Once upon a time, there were some insidious squid. No wait. That story has already been told. Once upon a time, there was a man who fell to the sea.

No wait. That story has already been told too.

How about this? Once upon a time, there was a guy who studied the secret life of plants. He unexpectedly became acquainted with a man hundreds of miles of way who was beginning to develop a reputation as a great science fiction and fantasy writer. The plant guy and the sci-fi guy developed a collaboration and a friendship.

That story is being told for the first time - in the form of an exhibit- at the Lamson Library at Plymouth State College. The show, called A Glimpse Into The Collaborative Works of Author Jeff VanderMeer and Illustrator Eric Schaller, runs through November 23.

Schaller is not just an illustrator, though. In his other life, he's a respected professor of molecular plant biology at Dartmouth College. He runs the Phytohormone Signaling Laboratory at Dartmouth - which, as far as a mere mortal understands it, is a place where very smart folks study how plants respond to the stressors and pleasures of the universe, as defined by their phytohormones. Or something like that.

Not content to just watch the plant

hormones, though, Schaller is also a guy who likes to draw and write. So 15 years or so ago, he submitted a story to a small-market science fiction/fantasy publication. The work got rejected. And the rest was history.

"Jeff was the editor of the anthology I submitted to, and he turned me down," Schaller said. "But he gave me such a good, right-on critique of my work - he really helped me to figure out to throw a lot of that work away. He was so good at editing that it made me want to read more of his work. From there, we struck up a letter-based friendship."

From that first rejection letter, Schaller and VanderMeer - who was still waiting for his big break in the sci-fi world - grew their friendship even as these little not-so-pleasant-mushroom-men grow in one of VanderMeer's stories - and eventually, Schaller began to share some of his other talents.

"It got to the point where there were these little doodles in the letters back and forth," Schaller said.

VanderMeer, it turned out, was a bit of a doodler too. The PSU show includes a hoax fax he once sent to Schaller under the name of a character in an anthology he worked on. The fax included VanderMeer's own doodled imaginings.

As the friendship grew, so did the collaboration. Schaller did work for The Exchange, and his drawings are featured in several of VanderMeer's other works and anthologies. The friendship allowed the two men to realize that they shared similar world views - though in their cases, that world may be Ambergris rather than a world most of us are familiar with - and Schaller is able to adjust his style and reference to the tone needed to complement VanderMeer's work.

Included in the show is an image of some of VanderMeer's semi-nasty mushroom cap-people; Schaller said that image evolved as he and VanderMeer discussed absurd characterizations.

"I was looking with that to create those mushroom-cap people as if they were interpreted by Disney - so they'd be these wholesome and sweet-looking things that weren't necessarily so wholesome and sweet," said Schaller.

The resulting image is a bunch of slightly smarmy but nearly seven-dwarf-like-cute mushroom cap people; VanderMeer ended up incorporating that Disney-wanna-be theme into his narrative.

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