Post-Conference Post: ICFA’s delights

I LOVE the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. Love it. I hate travelling to and from it, which is why I come to this blog post a little worn at the edges, possibly lacking in eloquence, but doggedly determined to let the world know that ICFA rocks.

I got there on a Tuesday evening in advance of the opening. I had a plan to pace myself: scheduled naps, cod liver oil capsules, B-Vitamin supplements and careful selection and timing of meals. I even slotted in two sessions of Zumba (thanks Karen Hellekson!) to compensate for the ridiculous amount of sitting I would be doing. It worked pretty well, I think, except that no-one is a match for the nonsense that is trying to make a connecting flight in Miami Airport. I arrived with a bruised knee; my departure resulted in sacroiliac pain.

Highlights of the conference included meals and conversations with … oh no, I can’t bring myself to list all the names. I’m going to forget someone, which isn’t fair and certainly will have more to do with the fried state of my brain at present than the importance of those conversations to me personally. But let me try …

Karen Burnham, Liza Groen Trombi and Francesca Myman of Locus Magazine. Karen gets a first-mention not only due to her name (ICFA was well-supplied with Karens, let me tell you), but because in addition to running the Locus Roundtable, she is my science and technology advisor for the sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds, my sci-fi novel due in March 2013. Since Karen is an engineer at NASA as well as a book reviewer extraordinaire, I’m in good hands. Her husband Curtis Potterveld and their adorable baby Gavin are also excellent company! Also of Locus, and known for the Coode Street Podcast, is Gary K Wolfe. I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with him and co-caster Jonathan Strahan along with Nalo Hopkinson (always an honour!) and Ellen Klages. So much fun!

I met the VanderMeers at last! Jeff, I thought you’d be taller We had a great lunch and chat and they put me completely at ease. I still feel very much the newbie, and they have been so supportive and kind. Another kindness I shall never forget is Guest of Honour Kelly Link’s conversation with me at the opening reception. This ICFA was my first time meeting Kelly and her little daughter Ursula (not so little! That child is going to grow tall!). I’d already met Gavin Grant at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival. Together they are the amazing Small Beer Press, the first publishers of Redemption in Indigo and my portal into this magic world of spec fic community. Without being too luvvie about it, I must say I’m huge fans of Gavin and Kelly and all the work they do. But hey, it’s hard not to gush a little at ICFA; you feel this immense fondness for all those people who understand and love and work hard at the same things you do.

A Tiptree gathering meant that I got to meet Karen Joy Fowler (another of the Karens). It thrills me that as a Small Beer Press author I get to be listed with people like her and Delia Sherman and Ted Chiang and Nancy Kress. Oh, Nancy I am so sorry about the one-legged squat, honest! I know it wasn’t the best etiquette, but they dared me!

I enjoyed a long conversation with Andrea Hairston, this year’s Tiptree winner and last year’s winner of the Distinguished Scholarship Award at ICFA. We discovered much to our amazement that a friend and former student of hers is one of my former students from when I taught secondary school physics in Barbados! The serendipity did not end there. While in conversation with Farah Mendlesohn, we discovered that the friend who I’d promised to visit on my next trip to the UK is chaplain at Anglia Ruskin, where Farah will be taking on head of department duties very soon!

So many good conversations and pleasant encounters: Charles Vess, Rachel Swirsky, my Crawford cousins Daryl Gregory and the newly-minted Genevieve Valentine, Siobhan Carroll, Theodora Goss (shared a reading slot with her; her story, and her delivery of it, was amazing), Andy and Sydney Duncan, Stacie Hanes, Mari Ness, Peter Straub, China Mièville, the brilliant Brit Mandelo, Dennis Danvers, Nancy Hightower … and all those whose names I have forgotten, whose name-tags I failed to read properly, especially those who gave me rich conversations on literature and folklore and pure, beautiful, creative silliness.

 

The Crawford Award

Wow.

So, I’ve been sitting on a secret for almost a week now, and today it was officially announced:

Karen Lord has been named the winner of the 2011 William L. Crawford Award for her first novel Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press). The award, presented annually at The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, is for a new fantasy writer whose first book appeared in the previous year. This year’s conference will be held March 16-20, 2010 in Orlando FL.

The award committee shortlisted Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Angry Robot), N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Orbit), and Anna Kendall’s Crossing Over (Gollancz/Viking Juvenile), and wanted to commend two other authors: Robert Jackson Bennett for Mr. Shivers(Orbit) and Amelia Beamer The Loving Dead (Night Shade), which was viewed by some nominators as centrally a science fiction work. Science fiction is excluded under the terms established by the award’s founding sponsor, Andre Norton.

Those participating, in varying degrees, in this year’s nomination and selection process included Niall Harrison, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight, Paul Witcover, John Clute, Jonathan Strahan, Liza Trombi, Farah Mendlesohn, Ellen Klages, and Kelly Link (who, as publisher of Small Beer Press, recused herself from final voting).

(Locusmag)

I was speechless then and I’m not much more eloquent now, so bear with me.

First of all, thank you so much to the award committee. The qualifications and experience of the judges, the calibre of the other authors they shortlisted and recommended, and the absolutely stunning list of previous award winners … all of that makes me awed and very very grateful.

And I can’t help but thank my publishers Small Beer Press (not for the first time, and definitely not for the last time).  I think they might have one of the highest awards:titles ratio out of all publishers of speculative fiction – a small press that punches in the heavyweight division.

So … I’m going to Orlando!

Dreaming of libraries at Small Beer Press

Here is my newest post on Not A Journal at Small Beer Press, where I muse on books, both e- and deadtree, and travelling: Library of a global nomad.

Back to blogging at Small Beer Press!

The tale of my computer woes is provided here.  No end in sight as yet, but we trundle along somehow.

Reviews and news

I’ve had some computer issues (not yet resolved, but the situation is workable for now), so I haven’t been posting for the last two weeks or so.  In all the computer drama I almost lost the audio file of an interview I did with Thomas Armstrong, but now I can settle down to work on it and produce some posts on the great conversation we had on his novel in particular, Caribbean literature in general, and more!

It’s been nice to see more positive mentions of Redemption in Indigo on the internet.  This review by Laura Miller at Salon was a particularly good Christmas present!

We’re into the second print run, and there’s an audiobook from Recorded Books on the horizon.  Many online bookstores seem to be temporarily out of stock, but don’t worry because Small Beer Press has stock from the second print run as well as some signed copies of the first edition.  The only other place you can get signed first edition copies is at Days Bookstore in Barbados, so if you happen to be in the area, go to Speedbird House in Bridgetown next to the new General Public Library and pick up a copy.

I had a great Christmas, mostly involving food, family and friends, which is precisely how I like it.  I hope yours was as excellent, and may 2011 be marvellous beyond all expectation!

New post at Small Beer Press

The blogging at Not A Journal continues with Crossroads, a look at the familiar and the odd and how both can be home.

New post at Small Beer Press blog

The holiday blogging continues! Go read Fictional Geography, my latest post on Not A Journal at Small Beer Press.

Authors blog at Small Beer Press

Check out Not A Journal, where Small Beer Press authors like John Crowley, Karen Joy Fowler, Edward Gauvin, Kathe Koja and Vincent McCaffrey are blogging for the holidays.  My contribution is here.

There is also lovely talk of beer by the resident brewer Michael DeLuca, and a holiday sale that should not be missed.

Give a Small Beer book for the holidays!

From my publishers, a handy guide to gift shopping:

 

My week in New York

I thought I would take tons of photos and be all over twitter.  It didn’t happen.  Part of that was the rain, part was my own constant motion, hands full, from place to place. There was neither time nor opportunity to pause with a camera or a Touch to capture the moment.

Fortunately, others were present to do some capturing for me, so here we go.  You can click on the photos for larger versions.

Friday

I arrived Thursday night, did some initial scouting and learning the subway system in the early part of Friday, and then prepared for my first event, the reading at McNally Jackson Books.  Unfortunately I managed to get a migraine a few hours before (sparkling blind spots, nausea and icepick-sharp pain), but fortunately, having it hit a few hours before meant that my sight was fully restored by the time I had to read.

The staff at McNally Jackson were fantastic.  I don’t think I told them I was under the weather, but they took such good care of me that it didn’t matter.  Kate Milford and Dustin Kurtz were warm and welcoming (and also memorable because I met them again at the Book Festival!), but I must also mention the gentleman downstairs with whom I discussed adrenaline, martial arts and life, and the blond young man at the cash register who chatted with me so pleasantly when I first arrived and was still feeling woozy.  I’m sorry I didn’t get/remember your names!  I’m better at this kind of thing when I don’t have a migraine.

Meeting Julia Holmes was another high point of that evening.  I think I was expecting someone very serious, intense and literary, but she’s relaxed and has a great sense of humour and lots of warm generosity.  I’m so glad to be sharing this debut experience with her!  There’s an unselfconscious depth and wisdom to her writing, serious literary fiction with a delicate but indelible touch.  Her book is called Meeks, and you should check it out and its marvellous reviews at the New York Times Book Review and more.

Sunday: The Brooklyn Book Festival

Saturday was spent quietly, recovering from the migraine (they take about three days to disappear completely, and until then sneezing is no fun, let me tell you).  Sunday morning I made my way down to Brooklyn Borough Hall without incident, and easily found the stall where Small Beer Press was set up.  And now I have a picture, thanks to the Los Angeles Times:

That’s Michael DeLuca and Gavin Grant on either side of an extremely short individual.  Michael is the beer specialist at Small Beer Press (of course they have a beer specialist!) and Gavin is co-founder of Small Beer Press (along with his wife, award-winning author Kelly Link) and my very own editor.  I don’t mean to sound like I’m in permanent gush-mode, but they are genuinely lovely people, and being a Small Beer Press author confers a certain cachet in both literary and genre circles.  Hence my slightly smug smile.

Lots of friendly people came by the stall in spite of the rain.  One gentleman persuaded me to be interviewed under an umbrella:

I met Elizabeth Nunez, who I first saw in Barbados, and got her latest novel Anna In-Between.  I also met K. Tempest Bradford and N. K. Jemisin, who are both extremely cool.  You should already know about N. K. Jemisin’s amazing fantasy novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and if you don’t, you need to rectify that immediately.  Do I have pictures of these meetings?  Of course not.  You try holding an umbrella, three bags and a camera in the rain and see where that gets you.

The panel went well.  Bill Evans, N. K. Jemisin and I terrorised the audience with visions of what happens when supernatural beings and nature (and sometimes both together) get out of control.  Bill Evans is a meteorologist writing about extreme weather in New York and the fact that two tornadoes occurred days later in the same area wasn’t surreal at all.

Here I am (photo courtesy of my cousin), being all terrorising.

The rain increased and large pools of water began to form alarmingly in the blue folds of our stall’s canopy, threatening to go gloosh onto the vulnerable books below. I went to Kate Milford’s panel and met a few more book-reading and bookstore-running people, but soon it was time to call it a day.  If only it had been sunny and warm!  But it was still exciting, and the die-hard book lovers would not be denied.

Monday

I went to Wall Street in the late afternoon to record with Jim Freund of Hour of the Wolf on WBAI.  This was brilliant on several levels.  First, Jim Freund is epically cool (no, I am not in gush-mode, will you shut up?).  The list of people in sci-fi and fantasy that he has interviewed gives me glee.  Second, the programme airs on Saturdays at 5am, but because this was a prerecording for a future slot (to be determined – I’ll be sure to let you know when the air date is confirmed), I avoided the military-style early rising.  Jim is so easy to talk to that I quite forgot that there were microphones and recording devices around.  Eek!

Here’s a photo of the occasion, nicked from his Twitter.

Tuesday

My final reading took place at Greenlight Bookstore in the evening.  What a difference no migraine makes!  I was able to make eye contact with the audience without feeling blurred and off-kilter.  Julia’s reading really captured my attention (was I too wrapped up in a personal universe of pain to appreciate it on Friday?) … sensual, musical, pleasing to the ear and the imagination.  I also got to meet her editor, Jedidiah Berry of Small Beer Press, who is also an award-winning author and, yes, also very cool (I’m not sucking-up; he’s not my editor after all).

Conclusion

All in all, it was grand.  I wanted to sleep for a day straight when I got back home.  But it must have been inspiring, because I am once more bending my brain cells to the agent-search and selection process, adding about 2 000 words to The Best of All Possible Worlds (wrote more than 1 500 yesterday alone – rare!), and even writing up this post like a dutiful student reporting on a field trip!