Algis Budrys always remembered to spell my name with one “t.”
 
It was a small courtesy extended by an accomplished writer to no one of importance, but one many a colleague, client, and business partner has failed to deliver since.
 
In the last days of May, 1990, I had the privilege of attending a week long seminar on writing fantasy and science fiction moderated by Algis Budrys.  Along with 17 other aspiring writers, I took notes as we tried to figure out what we could learn by being sequestered in the small town of Boulder City, Nevada before being unleashed upon the sixth annual awards ceremony of L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest, hosted that year at the Flamingo Hilton Hotel in downtown Las Vegas.
 
I still have those notes. 
 
In fact, I remember Algis conducting class with a clarity and impact that has given him a place in my memory alongside my favorite teachers.  Standing before us, Algis did not stand apart from us.  No air of self-importance dominated the room, no smug professorial cocoon enveloped him.  He was simply there for us.  There in a way you need a special talent and a bit of grace to be.  It was easy for him to remember to spell your name correctly; hell, Algis remembered the anemic stories you had sent in months before and why they were rejected (as well as any promise they might have shown).
 
The “rules” presented, Algis assured us, had nothing to do with clever marketing tricks or current trends in fantastic fiction; they were simply expressions of the way the human mind responds to storytelling.  If we didn’t understand the dynamics of what happened around campfires a hundred thousand years ago, we weren’t going to be crafting the “coming thing” in cool, speculative fiction today.
 
Algis Budrys passed away on June 9, 2008 at the age of 77.  It was a cruel turn of fate and much too soon, but Algis had already secured a happy ending for his life long before a malignant melanoma became the last obstacle this man of character would try to overcome.
 
Most stories demand happy endings.  Not in the sense that boy meets girls and both live happily ever after, but in a fundamentally deep sense that our emotional connection to story demands: that something live on, something showing a unique promise not only for ourselves but for the generations to come. Though Spartacus is crucified, the face of his newborn son is held up for him to see before his death.  Though William Wallace suffers the cruelest of public tortures, the freedom of an entire people is secured by his example and the social currents that arise from his death.
 
Algis created far more than a notable body of work that will live beyond him; he passed on an understanding of the deepest of human treasures -an understanding of story- from one generation to the next, along with the stern warning that “understanding” was not enough.  In order to tell stories, we had to find them where they are ultimately born, among the people who live in our communities, fill up our lives, and inhabit the whole of the world about us.  That’s what we were doing in Boulder City, being given an opportunity to find the stories the lived everywhere, all around us!
 
Many of the people that Algis taught over the years at Writers of the Future and during his long stint at Clarion Writers’ Workshop remained in touch with him and made him proud.  In addition to my Writers of the Future win, Algis purchased a story from me for his Tomorrow Magazine.  But it was the rejections that taught me more.  And in addition to my writing, he once expressed great satisfaction that I had formed a lasting friendship with James Verran from Australia, one of my Writers of the Future classmates. 
 
For me, though I met him only once during the few days of that workshop, Algis embodied the essence of being a gentleman.  And if even a small number of his students can pass on to their own pupils Algis’s ancient sense of story, or better still lead by the example of his gentlemanly grace, then the world will be the better for it.  That’s the happiest ending we can have from the sad news of his passing.
 
It may be one of the happiest endings any of us can aspire to.