Looking forward to attending Readercon July 12-15 in Quincy, Mass. If you are there, and you see me around, stop and say hello!
These are the panels I’m scheduled to be part of:
❧ Writers who edit, editors who write – Thursday, 8 p.m.
Those who edit as a full-time job rarely do much writing on the side, but many full-time writers bolster their incomes through editing. Why does this equation seem to function better in one direction than the other? How do writers who edit avoid the pitfalls experienced by editors who write? What can be done to address an ever-widening taste gap, and the tendency to self-edit into the ground?
Panelists: Julia Rios, Mimi Mondal, John Edward Lawson, Mike Allen, Scott Edelman and me.
❧ La Sagrada Chingonez: The sacred badassery of Latinx speculative fiction – Friday, 3 p.m.
David Bowles once dubbed me one of a number of “sacerdotisas de la sagrada chingonez” (priestesses of the sacred badassery). The term implies a religion of dogged persistence, of speaking up and out, of fucking with the status quo/system/hegemony, of acknowledging the vastness of Latinx badassery and reveling in it. This panel will bring together some of the practitioners of la sagrada chingonez to talk about what 2018 holds for Latinx writers and readers of speculative works.
Panelists: Julia Rios, José Pablo Iriarte, Malka Older, Pablo Defendini and me.
❧ Radical Elders – Friday, 9 p.m.
On the page, as in GOH Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, and in real life, as in the careers of authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, elders are speaking their minds and upsetting the status quo. How can age intersect with radicalism and pioneering thought? How is the cognitive estrangement of aging relevant to speculative fiction and fannish communities, and what’s the best way of acknowledging that relevance?
Panelists: Barbara Krasnoff, Elizabeth Hand, James Patrick Kelly, Rosemary Kirstein and me.
❧ Reading – Saturday, 12:30 p.m.
I’ll be reading “The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox,” a short story that will appear in Outland Publication’s Knaves anthology in November. Johnny the Fox is a character readers first met in my story “Skin in the Game” published in 2014 at Tor.com. You can read that here.
Take a look at all of Readercon’s programming here.
Tall tales, like their fairy tale cousins, are reinvented in every culture around the world. These tales, handed down through generations, provide context for how humans relate to one another and to storytelling, as well as giving an intriguing look into cultural history. Panelists will discuss the ways tall tales and oral storytelling traditions have influenced the work of present-day speculative authors such as Andy Duncan, Andrea Hairston, Catherynne M. Valente, and Daniel José Older, and explore what helps a tall tale hit the sweet spot of both exaggerated and believable.
SF writers have often written deeply political books and stories; some stand the test of time, while others become dated very quickly. John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The New Atlantis,” to name just a few, directly addressed major issues of their day and are still relevant now—but differently. What affects how political SF ages and is read decades after its publication? What are today’s explicitly political books, and how do we expect them to resonate decades in the future?
Sabrina Vourvoulias 