Thursday, February 26, 2009

Potlatch 18

This weekend, I'll be attending Potlatch 18 in Sunnyvale, California. (This is a con that moves up and down the West coast.) Aqueduct won't be in the dealer's room this year, but I will be an instructor for the con's Taste-of-Clarion writing workshop and the "ringleader" for a panel titled, "How Many Roads? (Reading Multiple Viewpoints." Just to give you an idea of what it's about, here's the description:

When a story has multiple narrators, can the reader trust any of them? Does a narrative with multiple viewpoints give a more complete picture of the story or the world than a story with a single narrator, or does it make things murkier? What are the strategies we use to read stories with multiple narrators? What do we make of the same set of events seen from multiple points of view, or the same society seen from different positions within it? What if it's not even clear how many narrators a book has? And has anything changed since Roshomon?


These are just the kind of questions I love. Not that I intend to do much of the talking. I've got a great crew to do that: Ursula Le Guin, Howard Hendrix, Jeanne Gomoll, Naamen Tilahun, and Vylar Kaftan. Not to mention the audience (which at this con tends to be high-powered).

If you live in the Bay area, do consider attending. (There will be registration at the door, for latecomers.) Potlatch is small and offers a single track of intense programming. The Dealer's Room is always heaven (even when Aqueduct isn't in it). Please do introduce yourself and say hello to me if you do attend.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sunny*dale*? You're channeling Buffy ;).

Timmi Duchamp said...

Oops! --ROTFL-- That must be *exactly* what I was doing.

Thanks for pointing that out, Cynthia!