I’ve just gotten home from the Renaissance Festival, which I always enjoy. On my way out the gates, the employee asked, “Is that a Discworld shirt?” It is; it’s “The Turtle Moves” shirt that I grabbed this morning.
On the way home, I finished listening to Rob Wilkins’ “Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes,” read by the author. When he talked about the last few months of Terry’s life, I was as heartbroken as I knew I would be. Tears streaming down my face, I drove home, and the book ran out within a minute of my driveway. I want to thank Rob, who was Terry’s assistant for several years, for such an amazing book.
Terry Pratchett was important to me. He was important to a lot of us, but I want to say how he was important to me here. When I was a teen, one of the families in the church dropped by to have dinner with us. The new boyfriend of the single mother joined them, and he was a big nerd, as was (am) I. At one point, we started talking sci-fi/fantasy, and he suggested I join the Science Fiction Book Club. I liked the idea of having more to read, and he suggested a couple of authors. The suggestion that stuck, that changed my life, went something like, “Oh, you liked Douglas Adams? You should pick up Terry Pratchett.” Memory being what it is, I am not sure exactly whether he was recommending it from The Colour of Magic or from The Light Fantastic. I want to say TLF was just released. Whatever the case, after I read them, I was completely enthralled. And I picked up every Pratchett book I could, every time they came out. My first four were SFBC copies.
Terry was important to me. My childhood PTSD self grew through the Discworld (and all the others along the way). I had found a funny, human, angry, brilliant, incredibly meaningful voice who knew me without ever knowing me.
I wrote my Master’s thesis on the Discworld. When I was first working on it, I emailed Terry and asked if he would answer any questions for me. He replied yes, and when I asked my first question, he replied, “You can’t ask Mark Twain what he meant by something he wrote” or something very close to it. I was horribly embarrassed and never wrote him back. But I cherished it just the same.
[edit] I found my folder of correspondence with Terry, and there was more than that, across a few emails. It’s funny how memory works. While he gave me nothing I used in my thesis, we had a much longer conversation than I remember. He did say,”Hold on, you’re not allowed to ask me this. If your thesis was on Shakespeare, you couldn’t ask *him*.” [end of edit]
I have the video games, the maps, a lot of the stamps, a few shirts, the Diaries. The postage from England is occasionally daunting, but it never stopped me. And as much as I’ve surrounded myself with his writings, I still can’t express how much he meant to me. I don’t know if I ever can.
I found my way to poetry, and then performance (Slam) poetry, along the way. I met a British poet, and he wrote me a few years ago to say he was performing in a bookstore where Terry was signing, and would I like a signed book. A few days later, I got a new paperback copy of Interesting Times. On the inside front page, it read, “To Bill Abbot. Keep slaming.” and his signature. It’s one of a few of his books I have autographed, and my favorite.
In the last year, I’ve run a course that I wrote about Terry and Neil Gaiman (my other favorite author, discovered as Sandman was released). So far, the course has run twice, and students tend to be delighted by it. I’ve had multiple students say they were going to go read more of both authors after the class was over.
So here I am, sitting with the memories of Terry Pratchett. The biography was amazing, and it gave me much more of a picture of the author’s life. I’m also sitting with my own memories of how much his books meant to my life. Even if he was short with me in that email, he was a source of joy in a benumbed, depressed, childhood PTSD life. He made it so much more bearable, so much more enjoyable, than it would have otherwise been. He’s been gone since 2015, but Rob’s writings have given me so much more than I had hoped. Thank you, Rob Wilkins, for that. And this still doesn’t express how much Terry mattered to me, at least not as much as I want, but I’m not sure I can ever pull that off.
Bill Abbott, poet, web page 