See the Egress

Sic Semper Readercon:

If you show up to anything, Saturday, 11 in the morning.  Show up to that.  I will be starting bribery, flattery, begging, and emotional blackmail to get you to my reading, or, you know, if you have a reading that isn't at one of the listed times below, show up to it in kind.


Thursday July 128:00 PM    F    Unfinished Symphonies. Erik Amundsen, C.S.E. Cooney (leader), Maria Dahvana Headley, Natalie Luhrs, Sarah Smith. One of George R. R. Martin's fans threatened to camp out at the author's house with a shotgun and an espresso machine until Martin buckled down and finished the Song of Ice and Fire. Recent years have seen Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time continued by Brandon Sanderson, a fourth book in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast completed (from only a fragment) by Maeve Gilmore, and younger writers completing some of Philip Jose Farmer's works, for only a few examples. Are such projects merely opportunistic attempts by publishers to extend a franchise, an exalted form of fanfic, or legitimate works of creative literary scholarship? Should unfinished series simply be let lie, or should the reader's (and bookseller's) desire for more trump notions of literary "purity"? And why do readers care so much about seeing series through to the end?9:00 PM    RI    How Fantastic Is Fantasy?. Erik Amundsen, Ron Drummond, Andy Duncan, Katherine MacLean (leader), Faye Ringel. Audience members discuss events of supernatural import that we ordinarily keep locked in the closet: luck, coincidences, things that go bump in the night, telepathy and precognition, visions and dreams. Many people have had Experiences, but no one wants to look like a nut. In this discussion, we'll let loose and explore our personal experiences of the places where reality gets weird.

Proposed by Katherine MacLean.Friday July 1311:00 AM    NH    Group Reading: Mythic Poetry. Mary Agner, Mike Allen, Erik Amundsen, Leah Bobet, C.S.E. Cooney, Gemma Files, Gwynne Garfinkle, April Grant, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Shira Lipkin, Adrienne J. Odasso, Julia Rios, Darrell Schweitzer, Sonya Taaffe. Over the past decade, speculative poetry has increasingly turned toward the mythic in subject matter, with venues such as Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, Jabberwocky, and the now-defunct Journal of the Mythic Arts showcasing a new generation of poets who've redefined what this type of writing can do. Come to the reading and hear new and classic works from speculative poetry's trend-setters.5:00 PM    G    Why I Stopped Writing. Erik Amundsen, Nathan Ballingrud, Steve Berman (leader), Geary Gravel, Jennifer Pelland, Luc Reid. We've all seen writers logging their word counts, charting their progress toward the next novel or short story. And we've heard the advice to keep writing and submitting. But is it ever a good idea to just stop? What can we gain from getting off the publishing merry-go-round, at least for a while? Is stopping a sign of failure, or just another stage in a writer's career? The panelists discuss how and why they stopped writing (and maybe started up again).Saturday July 1411:00 AM    VT    Reading. Erik Amundsen. Erik Amundsen reads his short story "Draftyhouse," published in Clarkesworld.Sunday July 1512:00 PM    F    Why Is Ancient Evil Ancient?. Erik Amundsen, Elizabeth Hand (leader), Matthew Kressel, Sarah Langan, Kate Nepveu, Ruth Sternglantz."Ancient evil" tends to be used as a shorthand for all the things we fear in our hindbrains, and everything lurking in the dark that we can't explain. It calls to mind something primordial that we feel we should have evolved past but still fear on some basic level. When we cite ancient evil in fiction, is its ancientness just a way of disclaiming that the evil isn't our fault, and thereby dodging the need to deal with evils that we could have prevented and could still avert? What if the ancient evil isn't entirely evil, just misunderstood? How do fictional treatments of ancient evil differ in cultures that venerate tradition and age versus those that prioritize innovation and youth?