Eagles Not Included

Remember WisCon 31?
Wit flashed. Sparks flew.
Eagles carried off the guests of honor.

Subtitled "Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future," Volume 2 of the WisCon Chronicles is edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and Eileen Gunn. The volume includes:

*Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks on books they love
*Mark Rich's reflections on WisCon 31
*Nisi Shawl's "Because we are all so royal: the Carl Brandon Society party at WisCon 31"
*Tom LaFarge's "Multimindedness"
*Susan Simensky Bietila's "An artist at WisCon," which includes two pieces of her art
*Naamen Gobert Tilahun's "Thoughts on 'Colonialism...in...Space!' and on the ground"
*L. Timmel Duchamp's "Creating the 'second self': performance, gender, and authorship"
*K. Joyce Tsai's "On the 'Romance of the Revolution' panel at WisCon 31"
*Laura Quilter's transcript of the "Romance of the Revolution" panel
*Chris Nakashima-Brown's "Science fiction in the Year Zero"
*L. Timmel Duchamp's "Whose Romance? Whose Revolution? The operations of race and gender in panel discourse at WisCon"
*Wendy Walker's "Sexual Stealing"
*Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's "Defeating the Default"
*Catherynne M. Valente's "Follow the Yellow Brick Road: katabasis and the female hero in Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and the Nutcracker
*Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks's "Asbestos pants: an epistolary performance"
*M.J. Hardman, Nicola Griffith, Nora Jemison, Kate Schaefer, Elizabeth Bear, Lawrence Schimel, and Joan Haran on WisCon 2018
*Rosalyn Berne and Jacqueline Gross on their first WisCons

PLUS a thoughtful, intense forum instigated and edited by Rachel Swirsky: "How to deal with racist and sexist material in workshop," with contributions by Nora Khan, Ericka Crouse, Anna Schwind, Maria Deira, Jenny Zhang, Steaphie Denise Brown, Nisi Shawl, K. Tempest Bradford, Richard Jeffrey Newman, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Eugie Foster, Alyx Dellamonica, Ross Wagner, and Katherine Sparrow

Although The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2 won't be released until August, it's available now through Aqueduct's website (and will be available from Aqueduct at WisCon). You can purchase it here.

Call for Ideas and Materials

Were you at WisCon this year? Was there a particular panel, discussion, or speaker that especially fired your imagination? If so, Aqueduct Press, publisher of The WisCon Chronicles, would like to hear from you.

We are seeking suggestions and submissions for volume two of the series, which will deal with WisCon 31 (2007). We want this volume to continue and extend the discussions that took place at the panels.

So far, we are considering articles that derive from the following panels:

The Future of Feminism: How does feminism need to change? Is it time for a reassessment of what feminism means? How can we take more action? Some people attending the panel felt that it was too much about white, middle-class, middle-aged feminists worrying about passing the torch to the younger generation. How would our thinking change if we looked forward to the issues likely to challenge us in the near and middle future, or if we looked laterally to the organizational strategies and tactics of the many feminist movements that are so vibrant and active in the third world today? As readers and writers and critics of feminist sf, surely we can expand our view of what feminism could be in the future!

The Romance of Revolution: This panel was rife with controversy. When a person of color in the audience asked the panelists to include examples of non-American, non-European revolutions, one of the members of the all-white panel said he “liked the Pol Pot revolution” and suggested that you can’t “retrain” people and thus have to “start from scratch” if you want to change a society. He later said that he wanted to make a point about the dangers of “utopian aspirations.” In addition, some audience members were outraged when another panelist asserted that the Indian Revolution was successful only because the US pulled Britain’s loans after WWII. This question remains: why in sf circles is the romance of revolution always so white, when in real life, postcolonial revolutions are so common? For more about this, see two posts at Ambling along the Aqueduct: http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2007/05/post-wiscon-report.html and http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-thoughts-on-romance-of-revolution.html

Unfair to Middle-class White Guys: This was a discussion that quickly moved beyond its satiric but misleading title to address issues of increasing racial, cultural, and gender-based diversity in the field. Can editors transcend their own cultural limitations to publish works that appeal to the diverse world of science fiction readers? Are the ones who can’t doomed? Or is it the genre itself that will end as bleached bones kicked to the roadside of literature?

What if You Don’t Want to Have Kids: Is not wanting kids the last feminist taboo? For more about this, see the discussion on Ambling along the Aqueduct .

If you were on or attended one of these panels and would like to participate—to offer ideas or to submit an essay—please get in touch with us. Don’t be shy. We may want you, and we don’t necessarily have your email.

If you were blown away by a WisCon panel that we haven’t mentioned and would like to see its ideas expanded upon in The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 2, please let us know. Tell us the name of the panel, which participants (including audience members) most engaged you, and what was valuable to you about the discussion. If you’re interested in writing an essay on the topic or contributing to the book in some other way, please mention that as well.

Please respond with ideas and suggestions by September 1, 2007. We will follow up with a request for submission of articles and essays on the topics we choose. To receive a list of topics (to be announced September 10), please send a request to wiscon-chronicles@aqueductpress.com.

Since the editors will be choosing specific topics to be considered, please query before writing an article. If you want to submit an article or essay, please send a proposal by October 1, 2007. (The earlier the better.) The deadline for the submission of finished essays is November 1, 2007. We’re looking for essays of 1000-5000 words. Payment will be nominal.

Email or postal submissions/responses are both acceptable.

Send email to wiscon-chronicles@aqueductpress.com.

Send postal mail to PO Box 95787, Seattle WA 98145-2787.

Thanks!

L. Timmel Duchamp
Eileen Gunn
Editors
The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 2

More thoughts on the Romance of the Revolution panel

Before I leave town for an intense week with the Rio Hondo Writers Workshop, I’d like to address an issue of the Romance of the Revolution panel that has emerged in the commentary on the panel as well as in the comments posted on the commentary. (The Feminist SF Wiki is keeping track of this .) The specific point around which most of the commentary has focused is Chris Nakashima-Brown’s “Pol Pot comment.” Laura Quilter took notes and has posted a partial transcript, but it isn’t verbatim (as a transcript from an audio recording would be), but an on-the-fly distillation (with some verbatim material). Her transcript gives us this:

aud (F): i was wondering if you could talk about revolution in non-am non-european countries and how that works.

chris - i like the pol pot revolution - scraping everything clean. kill all the people and start from scratch.

LP - i hope you're not serious.

chris - well of course - i'm serious sort of - no it's a horrible thing. but i'm serious in that you can't retrain people, you have to start from scratch. it has a sort of sick cogency to it.

My own memory of the panel is seriously jumbled by now, but I had the impression at the time Chris made that remark that he was addressing my earlier elaboration of the need for people to change how they think: as a collective process of trial and error that must be ongoing with no fixed endpoint in view. When I posted my report on the panel earlier this week, Chris replied to my question of what he meant to convey by his remark:

Thanks for mentioning this intentionally provocative comment of mine. My point was that, if the purpose of a movement's revolution is to completely expunge all traces of the former society, the literal approach to accomplishing that implemented by the Khmer Rouge has a certain sick logic. One that is self-evidently evil, devoid of any trace of humanism, and inherently doomed to failure. But also one that merits intellectual vetting as an extreme example of how one might actually try to accomplish a utopian aspiration of creating social conditions in which the better nature of humankind might more explicitly manifest itself. Please let me know if that gives you a better idea of where I was (am) coming from. Thanks!

It is Chris’s explanation of his intent that I’d primarily like to address here, but I feel it’s important also to discuss what some might dismiss as a mere matter of style. Chris says that he was being “deliberately provocative.” Because the Khmer Rouge’s genocide (and by “genocide” I mean not only the massacre of huge numbers of people of a single ethnic group, but also an attempt to extirpate and annihilate a culture), is among the worst atrocities in recent history, it (like the Nazi Holocaust) requires being treated with care, rather than as a rhetorical hand grenade. I don’t believe that exempting certain subjects from flippancy is simply a matter of “good taste.” (I tend to think the whole idea of “good taste” and “bad taste” is a cover concealing insidious underlying assumptions, but that’s a subject for another day.) I’m not saying that such subjects can’t be treated satirically: only that off-the-cuff flippancy is insidious and contagious and worst of all, superficial; rather than provoking anyone to think more creatively or seriously about the subject, it most often helps to encourage flippancy in others (simply because most people are desperately eager to blow off distressing subjects). You may of course disagree with this. (I’m sure that Chris does.)

Moreover, Chris’s remark was a response to a question from an audience member, asking the panel to include non-European revolutions in its discussion. Given that context, and given the longstanding racist stereotype of non-Europeans as not valuing human life (the way the masterminds of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo supposedly do), such flippancy is bound to carry powerful racist overtones, regardless of Chris’s intent. This offers us another strong reason for exempting certain subjects from use as rhetorical provocations.

As for Chris’s intent re the Khmer Rouge’s method: [It’s] “also one that merits intellectual vetting as an extreme example of how one might actually try to accomplish a utopian aspiration of creating social conditions in which the better nature of humankind might more explicitly manifest itself.” This is what I actually suspected lay beneath the remark, and this is what I’d like to take issue with now.

All through the second wave of feminism (and by most reckonings, we are currently in the “third wave” of feminism) feminists had to struggle with the rhetorical tactic employed by people distrustful or hostile to feminism of throwing worst-case scenarios in feminists’ faces every time they proposed any sort of change to the status quo. With the ERA, for instance, it was unisex bathrooms and the military conscription of women as well as men. (Yes, my friends, those were the Phyllis Schlaffley-promulgated Horrors of Horrors that convinced legislators to oppose ratification of the ERA in the mid-1970s.) With the development of tactics for dealing with sexual harassment, it was the possibility that men would constantly be under attack for just being men. With the arrangement of separatist cultural spaces, it was the fear that everyone would be branded as man-haters (or would naturally become man-haters simply by hanging out in a woman-only space). More generally, we’ve seen the right wing use this tactic to discredit the entire idea of providing universal health care to everyone in the US.

People buy this tactic. And buy it. And buy it. In the US, at least, it’s inevitable. And the algorithm is painfully simple: since nothing is scarier than change (not even the wretched outcomes we have reason to believe we’ll face if we don’t change), merely alluding to the worst possible outcome of a proposed change (however unlikely), and all serious discussion of a desired change—including discussion about how to prevent such bad outcomes—will vanish.

Perhaps this is a generational thing. In second-wave feminist sf, “utopia” was about creating not a blueprint, but a method of thinking about what kind of world we’d like to live in and what we might do to get there. Now “utopia” is a dirty word. When the worst-case scenario is all anyone can think of, the unstated assumption is that “utopian aspiration” automatically leads to dehumanization and totalitarian regimes and slaughter of massive numbers of people. It doesn’t matter that the assumption isn’t stated or even intended: it will be read as given.

I read constantly that in these postmodern times, “history” is dead. Maybe that’s the problem. See, when you pay attention to history (which is what one-off flippant remarks emphatically don’t do), you have to agree with Jameson: “History is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” That is to say, we aren’t merely individuals living independent of all that humans have been and over time become: we are a product of our collective history. All those wars, all that oppression: the very thinking and habits and “instincts” that generated all those horrors, that’s inside of each of us, like a collar around our necks attached to a leash, leading us on. You ignore history, you ignore the leash. (Isn’t that what everyone prefers to do: to imagine they’re independent of the past?) But just pretending our history isn’t in charge of where we’re going isn’t enough to get free of it. To do that, we have to challenge the hold the past has on us—which means consciously working to change how we think and live. Is doing that dangerous? Sure. But it makes a hell of a lot more sense than repeating the horrors of the past. And who can deny that at the beginning of the 21^st century, awash in a swelling tide of fanatical religious fundamentalism, we’re doing just that?

Look. Conversation is hard, especially when it's not conversation between intimates (who can talk in shorthand). It’s not just that we misunderstand one another constantly. But there’s all this other, subliminal stuff that’s constantly getting in the way of serious consideration—deflections from the painful, hard-to-think-about things; defensiveness; slowness to make connections; and above all hidden assumptions we might not agree with intellectually but are emotionally pushed by nonetheless. That’s why the conversation has to be ongoing and reflexive. And if it’s uncomfortable? Well hey. That just means we’re getting warmer.

What I wanted to say at the WisCon panel on "What if you don't want to have kids"

By Nancy Jane Moore

"Is not wanting kids is the last feminist taboo?" That's what the program description read. Since I'm happily childless,* I found the topic compelling, even though the panel was at 10 PM, when any sensible person would be partying.

I wasn't exactly looking for role models -- when it comes to being single and childless, I probably am a role model -- but I was looking for a discussion of what women's lives might look like when motherhood is taken out of the equation, with perhaps a comment or two on overpopulation.

Instead I got a panel of women who had -- for the most part** -- decided very early in life that they would never have children, were enormously proud of this fact, and wanted to complain about their parents, in-laws, relatives, and friends who didn't support their decision. I even caught a whiff of an opinion that people who weren't sure whether they wanted children or not were simply not living the self-examined life.

Perhaps, as a person who sometimes thinks she overdoes the self-examined life bit, I took that too personally, since I never had a strong desire to have children, but also never had a strong desire not to have children. I thought that children were something that might come along if I got married.

Of course, I haven't gotten around to getting married yet, and I'm not taking any active steps to do so, but there's always the possibility that true love will knock on my door before I shuffle off this mortal coil, so it could still happen.

Kids, though, are out of the picture for my life. And I know just when I decided once and for all that I didn't want to have kids. I was 50.

A single friend of mine was adopting a daughter from China. And despite the fact that I had spent many years content in my childless state, I was afraid that when she came home with the baby, I was going to take one look and say, "I want one, too." After all, babies are, for the most part, very cute. And I've always been a sucker for kittens.

I picked my friend and her daughter up at the airport on their return from China. The baby was as cute as I expected, and not even particularly fussy, an amazing fact given she'd just spent 24 hours on airplanes.

But immediately on seeing her, I thought, "No, I don't want a child." I haven't considered adopting since. I've enjoyed watching my friend's daughter grow up, but I'm very happy to be an honorary aunt, not a mother.

And since I've crossed the physical Rubicon of menopause, I'm not in danger of having a kid on my own. There may be some modern magical medical procedure that could conceivably allow me to conceive, but I know I'm not going to do that.

Here's the gist of all this musing: I may have waited until I was past the usual child-rearing age to make my final decision on having children, but I did come to one conclusion early on: I didn't see having children as a particular goal of my life.

I wanted to do things with my life -- to have a career, to study interesting things, to write. Raising children always struck me as a secondary thing, something one might do in addition to following one's own path in life. I never saw having children as a purpose in and of itself.

And I don't think it should be, even for those people who know they want children. After all, most of us live many more years than the 20 or so it takes to raise a child to adulthood. Even those determined to construct their lives so their children get absolutely everything don't have to devote an entire lifetime to the kids. (Let's not even get into a discussion of people who live vicariously through their children -- I suspect that drives as many people into therapy as neglect does.)

What we all need to do -- regardless of whether we plan to be parents or not -- is to make decisions about what we're going to do with our lives: what kind of work we're going to do, what kind of path we're going to take. We all have dreams and ambitions -- destinies of one kind or another. And children aren't destinies.

After all, we don't just live to reproduce ourselves. That may be a biological explanation for life, but humans have moved far enough up the evolutionary scale to create other purposes for ourselves.

Still, baby boomers like me are in the first generation in which being single and/or childless can be seen as a positive choice, not a tragedy. Succeeding generations are probably finding it a little easier than we did. But it's still considered kind of odd.

So I'd still like to talk about what women's lives might look like if parenthood is excluded from the equation. Maybe we can try again at next year's WisCon.

*The panelists seemed to prefer the term "child free" to childless, I think because it implies a choice. But I can't seem to use it without thinking of "fat free" or "sugar free" or other modern consumer alternatives.

**One panelist did not fit this description. She got quieter as the panel went on. The next day she and I were on a panel about overpopulation, to which she contributed some interesting statistics and a lot of thoughtful observations. I rather wish someone had let her get a word in edgewise on the no kids panel.

Romance of the Revolution panel-- a few links

I'm utterly miserable today with the cold I brought home from WisCon. But I have been out looking for WisCon reports, which are beginning to be posted. For those interested in reading more about the Romance of the Revolution panel (about which I posted yesterday), I've come across a partial transcript by Laura Quilter as well as a couple of reports on it (with discussion so far mostly by people who didn't attend it themselves):

Laura Quilter's transcript can be found on the Feminist SF Wiki

Ocyeter's report can be found on her Live Journal

Melymbrosia discusses the panel in the comments to a post on WisCon

Unfair to Middle Class White Guys?

By Nancy Jane Moore

Since Timmi brought up WisCon, I thought this blog would be a good place to explain a little about the panel called "Unfair to Middle Class White Guys."

We on the panel think the title was meant to be ironic. Or even sarcastic. We didn't chose it and frankly we find it a little obnoxious. But we've heard that a few people fear it was intended as a backlash panel for those who don't think the issue of gender balance in publishing is worth talking about.

Rest assured, it's not: We plan to have a serious -- though hopefully not humorless -- discussion of why the magazines end up with more stories by men than women.

And, since they put that word "white" in the title, and since we've heard about some backlash at the awards given by the Carl Brandon Society along the lines of "why isn't there an award for white men" -- see the WisCon Chronicles for details -- we're going to talk about race and science fiction as well.

We don't plan to go in for bashing. Or making stupid jokes. We'd really like to have as honest a conversation as possible about the diversity issues in SF/F publishing.

This panel is at 10:30 on Saturday night (in Senate B) and we'd really like to have a good turnout. I know the panel is opposite some very good parties, but you can party before and after. Come spend a little of your Saturday night talking about important issues!

Aqueduct Goes to WisCon: a preview

Aqueduct is going to WisCon! (Big surprise, huh?) We’ll have a table in the dealer’s room, of course. And we'll be throwing a party with Payseur and Schmidt on Friday night in Room 623, at which we’ll be launching Kelley Eskridge’s new collection, Dangerous Space, and Nicola Griffith’s new memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party. We'll have food and drink and conversation and two door prizes involving chocolate; Nicola and Kelley and I will be there all evening, and all of our other attending authors will be there at least some of the time. Everyone is welcome, and we hope to see a lot of you there.

Two sessions will be featuring Aqueduct's authors reading from their work:

Andrea Hairston, Wendy Walker, Nancy Jane Moore, and L. Timmel Duchamp will be reading from 10-11:15 a.m. Saturday morning

Eleanor Arnason, Kelley Eskridge, Nicola Griffith, and Nisi Shawl will be reading from 2:30-3:45 p.m. Saturday afternoon

Other programming our authors will be participating in include (in chronological order):

Friday

Opening Ceremonies—Sue Lange will be participating as Broad Universe’s representative

Lifestyles of the Rich and Supernatural Friday, 8:45-10:00 p.m. M: L. Timmel Duchamp,Holly Black, Carla M Lee, Catherine Lundoff

Saturday

Women Authors You Probably Never Heard Of (But Should Read!): The Karen Axness Memorial Panel, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: David Lenander, Lesley Hall, David Peterson, Laura M. Quilter

Genre Tokenism Today: The New Octavia, Saturday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Nora Jemison, K Tempest Bradford, Candra K. Gill, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor-Mbahu, Nisi Shawl

Liking Your Life in an Unlikeable World: Personal Energy for Political Work, Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Hanne I Blank, Eleanor Arnason, Debbie L. Smith, James A Trimarco, Élisabeth Vonarburg

Foremothers of Today's Feminist SF, Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: L. Timmel Duchamp, Jeanne Gomoll, Lesley Hall, Lynn Kendall

Making Good Books, Saturday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Liz L. Gorinsky, John D. Berry, John Klima, Heidi Lampietti, Wendy Alison Walker

The Ten-Foot Shelf Of Perdition: Books to Avoid, Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Lesley Hall, Chris Hill, Betsy Urbik

Feminism and the Problem of Gender for the Source, Voice, and Identity of the Woman Who Writes/Feminist and Science Fictional Resources for the Cultural Critic of Technoscience (Academic Papers) Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. L. Timmel Duchamp and Joan Haran

Can Technology Be The Answer? Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Graham Sleight, Eleanor Arnason, Richard J. Chwedyk, Gregory Frost, Will Ludwigsen

SF&F — Revolutionary or Conservative? Saturday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. M: Andrea D. Hairston, Eleanor Arnason, Paul Kincaid

Outreach to Non-Readers Feminism, Saturday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. M: Joan Haran, Alicia Ellen Goranson, Graham Sleight, lucy ann synk

Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading, Saturday, 4:00-5:15 p.m. Leah Rose Cutter, Jennifer Dunne, Rina Elson, Anne Harris, Sue Lange, Katherine Mankiller, Lyda Morehouse, Jennifer Pelland, Kristine Smith

Making War on "War" Saturday, 9:00-10:15 p.m. M: Jean Mornard, Paul Kincaid, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Wendy Alison Walker, Laurel Winter

Criticism: Beyond Slamming And Mythologizing, Saturday, 10:30-11:45 p.m. M: Paul Kincaid, Andrea D. Hairston, Michael Marc Levy, Natasha Minnerly, Maureen Kincaid Speller

Unfair to Middle-Class White Guys! Saturday,10:30-11:45 p.m. M: Nancy Jane Moore, Eileen Gunn, John Klima, Deb Taber

Sunday

Carl Brandon Society Update, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Nisi Shawl, Candra K. Gill, M. J. Hardman, Victor Jason Raymond

Let's You And Her Fight, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Alan Bostick, Lee Abuabara, Joan Haran, Liz Henry, Steven E. Schwartz

The Object In the Story, the Story In the Object, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Kat A. Beyer, Catherine Anne Crowe, Wendy Alison Walker, Terri Windling, Erzebet YellowBoy

Adventures in Peacemaking, Sunday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Jeanne Gomoll, Lesley Hall, Rosemary Kirstein, Naomi Kritzer, Jean Mornard

Romance of the Revolution, Sunday, 1:00-2:15 p.m. M: Paul Kincaid, L. Timmel Duchamp, Laurie J. Marks, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Lyn Paleo

Little Girls on the Hero's Journey, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Nisi Shawl, Kate Elliott, David L. Emerson, Rebecca Marjesdatter, Kerrigan Valentine

Speculative Fiction Theatre, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. Liz L. Gorinsky, Andrea D. Hairston, Reina Hardy, Wendy Alison Walker

The Human Genome, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Sue Lange, Vylar Kaftan, Kimberley Long-Ewing, Allan Moore, Rebecca K. Rowe

Writing About War, Sunday, 2:30-3:45 p.m. M: Naomi Kritzer, Eleanor Arnason, Yoon Ha Lee, Kelly McCullough

Writing as Spiritual Practice, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 p.m. M: Susan Palwick, Lori Buschbaum, Patrick James Rothfuss, Nisi Shawl

Words Like Icebergs, Sunday, 10:00-11:15 p.m. M: Nicolle Minnerly, Nicola Griffith, Natasha Minnerly, Lawrence Schimel, Catherynne M. Valente

Glorifying Terrorism, 11:30pm -12:45 a.m. Readings by Vylar Kaftan, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Rachel Virginia Swirsky, James A Trimarco

Monday

How Dense Can We Get? Options for Making a Better Future, Monday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. M: Nancy Jane Moore, Paula L. Fleming, Philip Edward Kaveny

And of course, most of us will be available at the Sign-out on Monday morning.

That’s lot of programming, much of it conflicting (meaning that, as usual, we’ll have be missing a lot of one another’s panels and facing some hard choices).

I’d be very open to posting notes or comments about WisCon on this blog. If you’re interested in contributing, please contact me at conversation@aqueductpress.com.