite cookies were the pile of marshmallow on a cookie and all dipped in chocolate.
He always drank coffee from a see-through cup, so that he could watch the cream swirl around.
If there were helium balloons in the house, Damon would always tie things to the string to make it hover in the middle of the room. His favorite thing was twisty ties.
He used the public library a lot.
When he and Kate bought a new car, he washed it almost every day for weeks.
He ate butter on saltines for a snack.
He would not eat mussels of any kind.
He could practically inhale pastries.
He loved a good, silly joke and would even laugh at the grandkids' attempts at knock-knock jokes.
Damon really listened when people spoke to him. He did not always say what you were expecting to hear, but you never felt he wasn't really listening,
He always told the truth about his opinion. He never sugar-coated or beat around the bush. And he wanted to be spoken to with the same directness and openness.
He was not real keen on the formalities of the spoken word as far as addressing different classes or stations of people. He treated everybody the same.
He was an absolute stickler for the written word.
A Few Fond Memories from one of his grandchildren
Damon has always been the Grandpa I never got to really have, both Kate and Damon were the best Grandparents I could ever hope to have.
Damon would tell us long stories at the dinner table...not always dinner appropriate stories but he would tell them, usually with Kate looking interested but not always approving, this was all fine but if we added to it would act like he had swallowed a slug.
During Christmas when we would go shopping, mom, Mo, and I would never know what he would like, so every year we got him very nice chocolate.
One day I was wearing boys clothes to school and I wanted to wear a tie but I didn't have one that matched my outfit so I asked if I could use one of his, he let me take my pick, later I realized I had forgoten how to tie them, so I asked him for help. He messed with it for a few minutes but he couldn't do it on somebody else so he had to stand behing me and tie it in the mirror.
Sometimes when Mo or I would watch a cartoon Damon would sit down and laugh along with us.
Sometimes I would eat green olives and have them sitting in a big soup spoon and Damon would walk by and take two and a while later he would come back and take two more, he wouldn't normally say anything just walk by and take two...always two.
In third grade I would rent all the mythology books that my school library had and sometimes I would accidently leave them on the dinning room table and when I would come out later he would be sitting in his chair laughing and taking notes on his little pad then at dinner he would talk about it.
Love always *~Roxanne Cole~*
The following are memorials to Damon that people have emailed to me:
Damon was a great listener. In a group he had no need to be the center of attention. He sat and listened, then suddenly would break into a chuckle or laugh or guffaw, indicating he was indeed listening carefully to what silliness was progressing. He was also the least pretentious famous person I ever met. So, unpretentious, great listener, with an unrestrained sense of humor.
An anecdote to demonstrate: Stan Robinson, his wife Lisa, myself and wife, Kay, and several other people, including a publisher went to dinner in San Jose years ago. The publisher picked a famous French restaurant--she was paying. We had difficulty meeting the dress code, but the publisher took the maitre d' hotel aside and advised him who Damon was, blah, blah, blah. Of course Damon was amused when they allowed us in even though we were dressed informally, because he was a *big shot*. It was the first time Damon had met Kay, and my wife is quiet and unassuming but not shy. So even though they sat by each other they did not converse much, both listening. But talk swirled around the table, the publisher often dominating the conversation. When it came time to order, the menu was in French, but the head waiter took it on himself to pretentiously explain each item on the menu to his obviously ragamuffin table. When he got to one item, he gave it a long French build up then stumbled over trying to translate this into clear English. Finally my wife, who was growing hungry and a little impatient, said, "You mean this is a baked potato with optional sour cream and chives?" The struggling waiter nodded, ³Ah. . .yes that is correct." Damon absolutely cracked up. He and Kay got on famously after that. *~Gene O¹Neill~*
I was one of those terrified 18 Clarionites in 1994 who faced Kate and Damon for what turned out to be their last time. Kate was evil, we knew that almost immediately. But Damon... Sharp, ironic, honest -- dangerously honest -- and usually laughing with and/or at us. My meeting with both Damon and Kate was memorable and what I learned from that jumps up in my mind whenever I write. And I'll never forget how Damon destroyed my story in one swift movement. However... In the afternoons and evenings were the frenzied water gun fights outside the instructors' rooms during which Kate and Damon usually stayed inside. I went in to get something and felt a little something at my leg. I slapped it -- probably a mosquito (there were billions that summer). Then I notice Damon standing against the counter nonchalantly. His arms were down, slightly obscuring the water gun in his hand. Stealth squirting. I caught his eye and he let me share his secret. I had him. And that will always be Damon to me -- he may not have been able to run around, so he created his own version of the game. And beat us at it, whether we knew it or not . *~Susan Franzblau~*
I hadn't talked to Damon for years until a few months ago, when I had just finished a story for Eileen Gunn. I contacted Damon by email to tell him how I often felt a story of mine worked only when it had a hard-to-define Damonesque quality exemplified in stories like “Down There.” Damon read my story and said he recognized my “doorman” as a character from “Down There,” which was amusing because I didn’t remember anything about a doorman in “Down There” (I’d been speaking in very general terms). I then mentioned the most unforgettable image of his from a story he’d workshopped—that of an old man lining up dead flies on a windowsill. I told Damon that when someone lined up dead flies on a windowsill in one of my stories, he’d know where I got it from. This led to a good laugh (via email) when Damon said he didn’t remember writing that at all. (And I have no idea if that story was ever finished, let alone published.) I really treasure this exchange; I’m glad Damon got to see a story of mine that bore direct lineage to his and Kate’s wonderful Eugene living room workshops, and one which is about the best I can do. I somehow thought I’d be trading a lot more emails with him after all this time. His influence was subtle, pervasive, and profound; and will be felt for years to come, even though few may recognize it as his. Bye, Damon. And, see you around.
I once pestered Damon to re-read a story he hadn’t liked very much in the first place. I had revised it without solving its fundamental problems, essentially putting an elaborate gilt frame around an ugly painting. Damon finally read it and told me that my revision was very “clever.” It took me a while to realize that he didn’t mean that as a compliment. *~Marc Laidlaw~*
I was lucky enough to be included in the last Clarion workshop that Damon and Kate taught, in 1994. The daily critique sessions were always stressful. Laughter was the most common way to relieve the stress. One morning we were all laughing so hard, and Damon was so tickled by the jokes flying around the room, that he placed his hands on the armrests of his chair and lifted himself off the seat to emphasize his joy. Needless to say, our laughter only escalated and continued for several more minutes. Now when classmates and I reunite, one of our treasured memories is "that time we made Damon levitate."*~Krista Dietrich~*
I did not see Damon Knight that frequently. Always, it was during a visit to his home to see his son, Jon, and daughter-in-law, Kitte. Typically, it would be a party or gathering. I would be hunting for a beer in the fridge or foraging the food table when Damon would emerge from his room, do a thorough scan of the food, and collect a plate of goodies, engage in some very small talk, and then disappear.
Those brief encounters (plus a couple of conversations that were more interrogations than dialogs) were enough. Damon became one of my models for how I want to be when I'm an old guy. Someone with presence. Someone who knew what was important and what was not - and that the two categories were generally the opposite of what most people believe (or practice). And he wore suspenders well. I liked that. *~ Gary Rabideau~*
First of all, last night there was a Philadelphia Nebula Awards event. Tom Purdom, Michael Swanwick, James Morrow and I participated. Tom described how the awards and the SFWA began. Needless to say, Damon's name came up quite a bit. At the end he said he'd considered making his talk a eulogy, but realized that Damon was such a part of the organization and awards that he didn't need to. At the end of his talk, he asked us not to recognize a moment of silence but rather to applaud as loudly as we could for Damon. And we did. When it was my turn at the podium, I was debuting a story, but I decided first to tell the following true story about Damon and Kate.
I am a graduate of Clarion 1975. At that time Damon and Kate always taught the last two weeks of the MSU writing workshop together. There is a tradition at Clarion involving squirt guns. It is a tradition that Damon started. These days almost every attending student packs a Super Soaker, and eventually there's a small outdoor battle on a scale about the size of Ronnie Reagan's invasion of Grenada. Back in '75, word was passed to us from previous years that we would want to have squirt guns, and some of us just all went out during the first week and bought our guns and left them in our rooms. We did nothing with them for four weeks.
The dorm in those days was Justin Morrel College, and we were the only denizens therein. We owned the place. At the end of the fourth week Damon and Kate arrived. They were terribly imposing figures to us wannabe writers. Damon was sort of a slender Moses figure. Kate could melt paint off a wall with a glance.We began to suspect, I think, that we'd been misled. These were very, very serious people.
Then somewhere near the end of that fifth week, one night Damon just showed up on our basement floor and started shooting. The call to arms went out and those of us with squirt guns raced madly to the nearest restroom, filled up our weapons and charged out.
Meanwhile Damon had disappeared. We went up onto the other floors, where matresses and beds and other furniture had been dragged out of rooms and into hallways. Pretty soon we'd all turned into various Man from U.N.C.L.E. avatars and were shooting each other as well as hunting Damon. Someone sighted him, got off a jet or two, and there went Damon, bounding like some mad scarecrow into the darkness. We crept cautiously after him and each other.
At some point in this free-for-all, and unbeknownst to us, Damon took himself out of play by running smack into a door in the darkness. We were all so spooked that it was perhaps twenty more minutes before any of us realized he wasn't around anymore.We became a united front once more. There was no battle if Damon wasn't playing, and so we all filed down to Damon and Kate's
apartments on the first floor of the dorm. Present were, I believe, John Cooper, Robert Crais, Vic Webb, Steve Volpe, Tim Campbell and me. I'm sure I'm leaving someone out.We knocked on the door and Kate answered. She stepped out and gave us all that stern look of hers, and we were instantly reduced to maybe five years old. I cowered beneath that withering gaze, but one of the others--Cooper I think--drew himself up and asked, "Can Damon come out and play?"
Kate shook her head and said, "No, he has to stay in now."
Moms the world over have used this tone and these words to end various male uprisings without incident. We understood. We nodded. If there'd been sand in the hallway, we would have scraped our toes in it and said, "Oh, okay." We went back to our rooms, sat down, and started to write again; only now we knew something we hadn't before. Damon was one of us. *~Gregory Frost~*
I met Damon at Clarion in 1994. Clarion was a fairly brutal experience and I gave Damon cause to go off on me for what he called a "Goddamned benign ghost story". I smile about this now, but then I felt like a slug who'd crawled out from under a rock and wished mightily he hadn't. Then Kate tore into me and I spent the rest of the day wondering why I'd even bothered going to Clarion.
The next day came and I was due to meet with Damon and Kate for a one on one. Kate, who was none to thrilled with me, begged off and I was there with Damon and we talked of writing and of my goals and he did a lot to make me feel human again after I got gutted in front of everyone the day before.
A few days later, I had my infamous "Line Edit With Damon" and it was easily the most valuable part of the whole six weeks. I learned so much about the craft in that half hour that I would've gladly suffered through it all a hundred times if I had to do it over. At the end of the session, Damon was concerned that I had taken some of the stuff personally and he told me that we had been critiquing the work and not the person and that he thought highly of my writing and thought I had "potential". Thanks, Damon. I'll never forget you. *~Dave Woomer~*
I owe much of my start in this business to Damon Knight, like dozens of other writers. Not only was Damon a receptive editor, and a mentor willing to spend hours explaining why stories worked or didn't, he and his wife, Kate Wilhelm, were personally kind to me far above and beyond the call of duty, letting me, a total stranger, and a pretty freaky-looking one at that, stay in their house and eat their food for weeks on end. At a time when I was nearly penniless and really had noplace else to go, and knew few other people in the business, they made me feel like a welcomed part of the community--and, since Damon and Kate's house in Milford, Pennsylvania was pretty much the center of the SF universe at that time, the place that all roads led to and where everybody came sooner or later, they introduced me to nearly everybody in the community at one time or another, allowing me to make career contacts that I might not have made for years otherwise, if I made them all.
Nor was I alone in receiving this kind of helping hand. The examples, in fact, are almost too numerous to count.
For this audience, I hardly need to recount the ways in which Damon Knight had a tremendous impact on the evolution of the field, as writer, editor, critic, and anthologist, as co-founder of the Milford Writers Workshop (the inspiration for all such professional workshops that followed), and as one of the founders of SFWA itself. Less frequently talked about is the fact that Damon may have helped more young writers in more ways than nearly any other figure in science fiction history over the last fifty years. Nobody else better exempified the philosophy of "pay forward." He was willing to work tirelessly to teach, as long as you were willing to work to learn. In addition to grooming "new writers" like Gene Wolfe and R.A. Lafferty and dozens of others as editor of the long-running Orbit anthology series, he was one of the Prime Movers behind the founding of the Clarion Writers Workshop, and he and Kate worked there for twenty-five years, teaching class after class of new writers, generation after generation of them, many of whom are now themselves grizzled veterans and Big Names in the field. In fact, many of us are, in a very real sense, Damon's Children.
Even after he retired from teaching Clarion, though, Damon continued to teach new writers, through practical, nuts-and-bolts writing books such as Creating Short Fiction, and, especially, through the medium of the internet. Damon took to the internet as though he'd been brought up with a PC on his desk, and in the last couple of decades of his life, he seemed to be everywhere in the online world, critiquing work, encouraging new writers, defending their rights when he thought they were being victimized by unfair business practices, not hesitating to puncture inflated egos or slap wrists when he thought it was called for.
Damon could be irascible, and sharply impatient with things that he thought were a waste of time, and he didn't suffer fools gladly. He was a gadfly, and knew it, and relished that role, sometimes with gleeful malice. He was irreverent, and hated pomposity and solemnity. He knew that the world was mad, and often derived ironic amusement from the fact that others did not. There was a benign anarchist inside him somewhere; instead of throwing bombs, he threw superballs and water-balloons, and sprayed the participants at workshops with silly-string at the tensest of moments, giggling maniacally all the while. He had a high-pitched, unselfconscious, totally-out-of-control, infectious laugh, much like the late Steve Allen, and it was hard not to laugh with him when you heard it. There was something childlike about Damon, in the best sense of the word: to the end, he maintained a childlike joy in life, and a zestful experimenter's interest in puzzling-out its mysteries. I remember that in the Milford days he often had some small experiment under way, just to satisfy his own restless curiosity, testing the viscosity of soap bubbles, or playing with arrangements of lenses to produce odd optic effects, or boiling up daylilies to see if they really were edible, and I think that in some alternate world, he would have made a pretty good scientist.
We're luckier in this universe, though, because instead we had him as a writer and editor and critic and teacher and gadfly, and friend.
I'll miss him. *~Gardner Dozois~*
If you knew Damon and have remembrances, tributes, or recollections you wish to share, please send them to me and I will add them to this page.
Here are some links to other online obituaries and memorials to Damon:
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
I did not include sites that were only bibliographies, and I did my best not to link to duplicate articles.
Damon's last work was a book about Heironymous Bosch. It was published online. You can view it by clicking the title below. Damon created this web page, with <very little> help from me. I was surprised at how quickly he managed to learn web page construction. For a man who was born before the invention of television, he was quite the computer geek:
Damon Knight Circa 1965
Click here to return to the Damon Knight Memorial Page
