The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

Oh, I’m very excited.  Nancy Etchemendy, the treasurer for the Clarion Foundation and an all-round wonderful person, is writing a sequel to her delightful novel, The Power of Un, as part of an upcoming trip to Antarctica.  A 1982 alum of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, Nancy’s writing the novel and publishing it online at her web site, Unarctica, while she’s traveling through the region.  She’s already got the story started, beginning here, in the form of lead character Gib Finney’s blog of the planning and the voyage.  As described in Nancy’s About This Blog post, in her own voice:

… my official job is to write at least one children’s book about the expeditions. I wanted to make this book as interesting as possible for my favorite audience, kids 8-12 years old. I wanted to tell the story of the expedition in a way that might get my young readers as excited about Antarctica as I am, but I wasn’t sure what that way might be. While I was thinking all this over, I received a packet of letters from a class of fifth graders who had just finished reading my book, The Power of Un. All of them loved the book and wanted a sequel. The mental equivalent of an aurora australis went off in my head. Why not tell the story of my Antarctic expedition through The Power of Un’s adventurous protagonist, Gib Finney? And why not make it into a blog, so I could write a little piece each day as exciting things happened that I knew I would never be able to imagine ahead of time! And, hey, why not make it possible for kids to talk to me about the story (and the expedition) while I’m writing and living it?

I’m not sure how you write a novel on the fly — I never could figure out how Charles Dickens was able to keep all his characters in place in his mind, publishing as he wrote, and bring them all together in the final chapter.  It will be fun to watch Nancy doing the same thing — with the added excitement of having kids able to write Nancy (or is it Gib?) during the voyage to ask questions, something Dickens didn’t have to worry about.

I have this image in my head of crowds of people waiting on the New York docks for the latest issue of the magazine serializing Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, crying out as the ship approached, “Is Little Nell dead?”  This time, though, they’ll be checking their laptops or cell phones every morning before heading to school, checking out Gib’s latest post.

By the way, as if that’s not enough, Nancy’s concurrently going to be writing a blog for teens and adults, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  The goal of that one is “to provide interesting and informative reading for teens and adults, and classroom opportunities and science facts for teachers.”  Students can also pose questions for that site, via the Comments option. 

 The whole adventure (outlined in a press kit here)  is funded through the National Science Foundation, as part of the agency’s mission to promote science to kids and teens, along with some additional funding from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.   They’ll be sailing on the NSF’s icebreaker, the Nathaniel B. Parker.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the two UC San Diego participants on the voyage: John Helly, Director of the Laboratory for Environmental and Earth Science at our San Diego Supercomputer Center; and Maria Vernet, who studies polar phytoplankton at our Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO).  A 2007 voyage of the researchers, sans Nancy, is detailed in this SIO press release.

Canadian bookstore chain Indigo Books & Music has released a survey on family reading habits in Canada finding that six of ten families read together daily.  Their favorite categories?

And what are families reading? Chapter books or book series play a strong role in family reading while naturally encouraging more reading. Science Fiction titles and Fantasy books round out the top three genres enjoyed by booklover families…

No real surprise there, I think.

The Philip K. Dick Foundation website alerted me that Dick’s only book for young adult readers, Nick and the Glimmung, will be released sometime later this year.  The book was recently mentioned in the New York Times’ Book Review blog Paper Cuts:

To my mind, perhaps the most unusual example of a well-known genre author crossing over into YA turf is a long out-of-print relic called “Nick and the Glimmung,” written by none other than Philip K. Dick. Published in 1988, six years after his death, and never released in the United States, “Nick and the Glimmung” has the gentle pacing and simplified vocabulary of a young-adult novel, but its sensibility and subject matter are unmistakably Dickian.

According to Subterranean Press, its publisher, the book won’t be out until December — hopefully just in time to make a nice Christmas present.  Hint, hint.

Joe Scieszka, author of the Time Warp Trio book series, has been named America’s first National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by Librarian of Congress James Billington.  (We stole the idea from the Brits, but that’s okay — that’s where the language comes from anyway.) 

Although time travel in his books is just a vehicle for getting at history and cultures, Scieszka’s naming highlights the importance of fun in promoting literacy nationwide; the utility of sf, fantasy and other speculative fictions in that effort; and also the way that such books increasingly meld into new digital media opportunities — see the Time Warp Trio tv series website as one example.  

The New York Times has a nice piece on Scieszka; and Newsweek’s got an interview with him discussing the importance of humor in writing.  This is, after all, the author of The Stinky Cheese Man.

Welcome to the Clarion blog at blog.ucsd.edu/clarion. This is NOT a chronicle of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop that occurs every summer (since 2007) here on the UCSD campus. This is rather a place to chat about ways that Clarion can build out to the larger community of sf and fantasy readers and writers, and to start a dialogue around Clarionish stuff. Things like:

• Clarion and the Cons. What’s the best way to participate in and with the Cons to the benefit of Clarion, its students and alumni, and the fan base?
• Clarion, sf and fantasy, and K-12 education. For many young readers, sf and fantasy are the fields that provide their ‘first contact’ with literature. For many techies and scientists, sf was the field that kindled their interest in science or math. How does Clarion play a role in both those fields?
• Clarion and the YA market: the young adult fiction market is booming, but Clarion isn’t a name in that arena. Should we be? How?
• Clarion, UCSD’s Literature Department and UC overall. The Clarion Workshop is a significant opportunity for UCSD’s Literature Department; and UCSD and UC’s resources in this area — the Eaton Science Fiction Collection at UC Riverside, Darkstar at UCSD — are strong, but how to leverage them? Should we leverage them?