The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

… with the start of the second Clarion Workshop here at UC San Diego.  The students arrive over the weekend, and I’ll have the chance to meet them Sunday night over dinner.  Kelly Link is coming in tomorrow, I’m told, driving over the Rockies from a stay in Santa Fe.  She wisely mailed herself a few boxes of things she’d need over the week she’s here, to minimize the schlepping.

It’s amazing to see what it takes to put one of these things on.  I stopped by the indefatigable Tania Mayer’s office today, where I found boxes upon boxes of pots, pans, fans, water pistols, water rifles, water cannons … well, you get the picture … all piled up around her in preparation for moving the students in.  It’s a zoo, but she’s in marvelous good spirits as always.  (The only time I ever see Tania bummed out is during the weeks after the Workshop, when everyone’s gone back to their normal lives and she’s all alone.)

So there’s a visit to Mark Thiemens’ lab scheduled for this coming Friday afternoon, and a visit by Nancy Holder for dinner on Saturday.  Kelly Link’s reading at Mysterious Galaxy, our totally favorite bookstore and for the second year in a row the donor of a Clarion Scholarship [hint: so go there, thank them, and spend money!], is scheduled for Wednesday, July 2, at 7:00 p.m., where she’ll be signing Magic for Beginners.  [By the way, if you’re a fan of signed books and live too far away to come for the signing, you can generally order online at MG in advance of a signing and ask that the book be signed before shipping — if you ask nicely and tell them Clarion sent you.]  All the Clarion instructors will be signing at MG this summer, as will the occasional Clarion alum — like Bob Crais’s visit on Monday, July 7 for his new Elvis Cole volume.

 So my readership will drop, but I’ll still be here.  Hello?  Hello?  Anyone out there?

In case you missed it, the third Slayage conference on the works of Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Josh Whedon took place last week at Henderson State University in Arkansas.  The program lists a wide variety of topics, described in a Los Angeles Times preview of the conference as follows:

Aristotle. Nietzsche. Buffy?

The blond heroine of the campy television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as well as other works by creator Joss Whedon, are the focus of an academic conference at Henderson State University this weekend. The show starring Sarah Michelle Gellar won cult fame and critical praise during its seven seasons on the WB and UPN networks.

Since it ended, the series has spawned enough academic books on the philosophy surrounding the roles of friendship and feminism to fill a 15-foot-wide bookshelf at the college in Arkadelphia, said Kevin Durand, an associate professor of philosophy.

Conferences on Buffy aren’t all that new, as evidenced by this 2002 Salon.com piece, “Deconstructing Buffy,” on the first-ever academic conference on Buffy, held at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.  The interesting catch here for me is the fact that, six years later, people are still commenting on these conferences — Google News shows 261 articles today in response to the search terms “buffy vampire academic.”

Clarion Foundation Board member and UCSD alumna Nancy Holder is our own representative to the Buffyverse.  She taught a Buffy course at UCSD Extension in the Winter Quarter ‘08; with any luck, she’ll be back for another.   And she’s also teaching the occasional Creative Writing course for UCSD undergraduates, this Spring quarter that just ended having taught a course on writing “Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Irrealism.”  Cool.