![\"ThomsDisch1\"](\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/ThomsDisch1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThere were many familiar faces from science fiction there, such as Sheila Williams, John Crowley, Chip Delany, Ellen Datlow, Gregory Feeley, Jacob Weisman and others, but there were also people I had previously known only as names, and their presence was evidence that Tom’s work mattered far outside the SF field.<\/p>\n
So also there last night were people such as Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and David Lehman, editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry<\/i>. Writer and translator Christopher Ecker, who is busy translating Tom’s poetry into German, flew to the U.S. purely so he could honor Tom last night.<\/p>\n
I showed up at 5:00, and within half an hour, the room was packed. Once Alice got our attention, we gathered in a ragged circle and began to share our memories. <\/p>\n The first to speak was Dana Gioia, who had memorized Tom’s poem “Ballade of the New God,” which resonates with Tom’s most recent novel The Word of God<\/i>, in that they both describe the revelation of Tom’s godhood. <\/p>\n We all took our turns, John Crowley speaking of how time and time again when he was at an impasse in one of his novels, Tom had been able to unlock the problem with just a few words, Chip Delany revealing how Tom and Charlie had made an effort to reach out to Chip’s partner to show that they appreciated him as a person in his own right separate from Chip, Greg Feeley, now the literary executor of Tom’s poetry, told of how in going through Tom’s papers, he had learned that all of the unbelievable stories Tom had been telling him over the years, which Greg had been sure were fabulations or at the very least exaggerations, turned out to have been true. Ellen Datlow spoke of attending plays with Tom back when he was a theater critic.<\/p>\n And the family shared what it was like to have had Tom as an older brother, letting us know who this big bear of a man had been when he was younger, before he had fled to the big city and carved out his new life.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n