Readercon 34 kicks off two weeks from now in Burlington, Massachusetts, and if you’ll be there, too, here’s where you’ll br able to find me pontificating —

The Body (of Work) Keeps the Score: Writing as Therapy
Thursday, July 17, 9:00 p.m., Salon I/J
“Kill your darlings” is a common bit of writing advice. But how about killing your demons? Writing effectively often requires channeling emotional responses and personal memories, so it can also liberate them and be a cathartic experience for the writer. This panel will discuss works where the author was definitely working through some stuff, as well as the experience of using writing to exorcise one’s inner antagonists.
with Barbara Krasnoff (m), Melissa Bobe, Noah Beit-Aharon, and Sophia Babai

Autographing
Friday, July 18, 4:00 p.m., Autographer’s Table

Remembering Barry Malzberg
Friday, July 18, 5:00 p.m., Create/Collaborate
Barry Malzberg (1939-2024) was a man of multiple aspects: a disparager of hack science fiction who could churn out a novel in a weekend, an acerbic observer of humanity’s manifest destiny in space who still won and accepted the first John W. Campbell Award. He was also a frequent Readercon panelist and a good friend to many who attend. Come with your memories of Barry and help discuss what he meant to us and our community.
with Gregory Feeley, Richard Horton, and Jim Freund

Reading
Saturday, July 19, 11:30 a.m., Empower/Embrace

Kaffeeklatsch
Saturday, July 19, 3:00 p.m., Suite 830

Shredding vs. Archiving Drafts
Saturday, July 19, 8:00 p.m., Salon I/J
Some writers want nothing to survive of their written work after death save the final drafts of the stories they love, and so they destroy letters, journals, early drafts. Other writers want the world to witness their process and box everything up for future archivists. This panel will engage proponents of both sides of the spectrum in dialogue and help the audience decide whether to cherish their early own work or turn it into confetti.
with Randee Dawn, Karen Heuler, and Natalie Luhrs

Rod Serling: Centenary of Birth, 50th Anniversary of Death
Sunday, July 20, 11:00 a.m., Salon G/H
Join us as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth, and 50th of the death, of Rod Serling, the pioneering fantasist of American television. Starting with radio in the 1940s as an actor and writer, Serling moved swiftly to writing for television. With his own production company, he created The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), an enduring anthology series that spawned a magazine, a movie, and 3 revivals. Gather with our panel as they explore the range of Serling’s works, “a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination.”
with Randee Dawn, Jim Freund, Mark Painter, and P. Djèlí Clark

If you’re there, please track me down and say hello!

After three conventions in four weekends, I finally catch my breath to celebrate several important personal comic book anniversaries, sort through Marie Severin’s classic covers, realize my discovery of horror comics was topsy-turvy, fail to answer a question about how to break into comics, remember Stan Lee’s fear of the word “horror,” appreciate the increased respect professional writing organizations are now paying comics, look back at the day Jim Shooter stopped sharing original art with writers, wrestle with the morality of my original art collection, and more.

You can eavesdrop on all those memories via the embed below or download them at the site of your choice.

Here are several images to illuminate the topics I touched on during the episode —

Chatting with Joyce Carol Oates at Stokercon

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It’s time for you to take a seat at the table for the second of three episodes of Eating the Fantastic recorded during last month’s Balticon. You’ve already had lunch with Compton Crook Award-winning writer Kemi Ashing-Giwa — and now it’s time for breakfast with Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Moreno-Garcia is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including Gods of Jade and Shadow (winner of the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and the Ignyte Award), Mexican Gothic (which won the Locus Award, British Fantasy Award, Pacific Northwest Book Award, Aurora Award, and Goodreads Award), and Velvet Was the Night (a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Macavity Award), plus many others. She writes in a variety of genres including fantasy, horror, noir and historical. 

Her short stories have appeared in such magazines as Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Giganotosaurus, and Shimmer, and in such anthologies as The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, Gods, Memes and Monsters: A 21st Century Bestiary, and others. She has edited several anthologies, including She Walks in Shadows (a World Fantasy Award winner, published in the USA as Cthulhu’s Daughters). Her most recently published novel is The Seventh Veil of Salome, set in 1950s Hollywood, and a new novel, the multigenerational horror saga The Bewitching, is due out next month.

We discussed how short stories helped her find her voice, the way a gross dream combined with a teen cemetery trip led to Mexican Gothic, her love for abandoned places, why she found Madame Bovary startling when she read it in high school, how to successfully write genres in which the reader is more aware of the tropes than the protagonist, the beauty to be found in flawed characters, how to make sure parallel storylines are equally interesting, one technique she admits doing which makes multiple types of reader angry, the difficulty of resisting branding, the reason the term magic realism is overused, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Baltimore’s Papermoon Diner — (more…)