Persephone in mittens...

...shoveling her way upward and out.

This year's Boskone schedule is short and sweet.

Beauty and the Beast

Friday 15:00 - 15:50, Lewis (Westin)

Disney adapted "Beauty and the Beast" into an animated film 25 years ago, but where did this age-old romantic story begin? What other stories of mythic love and romance have survived the ages? Are these old fairytales and myths derived from tales of "Cupid and Psyche" or "East of the Sun/West of the Moon?"

Priscilla Olson (M) , Chris Jackson, Peadar Ó Guilín, Jane Yolen, Greer Gilman


Bards, Ballads, and Storytellers

Friday 17:00 - 17:50, Lewis (Westin)

Bards and poets were once the social historians, providing musical tales of great and wicked deeds, as well as offering social commentary on events of the day. Can we identify great bards of the past in different cultures? What examples of their work remain today? Where have all of the bards gone and will they return? Have bards found new life in fiction?

Ada Palmer (M), Greer Gilman, Mary Ellen Wessels


Reading: Greer Gilman

Friday 21:00 - 21:25, Griffin (Westin)

Greer Gilman


The Romantics and the Development of Speculative Fiction

Sunday 13:00 - 13:50, Harbor I (Westin)

Shelly, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Polidori, Blake, Hugo, Grimm, Wilde, Dickinson, and Poe are just a few of the iconic authors from the Romantic period (approx. 1780-1850) who had a significant impact upon the development of the speculative fiction genre. Panelists discuss the art and literature of the Romantics that has had the most influence upon their own work. What should you read? What should you avoid? And what is a Romantic anyway?

Theodora Goss (M), Gregory Feeley, Greer Gilman, Walter Jon Williams

Mulling over a reading.  I could do a bit of the work in progress, as I did at the Bear Party:  Jack Donne and Ben Jonson on the Left Bank, on a book crawl.  Or in London, among Donne's peaky and precocious stagestruck children.  Or elsewhere.

Nine