I’d love to take total credit for this one, but in some ways this opportunity sort of fell in my lap. I met Brandon Sanderson, New York Times bestselling fantasy author and one of the ones I most admire in our field, at Worldcon in 2011, hoping to get him to agree to an interview for my podcast Speculate!; during the course of our conversation, he not only agreed to do that but volunteered to do a video session with my fantasy fiction students the following semester. We ended up studying his brand new novel The Alloy of Law, and as promised Brandon spoke with my class from his home in Utah for nearly an hour, fielding questions from my students and me. As expected, my students loved the experience, and (though I admit to being a bit biased) they asked a lot of great questions…so it worked out well for all concerned. The video quality isn’t amazing, but I think it’s clear enough to give you a sense of the session.

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.