Today, I got the bulk of my schedule for ReaderCon.
Updated and complete on 6/27 and confirmed as complete schedule on 7/2:
Thursday July 14
9:00 PM RI Speculative Poetry Workshop. Mike Allen. This is a basic workshop that challenges participants to write and share poems in various forms dealing with SF, fantasy, horror, and related topics.
Friday July 15
2:00 PM E Autographs. Mike Allen, David Lunde.
4:00 PM NH Mythic Delirium/Goblin Fruit group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Theodora Goss, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe. Contributors to the Mythic Delirium and Goblin Fruit speculative poetry magazines read selections from their work.
5:00 PM NH Steam-powered I & II group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Matthew Kressel, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft. Contributors to Steam-powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories read selections from their work.
Saturday July 16
2:00 PM RI How We Wrote “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves“. Mike Allen, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Sonya Taaffe. Mike Allen, Nicole Kornher-Stace, and Sonya Taaffe discuss the collaborative writing of their epic speculative poem.
3:00 PM ME The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan. Mike Allen (leader), David Lunde (moderator). A “poetry slan,” to be confused with “poetry slam,” is a poetry reading by SF folks, of course. The slan will be concluded by the presentation of this year’s Rhysling Awards.
8:00 PM F The 25th Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition. Mike Allen, Craig Shaw Gardner (leader), Mary Robinette Kowal, Yves Meynard, Eric M. Van (moderator). Our traditional evening entertainment, named in memory of the pseudonym and alter ego of Jonathan Herovit of Barry N. Malzberg’s Herovit’s World. Here’s how it works: Ringleader Craig Shaw Gardner reads a passage of unidentified but genuine, published, bad sf, fantasy, or horror prose, which has been truncated in mid-sentence. Each of our panelists then reads an ending for the passage. One ending is the real one; the others are impostors. None of the players knows who wrote any passage other than their own, except for co-ringleader Eric M. Van, who gets to play God as a reward for the truly onerous duty of unearthing these gems. Craig then asks for the audience vote on the authenticity of each passage (recapping each in turn by quoting a pithy phrase or three from them), and the Ace Readercon Joint Census Team counts up each show of hands faster than you can say “Twinkies of Terror.” Eric then reveals the truth. Each contestant receives a point for each audience member they fooled, while the audience collectively scores a point for everyone who spots the real answer. As a rule, the audience finishes third or fourth. Warning: the Sturgeon General has determined that this trash is hazardous to your health; i.e., if it hurts to laugh, you’re in big trouble.
Sunday July 17
10:00 AM RI Interstitial Arts Foundation Town Meeting. Mike Allen, K. Tempest Bradford, Ellen Kushner (leader), Shira Lipkin, JoSelle Vanderhooft. The IAF is a group of “Artists Without Borders” who celebrate art that is made in the interstices between genres and categories. It is art that flourishes in the borderlands between different disciplines, mediums, and cultures. The IAF provides border-crossing artists and art scholars a forum and a focus for their efforts. Rather than creating a new genre with new borders, they support the free movement of artists across the borders of their choice. They support the development of a new vocabulary with which to view and critique border-crossing works, and they celebrate the large community of interstitial artists working in North America and around the world. The annual Interstitial Arts Foundation Town Meeting at Readercon is an exciting opportunity to catch up with the IAF and its many supporters, hear about what they’re doing to support the interstitial art community in 2011, offer ideas for future projects, and contribute your voice to the development of interstitial art.
11:00 AM ME Reconsidering Anthologies. Mike Allen, Leah Bobet, David Boop, Robert Killheffer, David Malki ! (leader). Anthologies are incredibly popular for writers to submit to and proudly display their work in–but who reads them? Why don’t they sell well? Is there some reason they occupy the same cultural mind-space as foreign films: culturally relevant, but rarely bothered with? David Malki !, editor of last year’s bestselling anthology Machine of Death, leads a discussion group about this outcast art form.
[RE: The Kirk Poland competition, a dilemma faces me: should I go for the laughs like I did last year, or should I seriously try to win?]
Karen Burnham, who runs the Locus Roundtable at Locus Online, has rounded up a series of speculative poetry-related posts, podcasts and interviews for the month of May, and I got to be first out of the gate.
