Even though Sunday was one of the shorter days at Readercon, it was actually the busiest day for my personal programing.

Once I checked out of the hotel and parked my bag, I went to my 10:00 a.m. panel, “I’m Not Terse, I’m Just Edited That Way,” which in addition to me featured Barry Malzberg, Lucy Corin, Richard Chwedyk, and Ron Drummond. Kathryn Morrow acted as moderator, and I made it difficult for her to maintain order. Our mandate was to discuss the controversial relationship between writer Raymond Carver and editor Gordon Lish, the man who made his career. The panel description also tossed out the name of Robert Heinlein, who many feel became uneditable as he became more successful.

I was seated next to our moderator, and I’m afraid that when I got a chance to speak, the first panelist to do so, I began with something of a rant. I am very passionate about Carver, and so I’m afraid that it couldn’t be helped.

A decade or so ago, when the New York Times published in its Sunday magazine section its shocking article revealing the true nature of the Lish/Carver relationship, my understanding of the arc of Carver’s life changed completely. I’d always thought that the reason he’d eventually began publishing richer, deeper stories was because the love of a good woman had rescued him from his alcoholism. Instead, it seemed that the real reason his writing improved was because he’d finally developed the strength to throw off the shackles of his editor. (more…)

After I’d recharged my batteries with a brief nap Saturday afternoon, I was ready for two of the most important pieces of programming this weekend—the consecutive hour-long Guest of Honor interviews, the first of which had Jim Kelly being interviewed by John Kessel, the second with Jonathan Lethem being interviewed by Robert Killheffer.

Both of the interviews shared a common quality, in that you got the sense that these were friends who were very much at ease with each other, but beyond that, there was a sharp difference. In the first interview, I got the sense of eavesdropping in on a conversation, while the second was more a monologue sparked by an occasional question. For example, once Bob asked his first question, it was half an hour before he got a chance to ask a second, so ornate and passionate was Jonathan’s answer. There were no dull moments in either hour, and the two-hour block was very entertaining.

I guess the reason Jonathan didn’t need that much prodding to get going can be attributed to something he said during one of his lengthy answers: “I was explaining this all along before there was even very much work to explain it about,” followed by “I explained myself into a career.” He has obviously been thinking about his relationship with the signifiers of science fiction since the beginning of his career, and so he has the complex footsteps to that dance well thought out. (more…)

I woke up in time to catch Liz Hand’s 10:00 a.m. reading Saturday. Achieving vertical locomotion that early on a con morning isn’t always guaranteed for me, considering how late into the evenings I often schmooze, but I made an extra effort on account of Liz. She read an excerpt from Wonderwall, her upcoming YA novel about Rimbaud.

For some reason, usually a scheduling conflict, I’d never seen Liz read before, and so her performance was a revelation. She did more then merely tell her tale; she became her characters—a female teen runaway in modern times, the 19th Century teen runaway Arthur Rimbaud, a homeless burned-out rocker, and others.

Midway through the reading, one squirming child raised his hand, and when Liz acknowledged him, he looked at the manuscript in her hands and asked her, “Are you trying to make a joke or something? There are too many pages to read!” Which I think would make a wonderful back cover blurb. Liz continued on with her reading unfazed. (more…)

Jeffrey Ford and I headed off for a late lunch after the reading I mentioned in my previous post, and along the way we bumped into Ellen Datlow, who joined us for drinks and conversation. We spent an hour or so catching up on the stuff of life.

The geography of the hotel restaurant proved that it’s impossible to navigate a convention without bouncing off your friends. For example, when we were seated, Jim Kelly and John Kessel were at the next table, so we of course had to kibitz with them for awhile, but by the time we were done eating, Mark Budz and Marina Fitch had taken their place at that table, setting off more kibitzing. And then, as we were leaving, I noticed that Richard and Carol Parks were behind us (you can see them in the background in the photo above), and so I paused to chat there. And then I saw the Locus gang at a large table plotting to take over the world, so I of course had to stop there as well.

I almost didn’t make it out of the restaurant! (more…)

Friday started off slow. I spent the morning working in my room, and so didn’t get out to attend any official programming until Patrick O’Leary’s 11:30 a.m. reading. Patrick always give good reading. At the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs last year, he read a piece which will appear in Pete Crowther’s upcoming anthology I Think Therefore I Am, and if Patrick’s moving story is any indication, it will be a great book. This time, he read a story titled “The Little Guy,” which inexplicably has yet to find a market. The sad, funny tale tells the true story of why the Decider-in-Chief’s IQ seems to have fallen year after year after year, and stars Dick Cheney and an alien who speaks with an Irish brogue. He also read a few poems, including one about the woman he was destined to marry, which luckily for him turns out to be the same woman as the woman he is about to marry.

Immediately after that reading, I headed off for my noon kaffeeklatsch. I shared a table with Mary Robinette Kowal, someone whom over the years I’d managed never to meet before. (See, Karen, I don’t know everyone.) Over the course of an hour together, we talked (along with others who came to listen, urge on, and cajole) of the first female archaeologist, of her puppeteering background, and many other topics. And though Mary did not demonstrate those puppetry skills for us, she did perform the magic trick she learned during her brief career as a singing waitress fairy in a Christmas show aboard a cruise ship. That’s a picture of us below, snapped before our event began and I learned how interesting she was.

As soon as the kaffeeklatsch was over, I rushed to a reading given by Jeffrey Ford, one of my favorite writers, and luckily one of my favorite readers as well. He orates with a booming voice and a wry tone, and he’s always entertaining. In his half-hour slot, he read his surreal story “The Dream of Reason,” which will be forthcoming in an Ellen Datlow anthology the name of which he couldn’t recall. I’m glad he’s so popular that the titles of his outlets blur together.

I’ll relate more of yesterday’s busy doings a little later, as soon as I’ve gotten a little more work done, but to keep you busy in the meantime, here are further photos from the con.

There, that’s better. Four-and-a-half hours of sleep can work wonders!

Yesterday began with me waking up at 4:15 and getting to BWI Airport three hours before my 10:05 flight. I had a ton of work to do on the upcoming Fall Preview issue of SCI FI magazine, and doing it at the airport instead of at home that morning meant that I missed all the nasty Baltimore traffic which would have slowed me down had I tried to get there in the midst of rush hour. So I had a calm commute and then many productive hours of wifi work before my flight.

Once all (well, almost all) caught up, I flew to Providence, rather than Boston, to take part in what’s been a longtime Readercon tradition—since Providence and Boston are equidistant from the con’s site of Burlington, Massachusetts, I extend the con conviviality by having lunch in the land of H. P. Lovecraft with Paul Di Filippo (and sometimes his keeper, Deb Newton) before driving to the con with them from there.

Here we are about to devour lunch at their favorite Chinese restaurant.

My fortune cookie told me that You always know the right times to be assertive or to simply wait, which bodes well for not making a fool of myself this weekend—or at least for not making more of a fool of myself that I usually appear to be. (more…)

It is far too late in the evening (or is that far too early in the morning?) for me to have anything coherent to say about Readercon 2008, other than that I’m having fun as usual, and that my photos are beginning to appear online as if by magic.

But before I crash, here I am with John Joseph Adams, perspicacious editor of The Living End, who wisely chose to reprint my Stoker finalist “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” in his upcoming zombie anthology.

A report on Thursday’s doings will be posted tomorrow when (and if) coherency returns.

I just noticed that the following event is scheduled to take place on Friday at 9:00 p.m.

For me, this will take priority over everything else scheduled that weekend.

Bring your kleenex.

Tom Disch’s “Winter Journey”
(40 min.)
Almost exactly a year after the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor in September 2004, Tom Disch began writing a sequence of poems, which he shared on his blog. Eventually there were 31 of them. He titled the sequence “Winter Journey” after Schubert’s lieder cycle “Winterreise” (a work Naylor loved). Elizabeth Hand calls the sequence “an extraordinary efflorescence of grief … tragic, bitter, bleakly funny, romantic, heart-rending—and also accessible. I can imagine, by some divine fluke, the book becoming a surprise, posthumous bestseller—an irony Disch would have appreciated.” When the sequence was completed, Disch contacted friend and filmmaker Eric Solstein, and asked if a reading of the work might be videotaped to serve as a suicide note. At its conclusion, he said, he would kill himself, the attendant publicity hopefully contributing to the success of the recording. A deal was struck between Tom and Eric—the taping would proceed if the suicide were postponed for some indefinite period of time. This will be the first public showing of “Winter Journey.” The poems are to be published later this year, by Payseur and Schmidt, with a DVD of the reading included.

The Readercon committee has just posted the final program for the 19th iteration of what always turns out to be my favorite convention of the year. (I haven’t missed one yet.) I expect the sharply focused panel descriptions to spark lively discussions as usual.

You can find my photographs from last year here, and I look forward to seeing you there this year!

Here’s where you’ll be able to find me: (more…)

I just booked my plane tickets for this year’s Readercon. I haven’t missed one since the very first, back in 1987. (Funny thing—I’d always remembered Readercon I as having taken place in 1986, but after an online search, and based on Evelyn Leeper’s write-up of the first gathering, it seems to have instead been 1987, proving my memory wrong.)

Why have I been so consistent? A review of the possible panel descriptions for the con’s upcoming 19th installment, just announced by the organizers, will explain. Unlike the panels at many other conventions, which often have broad and vague starting points, leading to discussions in which participants can spend the first half just figuring out what they’re actually supposed to be talking about, Readercon panels are different, beginning with sharply focused mandates which lead to lively discussions that tend to cover new ground.

Here’s one example of a panel description from this year’s list of possibilities:

You Say Plagiarism, I Say “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Prolific romance novelist Cassie Edwards recently lost her publishing contract when it was discovered that most of the background passages about her Native American settings (and one passage about ferrets) had been lifted nearly verbatim from a variety of sources. But as Jonathan Lethem wrote recently in Harper’s, “appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act.” Lethem argues that the arts exist not only in a market economy but a gift economy like the open-source software movement, and that creative borrowing is an essential part of that economy. (Indeed, he borrowed the above quote and the economic insight, along with almost everything else in the essay.) Is borrowing as ubiquitous and important as Lethem claims, or has he overstated the case? It seems to us that it’s called “plagiarism” only when it’s done badly—Edwards got caught because the borrowed passages stood out so clumsily. But where exactly do you draw the line between good and bad theft (in both senses of the words)?

If you check the complete list at the link above, I’m sure you’ll want to book your hotel and air today.

Here’s a look at some of what you may have missed last year.