Creativity across disciplines

I’m cross-posting this from the Academic section of my site, since this obviously ties in directly to my writing career:  I’ve been including presentations from creative professionals in different fields as a part of my course on creative writing for many years…I’m happy that I finally remembered to actually film parts of these presentations this […]

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Bryan Thao Worra–Presentation to Creative Writing Course at St. John’s University, February 2012

The concluding presentation to my creative writing course from professionals in other creative disciplines was done by Bryan Thao Worra, whom I first met at a small conference in Minnesota called Fantasy Matters. Bryan is the first Laotian American poet to receive a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, and if you have a chance to read his work you’ll understand why–it’s interesting, creative, and often startling in its insight and reach. Here Bryan explains some of the differences in the way most people see the world as compared to how a poet is trained to see it.

Creative Writing Course Presentations

I’ve been including presentations from creative professionals in different fields as a part of my course on creative writing for many years…I’m happy that I finally remembered to actually film parts of these presentations this time.  Norman Cates and Bryan Thao Worra hold forth on the creative process for them in these clips; I think […]

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Miscellaneous update time

Hi all, It’s been a while since I’ve been able to update here–I’ve been swamped with work, and have been saving most of my free time for family.  But I haven’t been idle over the past few weeks.  Some details: 1.  I finished and submitted a new article to the SFWA Bulletin, this one on […]

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The Night Before Christmas–A Skyrim Tribute

A very brief tribute to a fun cast I’ve been watching of Skyrim (it’s great background for grading and watching)–in part because the caster, Katabasis, has been playing a version of my character Sarrtax from The Third Sign.  This will only be up for a day or so, so enjoy it (I hope you do) while it lasts!

Happy holidays to all!

Hi everyone, I’ve only just surfaced from a. submitting final grades, b. submitting my article for the next SFWA Bulletin, and c. revising novel manuscripts…and now I’m going to take a day or two to relax!  But I’ve got a short story coming out in an upcoming anthology which I have to finish, and I […]

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Speculation…

Just a quick reminder to check out some of what’s going on over at Speculate!, the show I run with fellow speculative fiction author Brad Beaulieu; we just got done with a sequence of shows on Night Shade Books‘ new anthology The Book of Cthulhu, and we’ve been having a great time doing the podcast […]

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Panel Appearance at Worldcon, August 17, 2011–Stretching the Mind While Thinking Outside the Box

This is a panel I was on at Worldcon 2011 in Reno, about innovative ways teachers at all levels can integrate science fiction into their courses. This was part of the AboutSF program, which is a great outreach program out of the University of Kansas and a joint project of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and the Science Fiction Research Association. I had been asked to participate in the program a couple of years ago, but schedules didn’t match up until this Worldcon; I was pleased to be able to do it this year with people like Maurine Starkey, Margaret McGaffey Fisk, Stephen Potts and Gary Wolfe. We talked about a number of things related to the teaching of science fiction and fantasy, and I got a few ideas myself from some of the panelists’ suggestions here.

Worldcon, August 19, 2011–Reboots of TV and Movie Series

My third panel at Worldcon 2011 and second one as moderator, this one about the increasing trend of reboots in TV shows and movies. Lawrence Person, A.C. Crispin and I took around an hour to talk about franchises from Superman to Star Trek and everything in between, alternating between admiration and despair at various attempts to take another bite of the apple. This was both good fun and instructive, with some surprising information I didn’t know about reboots currently in the pipeline.