Readercon 20

Program

There are three things you can do while at Readercon during the day: talk to friends, browse and patronize the Bookshop, or attend the program. This is a significantly shorter list than provided by other science fiction conventions (which typically include an art show, gaming, musical performances, and so on).  It's thus not an exaggeration to say that Readercon is all about the program.  As we used to say, it's not just the heart of the convention, but the lungs, brain, liver, and kidneys.

The Readercon Programming Philosophy

The form and content of the Readercon program are shaped by the following principles:

Form

  • The broad range of interests and tastes of our attendees should be recognized and satisfied. In terms of genre, attendees may be into any combination of hard science fiction, literary sf, fantasy, horror, or "slipstream" (unclassifiable non-realistic) fiction. They may be variously interested in the writing and reading processes, in editing and publishing, and in the criticism and teaching of sf. They may like to hear panel discussions more than author readings or solo talks or discussions, or vice versa.
  • There should be something of interest every hour for all but the most narrowly-focused attendee.
  • It's better to force someone to choose between two attractive alternatives than to leave them with nothing of interest in a given hour. However, items with obviously overlapping interest should not be held simultaneously.
  • There should be enough programming to keep our program participants reasonably busy: at least one item for everyone, a handful or more for our best speakers.

We've found that we can satisfy these principles by featuring the following simultaneously:

  • Two panel discussions featuring five (or occasionally six or four) participants, usually including a "leader" who both directs and takes part in the discussion (sometimes with the more traditional "moderator" who directs but doesn't opine). The participants sit in arm chairs in front of coffee tables, rather than behind the usual table. Usually, the last ten minutes or so are devoted to questions from the audience, but the leader is free to solicit audience input at any stage. Although some of the panels are based on ideas given us by the participants, they are all ultimately the brainchildren of Readercon's Program Subcommittee (see below).
  • Two tracks of author readings. Usually, each consists of a pair of compatible 30-minute readings, but there are 60-minute readings as well. Unlike nearly every other convention, we give you the title (and sometimes a descriptive blurb) in the Program Guide.
  • Two tracks of solo talks and/or discussion groups (the "mini-tracks"), usually 60 minutes long, sometimes 30. Unlike the panel discussions, these are the brainchildren of the individual presenters or discussion group leaders.
  • Two author Kaffeeklatsches — an intimate get-together between an author and up to 15 readers (who sign up in advance).
  • Two autograph sessions in the Bookshop.

The items in any hour are carefully selected to avoid overlaps of genre and topic. If there's a hard sf panel discussion, there will rarely if ever be a hard sf author doing a reading, autograph session, or the like at the same time. (There's another reason for this: we want them in the audience of the panel discussion). If there's a panel we deem useful to aspiring writers (who are legion in our audience), it will not be up against a solo talk about writing. In fact, someone with a fairly narrow set of interests should be able to pick and choose their way through the program: first a panel discussion about fantasy, then a reading by a fantasy author, now a discussion, another panel, a Kaffeeklatsch, and so on. The attendee with broader tastes finds themselves (we hope) at a sumptuous but well-balanced buffet.

Content

Very simply, we pride ourselves on doing panel discussions you haven't seen at a previous sf convention. We develop our ideas at meetings of our Program Subcommittee (there were ten of us this year, which is to say roughly half of the entire convention committee). If we have a driving principle, it's to start the panel at the right point, which is often roughly where the typical panel on the topic ends. In other words, we strive for panels that ask the next question (the driving cognitive philosophy of sf great Theodore Sturgeon, Memorial GoH at Readercon 2).

If this sounds attractive (or like a bold claim we need to back up), we urge you to read through the programs of past Readercons!

Schedule

The convention begins Thursday at 8:00 PM with programming open to the public.

Friday's full schedule starts at 11:00 AM. Since many local attendees are arriving after work and hence at dinner time, there's no dinner break. Special events start at 10:00 PM (see below).

Saturday's full schedule runs from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. While there's no lunch break, we do try to populate the lunchtime hours with some of our more specialized programming — and if that fails, there's a concession stand which sells very satisfying sandwiches! See the "Special Events" section for what happens after 4:00 PM.

Sunday programming once again begins at 10:00 AM and ends at 3:00 PM.

Traditional Program Items

While the bulk of the program items at every Readercon are novel, there are a handful that you can count on:

  • The "Bookaholics Anonymous" meeting Friday — a great way for folks attending their first Readercon to meet some of the regulars and get into the spirit of the weekend.
  • A set of panels appreciating the career and works of our Guests of Honor, and of the outgoing Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award winners.
  • Panels reviewing the year in short fiction and in novels, and (in most years) the "Absent Friends" panel remembering writers who have passed away in the last year.
  • The Readercon Book Club: China Mieville's The City & The City
    At the center of former Readercon GOH China Mieville's new novel is a stunning, beautiful conceit that is revealed, in its basic dimensions, over the first six or so chapters. Reading these was about the most fun we've had with speculative fiction in years — and the book then gets even better. The reader gets a taste of the lived experience of a world existentially very peculiar, in prose much sparer than Mieville usually writes. That the conceit is revealed early makes the novel difficult to discuss without spoilers, so we urge you to read it before reading any reviews. And then come to this panel!
  • A series of 30-minute author talks called "How I Wrote Novel Title." The titles are announced on the web site in June and are a mix of books just out in hardcover and just reprinted in paperback. You're all urged to read as many as possible before the con. (One of our past slogans was "The con that assigns homework!")

    This year's selections are:
    • Wonderwall by Elizabeth Hand
    • A is For Alien by Caitlin Kiernan
    • Enclave by Kit Reed
    • The Orphan's Tales by Catherynne M. Valente
    plus presentations on:
    • Diamond Star by Catherine Asaro
    • Wildfire by Sarah Micklem (forthcoming in July)

Special Events

  • The presentation of the annual Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, Friday night at 10:30 PM. This is followed by:
  • The Meet the Pros(e) Party. This is a chance to not only meet the program participants, but a fragment of their work! See the program listing for any recent convention for the details.
  • The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan, Saturday afternoon at 3:00 PM (as part of regular programming). The Rhyslings are the annual awards of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and Readercon is proud to be their new annual host. (A poetry "slan" — to be confused with "slam" — is a poetry reading by sf folks. If you don't get the in-joke, ask an sf fan above a certain age).
  • Interviews with our Guests of Honor from 4:00 to 6:00 PM on Saturday. Our Guests of Honor are eminent and interesting enough that we don't need to program anything else (except an open Bookshop) opposite them.
  • The famous Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition Saturday evening (after a two-hour dinner break). To our chagrin and secret satisfaction, we are perhaps as well known for "Kirk Poland" (widely regarded as the funniest 90 minutes in science fiction fandom, and certainly the funniest 90 minutes at any literary conference) as for everything else we do combined. Again, see a recent program listing for details.
  • In some years, Something Else at 8:00 PM, between the dinner break and Kirk Poland. We've had a Poetry Slan, one-act plays, and several James Tiptree, Jr. Award presentations and auctions. Watch this space!
  • The Shirley Jackson Awards Sunday morning. Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, "The Lottery." Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. The Jackson Awards have been established in her name for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic; they are voted on each year by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. Awards are presented in six categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology. Readercon hosted the inaugural Jackson Award ceremony last year (with nominees present in every category, and half the winners) and is delighted to host it once again.

Preliminary Program Schedule

This grid shows panels, special events, discussions, solo talks, and workshops only. IT DOES NOT INCLUDE AUTHOR READINGS (except for Howard Waldrop's featured turn Saturday night), KAFFEEKLATSCHES, OR AUTOGRAPH SESSIONS. There will be considerably more programming at the con (which will happen in the blank boxes, of course)!

The full schedule should be online sometime during the weekend. (Note that the division of the readings into 30- and 60-minute blocks will change.)

Panel leaders are underlined (they both ask and answer questions), while moderators are in underlined italics (they ask the questions but don't answer them). If there is no one assigned to either role for a listed panel — we're working on it!

As always, you can look below to read descriptions of the program items.

This Year's Panels

New Panels

Reconsidering The Classics. Some hoary classics no longer read well, while other relatively minor classics now seem seminal. We won't just name titles, we'll try to figure out why these alterations of importance happen. Are there features that the ascendant or eclipsed titles share?

SF As The Literature Of Things. It's commonly agreed that stories set in the future can "really" be about the future or the present. But in novels like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, and Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist and Zenith Angle, we are for the first time seeing stories set in the present which seem to be about the future. These fictions seem to argue that the future will be built bottom-up rather than top-down; that progress does not derive from the implementation of ideas but rather from the accumulation of quotidian technological change. Character in these works is not so much a matter of nature or nurture, but a product of our interaction with things, things produced as fast as we can (because we can) and without any deep consideration for their consequences. Is this "SF as a Literature of Things" ultimately just an interesting sub-genre, or might (or should) the field itself be morphing in its direction? There are more and more slipstream stories that start with an architectural setting or an object or some arcane text; do these reflect the same movement?

How Do We Choose What We Read? Those of us with broad tastes in literature are constantly choosing among many different types of story. What determines these choices? Do our story preferences vary with psychological state? What's behind the phenomena of concentrating on one subgenre or even one author, or acquiring a transient aversion to same?

The Invention of Fantasy in the Antiquarian Revival. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of scholarship on myth, ritual, and cultural traditions from ancient Greece to contemporary Sussex, a mix which had a profound effect on fields as disparate as classical music, analytical psychology, and literature of the fantastic. Whether the names Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, or Cecil Sharp mean anything or nothing to the average reader of fantasy, their legacy includes the mythic vocabulary that underpins much of our field — an older world beneath this one which still seeps through, to be identified in fragments and perilously traced to its source. Join us in exploring the present-day inheritors of these motifs and their framework, starting with our own Guests of Honor (Greer Gilman's Cloud derives its physics from The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, its history from Child ballads; Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love not only draws on the Victorian folk revival for inspiration, but sets its plot going among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Folk-Lore Society; Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist is perhaps the archetypal novel of slippage between worlds. Green Men in varying guises haunt the fiction of all three). Is this a peculiarly English take on fantasy? If so, what are two Americans doing writing it? Or have we all internalized katabasis, solstices, Indo-European trinities? Bring folksongs to answer the questions if you must, but Morris dancing will be politely discouraged.

So, What's New? Nanotechnology is now an industry. Cloned animals can be bought on-line. Robots are getting smarter, more human, and they're even being tortured to find out if humans will grant them some modicum of instinctive rights. And the best current science is telling us that the future could be different in ways (elevated seas, vanished glaciers, droughts and floods, reduced biodiversity) that are materializing perhaps even faster than AI and the Singularity. Is science fiction paying proper attention to the best information available on the future? What is new and on the horizon that sf should pay attention to? How could it change sf?

Outsider Artists & Speculative Fiction. The popular conception of "outsider art" is art created by unschooled social outcasts working outside the mainstream and utterly unaware of its conventions (a paradigmatic figure is Henry Darger, whose 7,000,000 word fantasy novel The Story of the Vivian Girls… in the Realms of the Unreal remains unpublished but whose folk-art illustrations of the ms. fetch up to $80,000 at auction). However, the definition can be fruitfully expanded to include anyone whose work derives from and is secondary to an obsession essentially unrelated to the creation of art. In both cases, there is a sense that unique art was created because the artist "didn't know better" than to take such an unconventional approach. From this point of view, Tolkien (coincidentally, Darger's exact contemporary) was an outsider artist. Are there other examples?

The Future of Speculative Fiction Magazines. Are print magazines doomed? (Heck, if newspapers can't make it …) Or will they survive in their tiny niches? Are there ways to make them more viable? Is that even worth the bother? After all, online magazines are now easy and relatively inexpensive to start — are they the answer?

Strong Stories With Strong Parents. Absent or clueless parents are endemic in YA fiction: after all, it's much easier to put your young protagonists in dramatic peril when Mom and/or Dad aren't there or aren't up to protecting or rescuing them (or noticing they've gone AWOL). Rather than bitch about the many offenders, we'll talk about YA books that feature strong, capable parents who do the right things but whose kids still get in fantastic hot water. What are some of the ways of creating peril and predicament for teen characters even as their parents watch over them well?

Novels of Advocacy vs. Novels of Recognition. At the keynote Thursday night panel at Readercon 18, our panelists stumbled upon a useful taxonomic distinction: novels that advocate for a particular future (a la Heinlein) versus novels that merely attempt to recognize and describe a possible one (a la Gibson). There was some debate as to just how strongly the field was moving from the former to the latter, and if there was such a trend, its relationship to others (optimism vs. pessimism, far futures vs. near futures, etc.) One of the panelists, Graham Sleight, has recently renewed the discussion online. We'll explore the numerous possible directions raised by Sleight and others.

Divinatory Systems In Imaginative Literature. Divination takes a fundamentally random process (the fall of playing cards, the position of tea leaves) and regards it as fated and meaningful, and hence indicative of the future. The use of a divinatory system in a story thus suggests that the author is concerned with the causal structure of reality: chance versus fate, randomness versus determinism. What are the motivations of authors who use divinatory systems in their fiction? What do such works end up saying about causality? It's possible to borrow an existing system (the I Ching in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, the Zodiac in John Crowley's Ægypt), or invent your own (alternate Tarot decks in Crowley's Little, Big and Greer Gilman's "Jack Daw's Pack"); what are the rationales for doing one or the other?

The Origin of Character in the Breakthrough of the Bicameral Mind. Our panelists all report the experience of their characters "taking over" the story and behaving in some way autonomously. But we wonder whether this is actually multiple different psychological phenomena rather than a single one that everyone shares. So we've asked them to compare notes.

I Spy, I Fear, I Wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic. In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because "all cold-war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation") while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their "obsessive collection of secret information"). In fact, Stross argues that the primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the "uncontrollable universe" in horror fiction "verges on the overwhelming," while spy fiction "allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over" it. This is only one example of the confluence of the espionage novel with the genres of the fantastic; the two are blended in various ways in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers' Declare, William Gibson's Spook County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We'll survey the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel has a special affinity or relationship?

Apollo 11 and Science Fiction. Forty years ago a week from next Monday man first walked on the moon. Apollo 11 can be regarded as a triumph of the science fictional imagination, even if virtually no one foresaw that it would come as part of a massive governmental program motivated more by global politics than by scientific or commercial interests. That we haven't been back there since 1972, though — that would have been unthinkable in 1959 (to us) or 1969 (to everyone). Arguably, the moon landing was precisely the moment that sf became irrelevant, the moment where the real world overtook us and our ability to discern the future better than others collapsed. We'll talk about the strange and unforeseen history of the manned exploration of space — and its relationship to sf.

Call and Response. Some fiction is in conscious dialogue with the philosophical content of a prior work. For instance, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is a response to C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, Samuel R. Delany's Trouble on Triton addresses Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, James Patrick Kelly's Burn is a response to Thoreau, and Elizabeth Hand's "The Last Trumps" is a reaction to John Crowley's "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines." We will discuss these and other examples, and how they use different approaches and varying degrees of explicitness. How do such works read independently, out of context as responses?

Writers Who Review. The reviewers in our field have often also been writers: Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Algis Budrys, James Blish. Does being a writer/critic inevitably affect the practice of both arts? Or are the required skill sets sufficiently different that doing one has surprisingly little influence on the other? Our panelists look at the careers of the greats and talk about their own experience as two-way players.

Short Horror Fiction: The State of the Art (and Market) Today. Traditionally young genre writers have earned their spurs with short fiction. Where does a novice horror writer get their start?

Is Darwinism Too Good For SF? This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great sf inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, if the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

You Don't Know Dictionary! There's no need to make up new words when there's so many great unknown old ones. Tolkien introduced many readers to the likes of "wain" and "fell" (in the sense of fierce and cruel), while later writers such as Greer Gilman and Gene Wolfe have gone much further in plumbing the depths of unabridged dictionaries. Our panelists share their adventures with prodigious vocabularies and blank pages. And for the reader, what are the pros and cons of relying on context versus consulting the Book?

Boom & Bust in Genre Publishing and the Economy. What's the history of boom and bust in genre publishing, and how have these publishing cycles correlated with changes in the general economy? What has happened to publishing in past economic downturns, and has the effect on genre publishing been different from that on the mainstream? Within the genre, has a slow economy historically affected different fields or formats differently? How is the impact different for established writers vs. new writers trying to break into the field? And what can genre publishers (large or small press) do to help weather a recession?

Upbeat and Downbeat in YA Fiction. Dark and downbeat endings have become fashionable in YA fiction, even to the point where they have been questioned as a fad gone too far. The trend raises a host of questions about the psychology of young readers that need to be asked and answered. Is the tone and resolution of a work of YA fiction actually more important than in adult fiction, e.g., because the readers are still at the age where their worldview is being shaped? Do young readers have a different tolerance for or reaction to downbeat endings than adults? Do they need to be forcibly exposed to the cruel realities of the world, shielded from them, or gently inoculated?

Altered Minds, Damaged Voices. Minds differ, and nothing reflects those differences more directly than the use of language. When a story's first-person narrator has a mind significantly outside the norm, their altered diction provides a (sometimes purposefully cloudy) window into their altered thought processes. What are the protocols and challenges of reading a text where the narrator is autistic (Peter Watts's Blindsight or Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark), insane (Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit"), mentally slow (Flowers for Algernon), impossibly brilliant (Camp Concentration), or unclassifiably damaged (Liz Hand's Winterlong)? How do we infer the mental states from the altered and often unfamiliar diction? And what does that tell us about the relationship of mind to language?

Edgar Allan Poe. This year marks the bicentennial of Poe's birth in Boston. We'll discuss the relationship of his life to his work and his importance to the development of genre. Shorn of that context, just how great a writer was he, and in what ways?

The Radical Rewrite. Some time after beginning the first draft, the author changes a major structural component: the setting, the relationships of the characters, or even the genre ("this would be so much better with a vampire," as Justine Larbalestier puts it). This phenomenon poses interesting questions about the nature of storytelling. For example, if you can write a horror novel that becomes better when turned into a YA novel, does that mean you were writing a YA novel in the first place but just didn't know it consciously? What other surprising metamorphoses have our panelists grappled with?

After Neurons Met Saurons: The Emotional Roots of Fantasy, Part 2. In the January 2008 New York Review of Science Fiction, David Swanger examined the emotional underpinnings of horror and sf from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. At last year's Readercon, we began an attempt to extend this line of thought to the fantasy genre by identifying fantasy tropes that are notable for the emotions they produce. Our list included: the revelation of the protagonist's great destiny, the affirmation of brotherhood and kinship, the journey to beyond the fields we know, the discovery of the time abyss, the encounter with the omniscient secret-keeper, the finding of lost things, communication with animals, the contrast of the beautiful and grotesque, the healing of the dying, the confrontation with the Dark Lord, the passing of the mantle of leadership, the passing of the age, and finally the eucatastrophe (including the return of meaning, the restoration of order, and the expulsion of the horrible). What emotions do these tropes evoke? How much sense can we make of them as part of the family of wonder (our response to vastness so great that it requires cognitive adjustment), the central emotion in sf? Or are other fundamental emotions equally as important?

Plus Readercon's Greatest Hits!

From Readercon 1: Academic Attention: Good, Bad, or Ugly? Academic attention may be the best thing that's ever happened to the genre, as writers get real-world attention and corresponding increases in advances. Or it might be the worst disaster of them all, as the very lifeblood / sap / coolant fluid is drained from the genre's twitching body. Or maybe it depends on which academic is paying attention? Absolutely no firearms or other weapons will be allowed in the program area for this panel.

Readercon 1: Exceptions to the Rule. All con long we've talked about the ideas, styles, and aesthetic values that distinguish good literature, because written literature is the medium where we expect the creative cutting edge of the f&sf field to be. But is it always that way? Can the intelligence and subtlety that inform a great novel or short story translate to other forms? Are there ways that those forms, properly used, could surpass written literature at the things we expect written literature to do best? As well as identifying some outstanding existing work, we'll talk about what we'd like to see in the future.

Readercon 2: The Notion of Lives on Paper: Self and Science Fiction, 1929-1988. How can our knowledge of a writer's life influence the way we read a text? How much should it? How revelatory is it necessary or desirable to be in autobiography, essay, or interview?

Readercon 3: Hacks Anonymous vs. The Art Police. Admitted ‘hacks' (okay, ‘commercial writers') tell us of their lives while those who can't conceive of doing that gawk and gape and ask questions that would be rude if they weren't so naive.

Readercon 3: Novels You Write vs. Novels You Talk About in Bars. Those who have read John Crowley's "Novelty" know exactly what this is about. For those who haven't (yet)… some books are best left unwritten, because they are essentially unwriteable. How do you know which grand ideas you should tackle and which you should just dream about? Do the latter ever get turned into the former? Which concepts have you rejected as unrealizable?

Readercon 5: Is Hard SF Just a Narrative Voice? "When people talk about ‘hard' science fiction… it is… a difference in narrative voice that they are responding to… a narrative convention that many readers find reassuring, that appears to provide them with absolute values of truth and accuracy within the confines of a story… People talk with regret about the demise of old hard science fiction storytelling — it is not the science they miss, or the attention to scientific detail. In general, standards for that are higher now than ever. No, they miss the voice, and the journalistic prose which is the repository for that voice. They miss the sense of control, of absolute reality… And above all they miss a sense of optimism and potential that they associate with science…" — Paul Park, "The Shadow of Hard Science Fiction," The New York Review of Science Fiction, October 1991. Is he right?

Readercon 6: The Golden Age of SF Was 1968. Enough great novels were published in 1968 to fill a decent decade: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Camp Concentration, Stand on Zanzibar, Nova, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Last Unicorn, Past Master, Rite of Passage, Pavane, Picnic on Paradise, The Final Programme, Report on Probability A, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Synthajoy (D.G. Compton), The Last Starship From Earth (John Boyd), Black Easter, The Masks of Time, City of Illusions, The Goblin Reservation . . . what was going on? The glib answer, "the first year of the Ace Specials," is clearly confusing cause and effect. What produced this fireball of talent that Terry Carr noticed? Random chance? Some cycle of age and influence? Or was the environment of the mid-sixties conducive to brilliant speculation in a way that just hasn't happened since? If either of the latter, when might we see another year like this one?

Readercon 6: The Nature of Evil in Horror Fiction. Evil comes directly from Satan. No, it's just the randomness of human nature, throwing snake-eyes. No, it's something else entirely, something we barely know, Cthulhu, something nameless, disgruntled postal workers. Nothing influences a work of fiction more than the author's concept of the nature of evil. We'll trace how this has developed through the history of the genre. Does a given period's most prevalent conception of evil merely reflect that time? Or does it ever presage the mood of tomorrow? What happens to fiction that runs against the grain — is it overlooked, or misunderstood?

Readercon 7: Just Who the Hell Am I, Anyway? "Every book has a writer… You know that someone is telling you this story. And you think you know a little bit about this person. Very often the person who's writing that book is not the author." — John Crowley, in interview. Even in a third-person narrative, it can be a mistake to think that the sense of the narrator we feel as readers is an actual reflection of the authors as they see themselves. What's this like for the author, to adopt a persona (directly or indirectly) they feel is foreign to their own? Great sport, or a little scary? So such masques actually reflect something deeper that isn't foreign at all? What happens when the adopted voice has distasteful elements?

Readercon 8: Is Fiction Inherently Evil (and If So, What's My Job)? Simone Weil (in "Morality and Literature") argued that fiction is inherently immoral because it reverses the truth about good and evil: in reality, good is "beautiful and wonderful" and evil is "dreary, monotonous," but in fiction, it is evil that is "varied and intriguing, attractive, profound …" while good is "boring and flat." Certainly we can all think of counter-examples (To Kill a Mockingbird gets it right), but this is a problem as old as Milton. Does a writer have an obligation to try to make goodness interesting, and to show the banality of evil? How does doing so affect the fiction?

Readercon 8: The Catharsis of Myth, the Shock of Invention. In writing or reading fiction, we place a high value on the degree to which the plot unfolds in unexpected ways. But much of the power of myth and fairy tale derives from the way it fulfills our expectations. How do the best works of fantasy reconcile these seeming opposites?

Readercon 9: History and Fictional History. Certain things in fiction are, by convention and for good reason, not strictly realistic — dialogue, for instance, is a highly edited version of real speech. We ask: is history one of these things? When we devise a fictional history (either an alternate past or a history of the future), can and should it represent the way history really works (choose your own theory), or is doing so antithetical to good fiction? Isn't, for instance, the dramatic structure we look for in most novels absent from real history?

Readercon 9: Reality and Dream in Fiction. "It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded." "Not to me," said Frodo. "To me it seems more like falling asleep again." Some books create a world so engaging and convincing it seems more real than reality. Others (e.g., Gene Wolfe's There are Doors) seem like dreams from which we awaken. What elements in fiction create these disparate effects? Are they mutually exclusive?

Readercon 10: Words as Magic. In Red Magician Lisa Goldstein wrote: "A magician's business is with words." Words are the ultimate power in the universe of this novel, used to make magic and shape reality. In other fiction, a facility with the magic of words and language can also be important in more prosaic ways, both within the story and to the reading experience. And we cannot forget the beauty of language itself in literature. We will discuss the various implications of the magic of words and language, for characters, readers, and writers, in the context of imaginative literature.

Readercon 11: The Killers Inside Us. There is no obvious division between normality and horrific psychopathology (a thought that occurred to us long before Littleton [Columbine], by the way). How have writers exploited this fact? What's it like to read a text that reminds you that you exist on a continuum with the monster?

Readercon 12: We Won, We Lost. It's an sf world. Our once-visionary iconography is now commonplace. The present turns into the future even before we wear it comfortably, let alone wear it out, and this sense of constant change is now the common currency of our culture rather than our precious private truth. And yet the sf readership shrinks, or at least gets older, every year; as sf media ascends (and merges with real life), the written sf word seems ever more irrelevant — and certainly wins no greater prestige for its creators than in the past. Maybe this has nothing to do with sf, but just reflects the death of reading (a development we perhaps ironically foresaw). But maybe somehow the contents of sf, the accidents, have conquered mass culture, but some crucial part of the form, the essence, has been left behind. Is it an sf world after all? Or just a holographic simulation of one?

Readercon 12: Off Color. At various sf conventions, we've been to more than one panel during which the panelists try to figure out why there seem to be so few writers of color in the field. As an alternative, we have invited several panelists to discuss what an sf field more enticing to writers of color might look like.

Readercon 13: Egocentrism and Creativity. "I'm Michael Swanwick, and with the possible exception of Gene Wolfe, I'm the best writer present today." This introduction at Readercon 1 (at the Wolfe appreciation panel!) drew big laughs for its nerve (and apparent self-delusion), but in retrospect it seems to be merely precognitive (Nabokov observes that "there is no more pure love in the world than the love a young writer has for the old writer he will someday become"). Swanwick now maintains that "modesty and a reasonable awareness of [one's] limitations have no place in a writing career."

Readercon 16: After the Cover's Closed. The amount of closure that any story can have varies widely; there are endings that clap shut like a trap and endings (like "The Lady and the Tiger") that force the reader to decide what happened next. Presumably the writer has a sense of how much closure the ending should provide, and thus how much they want the reader to think about the characters afterwards (and even what those thoughts might be). And yet there's no question that the reader brings as much or more to the ending of a story than the writer. Different readers not only have different tastes in degree of closure, they have different propensities to wonder what happens next (from the reader who doesn't care whether the lady or tiger gets chosen, to the reader who can't help wondering what happens after the end of On the Beach.) When the closure a reader experiences matches the writer's intention, the result can be very powerful. But it may be the mismatches that tell us more about the nature of fiction.

And Our Traditional Panels

The Career of Elizabeth Hand.

The Fiction of Greer Gilman.

The Career of Hope Mirrlees.

The Fiction of Stanley Weinbaum, Current Cordwainer Smith Award Winner.

The Year in Short Fiction.

The Year in Novels.

and The Readercon Book Club

Guest-Organized Panels

How To Review (Charles N. Brown). A roundtable on reviewing: what to do and what not to do. Do different audiences need different sorts of reviews?

The Seeds of Poe: Two Anthologies (Ellen Datlow and Peter Straub). Last fall saw the publication of Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology, a reprint collection edited by Peter Straub covering the last twenty-five years that, in the words of the Washington Post, did "as much to blur the boundary between genre fiction and ‘literature' as any anthology in living memory" (the blurring, of course, being the legacy of Poe). This January it was joined by Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe, edited by Ellen Datlow. Despite the similarity of titles, the two anthologies serve rather different purposes. A discussion with the editors and contributors.

Solo Talks with Discussions

Excellent Foppery: The Use of History in the Fantastic (Graham Sleight). Following on from his talk at last year's Readercon (a potted history of the last twenty years in speculative fiction), Sleight now discusses the use of history in the fantastic — from John Crowley's Ægypt sequence to Tim Powers's fantasies of history, Ursula K. Le Guin's recent revision of the Aeneid in Lavinia, and the work of Guests of Honor Elizabeth Hand and Greer Gilman. Overarching theories may be suggested; gratuitous mentions of Shakespeare may also take place.

Narrative Psychology and Science Fiction (Robin Abrahams). If a character gets shot, it's a mystery story. If a character gets shot with a phaser, it's science fiction. But are there elements to science fiction that go deeper than the surface tropes? Psychologist and writer Robin Abrahams discusses what cognitive psychology and her own research say about mental models of literary genres — including science fiction, fantasy, and horror — and what personality factors correlate with a liking of different kinds of stories.

The Weird, Strange, Odd, and Unsettling Underland Press (Adam Golaski and Victoria Blake). Author and editor Golaski conducts a lively, informal conversation with Blake, founder and publisher of Underland Press, part of a wave of new indie presses dedicated to, as Blake terms it, "weird, strange, odd, and unsettling fiction." In their first year, Underland has published books by Brian Evenson, Jeff VanderMeer, and Will Elliott, with Joe R. Lansdale, Martin Millar, and the Best American Fantasy edited by Kevin Brockmeier forthcoming. Find out about the joys and challenges of launching a press, about Victoria's start as an editor for Dark Horse Comics, about the groundbreaking wovel, and about what's in store for Underland.

The Genre Roots of the Mainstream Tradition in American Fiction (C. C. Finlay). The plots of Charles Brockden Brown, America's first novelist, frequently hinged on scientific speculation. Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne employed fantasy elements, Edgar Allen Poe invented a range of genre tropes, and James Fenimore Cooper introduced the series character — a staple of modern genre fiction. In the last century, some of F. Scott Fitzgerald's earliest works depend on fantastic elements. Mainstream American writers, in fact, have regularly created fiction that would now be considered part of the speculative genre. Finlay will argue that genre elements are not isolated in a separate branch of the American literary tradition, but are instead at the heart of it.

Classics for Pleasure (Michael Dirda). In his latest book, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Dirda continues his lifelong campaign to break down the artificial boundaries between mainstream and genre classics. In this collection of nearly 90 essays he writes about such fantasy authors as Lucian, E.T.A. Hoffmann, James Hogg, Sheridan Le Fanu, Jules Verne, E. Nesbit, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, and Edward Gorey. In one section, "Love's Mysteries," he discusses Sappho, the Arthurian Romances, "The Princess of Cleves," Kierkegaard's "Diary of a Seducer," George Meredith's sonnet sequence "Modern Love" (which is actually about divorce), the poetry of C.P. Cavafy and Anna Akhmatova, the regency romances of Georgette Heyer and Daphne Du Maurier's "Rebecca." Throughout Dirda writes about adventure novels, mysteries, ghost stories and science fiction with the same respect and affection he brings to discussing Samuel Johnson, Henry James, and Willa Cather. If any of these authors are new to you, or if you want to suggest some other favorite books, come talk with Dirda about the pleasure of reading the classics.

Tarot, Myth, and Imagination (Rachel Pollack). What are the myths embedded in the Tarot cards? How do the cards lead us into — and out of — ancient stories? How can they spark our own mythic imagination? We'll look at some ancient stories in the Tarot, such as Persephone the bride of Hades, or Rapunzel, or Merlin and the Three-Fold Death, or the play of Hermes the Magus and Hermes the con man. We'll consider how the cards illuminate the myths, and how we can find and develop our own stories, with the Tarot as spark and guide.

Poetry and Science Fiction (Mike Allen and Michael Bishop). Over the years, sf and poetry have intersected in myriad ways; the two art forms have significant ties, even when the poetry itself isn't SF. We'll discuss their joint history, from the pages of Planet Stories to Robert A. Heinlein's Rhysling; from the Nobel Prize-winning space epic "Aniara" to Judith Merrill's best of the year anthologies to the poet narrator of Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes;" from D.M. Thomas and the Eight Hands Gang to Asimov's Science Fiction to the rise of Strange Horizons and Goblin Fruit.

Slipstream in the 1940s? The Growth and Exile of the Fantastic in the Postwar American Short Story (Amelia Beamer and Gary K. Wolfe). In the introduction to his 2003 anthology McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, Michael Chabon complained that the literary short story was effectively taken over in about 1950 by a single genre — "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." Curious about Chabon's choice of 1950 as a change point, Beamer and Wolfe set about looking for fantastic elements in short fiction published in mainstream venues from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s. What they found was a revelation: dozens of stories that resonated with the ambiguities of genre and style characteristic of recent "slipstream" or "interstitial" fiction, published in The New Yorker, Colliers, the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion, Charm, Town & Country, and Story. They found examples not only from expected authors such as Shirley Jackson, John Collier, and Roald Dahl, but from the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Coates, E.B. White, Conrad Richter, and John Cheever — who later complained that his earlier fantastic tales had been overlooked as he became "ghettoized" as a chronicler of suburban malaise in the 1950s. Beamer and Wolfe will highlight some of these stories, and speculate on exactly what happened in the early 1950s to send them, effectively, into exile. Was it simply a shift in available markets for stories, or a shift in literary tastes on the part of a few key editors, or a symptom of a broader cultural "retreat" from the fantastic?

When The World Ends, And Nobody Notices (Rachel Elizabeth Dillon). Apocalyptic fiction often allows the death of society to stand in for anxieties about our individual deaths. In Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, where the world floods and seven hundred ill children and their support staff float above the end of the world, the characters are too busy ensuring that the children live to process their anxiety fully. In Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes, the world is broken and reformed, but the only ones who seem anxious are the gods. How do these stories fit into the canon of apocalyptic literature (assuming they do)? We'll look to critical work for other examples of cases where the world ends and no one cares, and discuss the reasons why.

Odyssey Writing Workshop Presentation (Jeanne Cavelos). Director Cavelos describes Odyssey, an intensive six-week program for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror held each summer in Manchester, NH. Guest lecturers have included George R. R. Martin, Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Kushner, Jane Yolen, Robert J. Sawyer, Nancy Kress, and Dan Simmons, and 53% of graduates have gone on to be published. Jeanne explains the structure of the program, the work required, and the pros and cons of workshops. Graduates discuss their personal experiences.

A Different Mind (Sarah Micklem). In Micklem's new book, Wildfire, the narrator is struck by lightning and suffers brain damage that results in aphasia, memory loss, and insomnia. Because the novel is a fantasy, the interpretation of her afflictions — within the world of the book — is completely non-scientific. Firethorn feels cursed by the god of lightning, but other characters believe she has been blessed, and they search her garbled utterances for prophecies. Micklem will talk about what inspired her to mix neuroscience with a magical worldview: neurologists' case studies, the ordeals of shamans, and firsthand accounts by survivors of lightning strikes and strokes. What different selves are revealed when brains are drastically reorganized? What strange abilities?

Annual Interstitial Arts (IAF) Town Meeting (Ellen Kushner). Interstitial Art falls in the interstices of recognized genres. The Interstitial Arts Foundation is a group of "Artists Without Borders" fighting the Balkanization of art. They celebrate work that crosses or straddles the borders between media, the borders between genres, the borders between "high art" and popular culture. They are not opposed to mainstream fiction or genre fiction, nor are they seeking to create a new category. They are just particularly excited by border-crossing fiction (and music and art), and want to support the creation of such works and to establish better ways of engaging with them. The IAF has had a presence at Readercon from its beginning. In 2007, in cooperation withSmall Beer Press,the IAF published Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, and in fall 2009 they will present Interfictions 2, edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak. They are also doing a lot with visual arts. Interstitial Arts is an idea, a conversation, not a hard-and-fast definition — and it's a conversation you are invited to join.

Solo Talks with Discussions — Off-Topic

Lasers, Death Rays, and the Quest for the Ultimate Weapon (Jeff Hecht). Nature invented lightning bolts first, but the ancients put them in the hands of their mythical gods, and ever since we've had dreams of destruction in fiction and in fact. H.G. Wells armed his Martian invaders with heat rays; Nikoka Tesla and others tried to build real death rays. In 1958, the director of the then-new DARPA said his agency would be interested in far-out ideas like death rays, and a few months later Gordon Gould arrived at their door with a plan to build the laser. Hecht will talk about the real (and the questionable) science, the fictional visions, the bizarre history, and the quest for the ultimate weapon of directed energy.

IDIC for the Pre-Federation World: Coping with Diversity (Robin Abrahams). The Vulcans allegedly had a slogan "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," which is pretty big talk for an entire race of people who all have the same haircut. In the 21st century, however, diversity is increasing — and increasingly hard to deal with. Robin Abrahams, writer of the Globe's "Miss Conduct" social advice column and the new book Miss Conduct's Mind Over Manners, discusses diversity of values, priorities, and experiences. Can we really say that nothing human is alien to us? How do we cope with the "other"? And how can we use science fiction to help us address contemporary social dilemmas?

Geek Card Workshop, With a Brief Romp Through Theoretical Physics and Astronomy (Carl Frederick). The Geek Card contains (among other things) the "standard model" of elementary particles, ten important physics constants (including c, h, the Planck length, g, G, and the fine structure constant), a table of the elements, data on the 18 brightest stars, data on the solar system, and some purely geeky stuff such as a working slide rule function, pi and e to a lot of decimal places, and even a geek joke transcribed into Morse Code. And it's the size of a business card! (http://www.darkzoo.net/TC/TCGeekCard.htm). Although it started out as a promotional for a geeky novel (The Trojan Carousel), it's taken on a life of its own. Each attendee will be given a Geek Card and, using it as a jumping off point, we'll discuss some of the big ideas in physics and astronomy.

Discussions

Bookaholics Anonymous Annual Meeting. The most controversial of all 12-step groups. Despite the appearance of self-approbation, despite the formal public proclamations by members that they find their behavior humiliating and intend to change it, this group, in fact, is alleged to secretly encourage its members to succumb to their addictions. The shame, in other words, is a sham. Within the subtext of the members' pathetic testimony, it is claimed, all the worst vices are covertly endorsed: book-buying, book-hoarding, book-stacking, book-sniffing, even book-reading. Could this be true? Come testify yourself!

What Did You Guys Think Of…? (Lawrence Person and Howard Waldrop). Come talk classic and recent genre films with Locus's film reviewers.

Mainstream and Genre (C.C. Finlay, Amelia Beamer, and Gary K. Wolfe). The (independently conceived) presentations by Finlay and Beamer & Wolfe raise so many interesting questions about the relationship of the mainstream to genre fiction that we thought we'd toss them together with our attendees for an hour of spirited discussion. What relationship did the postwar boomlet of slipstream fiction have to the long history of the fantastic identified by Finlay? Was there any relationship between the exile of the fantastic from the mainstream in the early 50s and the contemporaneous ascendancy of well-defined and exclusive genres? When the mainstream and genre began cohabiting again (in the UK in the 60s during The New Wave, or recently in the US with the likes of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem), can this be fruitfully viewed as a return to the earliest tradition, or is it best viewed as the marriage of two now thoroughly estranged parties?

Solo Talks (60 min.)

My Life in the Theater, 1910-1960 (John Crowley). Crowley reads a "memoir of sorts," about his intense though almost entirely imaginary involvement with opera, theater, stage design, and puppetry as an adolescent.

You Never Can Tell What Goes on Down Below: Reading Dr. Seuss as Weird Fiction (Caitlín R. Kiernan). Few would consider Dr. Seuss a master of weird fiction, but most of us knew about the strange denizens of McElligot's Pool long before we were introduced to those of Innsmouth. We met the Lorax before Great Cthulhu, and shuddered at the Jogg-oons long before we ever met up with our first shoggoth. Join us for a review of the strange worlds of Seuss (and other "children's authors") and a discussion of how the surprisingly sophisticated oddities we meet as kids shape us as aficionados of fantasy and science fiction.

Memorial Guest Of Honor Interview (Michael Swanwick). Swanwick will interview the late Hope Mirrlees, author of "Paris, a Poem" and Lud-in-the-Mist, in person.

The Pleasures Of Sacrilege: Rewriting Lewis And Rowling Into The Magicians (Lev Grossman). Stealing from the best is a time-honored fantasy tradition. But how far can you go? Lev Grossman's new novel The Magicians takes key elements from two towering fantasy masterpieces, the Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter series, updates them, inverts them, reinterprets them, and then mashes them up together into one sprawling work of urban fantasy. Grossman talks about what drove him to these heinous crimes against the canon, and the process and the perils (personal, aesthetic, legal and otherwise) of trespassing on sacred territory and trifling with his elders and betters.

Solo Talks (30 min.)

The Savage Humanists (Fiona Kelleghan). Kelleghan's recent anthology identifies and names an important movement in contemporary sf. The "Savage Humanists" are a group of award-winning writers who write brilliant works with both humor and anger — in other words, satirists of one stripe or another. They include Connie Willis, Jonathan Lethem, Robert J. Sawyer, John Kessel, James Morrow, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others, and most of them would name Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as influences.

Some Notes on an Early Model for the Superhero (John Clute). Clute discusses how Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo contains, in the Count himself, a very early and remarkably full-spectrum prefiguration of the superhero. Furthermore, the Count, and hence ultimately the superhero, is an intensely paradigmatic upwelling of fantastika out of a central "moment": the Club Story atmosphere that in 1816 initiated both the Frankenstein monster and the Byronic vampire. The superhero, argues Clute, is most likely to come into the world at a point when the world needs defending, i.e. when the society the superhero defends is particularly anxious about its stability.

Sword in the Hand: Language as Tool in Moonwise and A Deepness in the Sky (Cassandra Sears-Phillips). Greer Gilman's Moonwise and Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky deal with the ability to use language to shape realities both internal and external. Characters who work within the medium of language — and language itself — are presented in both novels as means to an end, tools being deliberately used in service of writerly craft as well as plot. What does, or should, it mean to the reader that in both novels, the characters so pressed into service seem unwilling?

Mind From Matter: How Body Structure Shapes Intelligence (Helen Collins). The origin and nature of intelligence is a hot topic among both neuroscientists and sf writers and appears surprisingly often in pop culture. Sf writers have speculated on how variations and differences in physical structure necessitate different perceptions of external and internal realities, which, in turn, determine "intelligence." Collins will discuss examples from classic and current sf, including works by Eric Frank Russell, Octavia E. Butler, David Brin, and Joan Slonczewski, and her own novels Mutagenesis and NeuroGenesis, where these speculations constitute a major theme.

The Intersection of Puppetry and Science Fiction (Mary Robinette Kowal). Much like science fiction and fantasy, puppetry is often seen as a childhood interest. Professional puppeteer and Campbell award-winning author Kowal talks about what the speculative fiction community can learn from the world of puppetry.

Contextual Definitions of Vocabulary in the Work of Greer Gilman (Lila Garrott). Garrott gives a close-reading of the word "hallows" throughout Gilman's oeuvre, examining how her usage of many different contexts and meanings for what is nominally the same word gives rise to concepts which are different from, though related to, the pre-existing dictionary definitions.

"How I Wrote" Talks (30 min. unless specified)

How I Wrote Wonderwall (Elizabeth Hand). Breaking with Readercon tradition, Hand talks about writing a novel that won't be published until after the convention. (60 min.)

How I Wrote A is for Alien (Caitlin R. Kiernan). Breaking with Readercon tradition, Kiernan talks about writing the stories that make up her first sf collection.

How I Wrote Enclave (Kit Reed).

How I Wrote The Orphan's Tales (Catherynne M. Valente).

Solo Talks — Off-Topic (30 min. unless specified)

Where the Turtles Stop: Preons as the Most Fundamental Particle (Eric M. Van). The discovery (invention?) of the quark simplified the "particle zoo" immensely, but the Standard Model of Physics still contains an embarrassing plethora of "fundamental" particles: six quarks and six leptons (both of which fit into neat and cognate 2 x 3 grids) and a variety of bosons (the photon, gluon, etc.). That all of these particles might be composed of various combinations of two or three truly fundamental "preons" seems obvious. Van will explain why the preon concept was unfairly rejected in the 70's and 80's and talk about its recent resurrection by the Australian physicist Sundance Bilson-Thompson. He will then (of course) present his own preon model, which he argues is simpler and has much more (way cool, in fact) explanatory power. Note: this talk is designed to be intelligible even to those who believe "leptons" manufacture iced tea and Cup of Soup. (60 min.)

Dubai, City Of The Future? (Judith Berman). Air-conditioned beaches, kilometer-high towers, buildings that re-configure themselves — are these a glimpse of the future or the extravagant last gasp of fossil-fuel excess? Or does the real future lie in Dubai's third-world cosmopolitanism, from which the US looks like a distant, corrupt, and increasingly irrelevant Babylon — and which (unlike the expat real-estate sector) is still thriving? Berman, who's lived the last year in the United Arab Emirates, will talk about her experience in the high-tech Islamic monarchy.

Robert Hooke (James L. Cambias). Isaac Newton's arch-rival is a fascinating character who spent decades at the center of English intellectual life. His achievements were spread over numerous field — science, architecture, art — but he has been sadly forgotten in the centuries since his death.

How An Author Learned to Fight like a Knight (Resa Nelson). When Nelson researched her novel, The Dragonslayer's Sword, she studied historically accurate weapon techniques from the Middle Ages and Renaissance at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester. Weapons included Italian rapier and dagger, German long sword, sword and buckler, and dagger. Come hear what it was like to learn the same weapon techniques used by medieval knights and what Nelson has learned about this new field of study.

Workshops

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? Improv for Writers (Ellen Klages). Remember when writing was fun? If you're stuck, out of ideas, or if your Editor/Critic keeps shutting down your muse — get out of your head and into this class. We're going to improvise, play with our imaginations, and rediscover our creativity. We'll explore characters, settings, plot twists, and dialogue, all using simple theater games. What bubbles up will be the basis for a few short writing exercises. Wear comfortable clothing, and come prepared to laugh. (2 hrs)

Speculative Poetry Workshop (Mike Allen) What is speculative poetry? How do you write it, why would you want to, and which editors will buy it? Come prepared to write on the fly. (90 min)

How Acting Techniques Can Enhance your Writing (Innana Arthen). Recent neurological studies have shown that readers' brains react to fiction as though they were experiencing the events. The line between written and performed art is blurring more and more as young readers grow up in the age of instant video, YouTube, and podcast fiction. Acting training and awareness can thus be hugely helpful for successful fiction writing in the 21st century. We'll cover "four-dimensional writing" using physicalization, pacing, dialogue flow, description, and setting the scene. Wear comfortable clothes and expect to participate actively! (2 hrs)

How to Give an Effective Reading (Mary Robinette Kowal). You may be a good writer, but reading aloud is a separate skill. Learn to make your words sound as great out loud as they do on the page. Using both demonstration and audience participation, we will explore voicing, narration and pacing. (90 min)

Writing Jujitsu: Turning Writer's Block into Stories (Barry B. Longyear). You can't sell it until it's on paper and you can't get it on paper if things keep eating up your time, nag at you, bully you, or you're filled to the brim with illnesses, insecurities, or crushing doubts. Longyear presents a how-to workshop for beginning writers and those who have been there on how to turn what's blocking your muse into stories. (2 hrs)