{"id":574,"date":"2006-01-22T19:19:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-22T19:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/maureen-f-mchugh\/"},"modified":"2006-01-22T19:19:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-22T19:19:00","slug":"maureen-f-mchugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/maureen-f-mchugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Maureen F. McHugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maureen F. McHugh is an acclaimed science fiction writer and all-round nice person who used to live in Cleveland, OH and currently lives in Austin, TX. Her work displays a gift for language and characterization that is unusual among science fiction authors.<\/p>\n

McHugh was born in a small town in southwestern Ohio in 1959. As a young woman, she earned her undergraduate degree at Ohio University and then went to grad school at NYU where she obtained an MA in English literature. <\/p>\n

After college, she spent a year teaching in Shijiazhuang, China and also lived in New York City. During her time in the Big Apple, she hung out with a good many gay writers and says that she became interested in their lives.<\/p>\n

The combination of her explorations in China and her investigations into the gay demimonde led to her writing her breakthrough 1992 novel, China Mountain Zhang<\/a><\/i>. This first novel was widely hailed by critics and readers alike and is unusual amongst SF novels in that it features a gay Chinese protagonist. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and it ultimately won the Lambda and Tiptree awards.<\/p>\n

At a recent science fiction convention in Cincinnati, McHugh talked about the circumstances that led to her writing China Mountain Zhang<\/i>. “I was in a writer’s group in New York City,” she told us. “We were crazy. We met every week, and we had to have 5,000 words written for each meeting. I’d been writing about typical science fiction tropes, but after a while, I ran dry, just utterly bone-dry of ideas. And that’s when I started writing about the stuff I really cared about, and China Mountain Zhang<\/i> came out of that.”<\/p>\n

McHugh met her engineer husband after she returned to Ohio and was soon married into a ready-made family. “We joke about me being the evil stepmother,” she says. “In fact, the joke is that I am the Nazi Evil Stepmother From Hell. It dispels tension to say it out loud. Actually, Adam (her stepson) and I do pretty good together. But the truth is that all stepmothers are evil. It is the nature of the relationship. It is, as far as I can tell, an unavoidable fact of step relationships.”<\/p>\n

McHugh is as well-known for her short stories as she is for her novels; her story “Lincoln Train” won the Hugo award in 1995. She taught creative writing at John Carroll University and is a frequent instructor at the Clarion science fiction workshops. She was also a member of The Cajun Sushi Hamsters From Hell writing workshop.<\/p>\n

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Partial Bibliography<\/h4>\n

Novels & Collections
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