Wiscon 2010

For those of you who’ll be at Wiscon in a couple of weeks, here’s what I’m scheduled for:

Friday:
Writers’ Workshop (I’m leading a novel group!)

Saturday:
When to Speak Up, When to Let It Go; Sat, 10:00–11:15 am
How do you balance political activism and relationships/work/life? When do you let things pass? When do you make allowances for people, or stop making allowances? How can you speak up without turning something into a fight? How do you protect your personal and emotional safety when you do activism? What words and phrases do you find particularly helpful? Let’s discuss and strategize around all kinds of activism.

Sunday:
Privilege and Discussion Dynamics: How We Talk, How We Listen, and How Who We Are Changes Things
Just what is a “productive” discussion? Gender, race, sexuality, and culture all factor into interpretations and misinterpretations of what has really been said. How does privilege disrupt an open dialogue? How can we converse with each other in producing useful knowledge about topics that are controversial?

Taboo III: Now with Even More Taboo! (reading with Vylar Kaftan, Rachel Swirsky, and Jennifer Pelland!)
Readings from “transgressive” and controversial works. I’ll be reading an excerpt from “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters”, to run in Postscripts this Summer 2010.

What If They’d Been Invented Earlier?
Steam–driven mechanical computers, telegraphs in the Roman Empire, computers in ancient Greece, lasers in the 19th century. What inventions had all of the building blocks but weren’t invented centuries early? How would the world have been different with them?

The SignOut

This will be my last bit of travel for awhile, so I’m planning to savor it mightily. Have already begun rubbing it in with my housesitter how much fun I’ll have. Mwaaahahahaha!