Carrion Comfort - By Dan Simmons Page 0,2

helicopter in the forest, I wrote my novelette or novella (I always forget the precise length of those forms) “Carrion Comfort” and sold it to OMNI. I believe it was the first two-part continued piece of fiction published in OMNI up to that time.

There was no forest and no helicopter in the tale yet— the original story was set in Melanie Fuller’s house in Charleston, S.C., over one weekend reunion for the old mind vampires— but at least I’d discovered why the old woman in the forest in my dream seemed so frightening to me. She was a mind vampire.

Life was rich. In February of 1982, on the same day that my first published story appeared in the Twilight Zone Magazine, our daughter Jane was born. That summer I wrote Song of Kali and delivered it to my new agent and friend, Richard Curtis, and while no one wanted to buy the novel, that wasn’t my problem. I trusted Richard to— someday—find a home for it. Meanwhile, I was still a sixth-grade teacher who loved and celebrated teaching as much as I always had. I wrote short fiction in the evenings, in the early mornings, on weekends, and— especially—during those wonderful summer vacations that school teachers receive as a bonus.

By 1984, Song of Kali still hadn’t sold— its view of Calcutta and tragic tone actively frightened away publishers— but I’d earned a new day job of working with three other teachers to design a new K–6 gifted/talented program for our huge school district. The job was staggering in both scope and our own expectations (two of the four teachers on special assignment to design the program and identify students out of a K–6 population of thousands and then write the curriculum and then teach it literally had nervous breakdowns and left teaching over the next year) but the other survivor, Frank, and I pressed on and created the program called APEX, Advanced Programs for Excellence. [The the school board demanded an acronym and weren’t amused at my suggestions of GANDALF (Gifted and Able Learners Forum) or LPOP (Little Program on the Prairie.)]

APEX was designed to serve thousands of high-end kids, both on the kindergarten through sixth-grade level in nineteen scattered elementary schools and (most excitingly) on the third-grade to sixth-grade level at the APEX Center where a round robin of new courses appeared every eight weeks. Any child in the district that met the age requirements could apply and take the half-hour DAT (Demonstrated Ability Task) that was the key to finding those kids who could work from three to fifteen years above “grade level” in those areas— literature, history, science, art, music, “show-biz,” math, oceanography, biology, social studies, etc.— and every eight weeks or so another several hundred self-selected students came flowing into a whole new roster of APEX Center courses. A few kids qualified for all five mornings of APEX courses and were receiving several years’ worth of truly differentiated gifted/talented advanced programming in eight weeks of long morning sessions and some astounding in de pen dent work between those sessions.

One of my courses was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, using curriculum written for college-level courses but also more extensive curriculum I’d written for it, all on the post–high school science level, all for a class of powerfully capable fifth-and sixth-graders who were never labeled gifted or talented or anything else. In what I believe to this day was the most successful advanced-learning G/T program in the nation, the hundreds upon hundreds of students flowing through APEX Center produced work, projects, and levels of thinking that would astound even master teachers around the nation.

Designing and administering and teaching APEX was the most creative thing I’d done in my life to that point and now— after publishing twenty-seven books— I still rate it as the single most successful creative thing I’ve done. For three years I was putting in a hundred hours of work a week on APEX— meetings, constantly reviewing and applying research in the field, writing advanced curriculum, designing new courses, designing the all-important Designated Ability Tasks that found these kids, training others to do such design, training others in the group holistic assessment the DAT’s required, in-servicing more than eight hundred teachers on gifted/ talented issues and classroom teaching options, carrying out all the administrative duties that flow from running a program serving thousands of kids in a constantly revolving basis, meeting with parent groups and others . . . and all through that period, I didn’t begrudge