I started off March going to NYC for Armory Arts week. It was four days of art ogling, first going to see the Amory show, then on to Volta and Scope. My first day there I got to have lunch with Ellen Kushner and Katherine Pendill, where we talked about all things Interstitial.The wonderful artist Lia Chavez hosted me for a few days, while Trine Bumiller and Carla Gannis became my guides through galleries and after parties (which lasted long into the night and somehow always ended with dancing).
I came back, finished my essay on portrait artist extraordinaire Jenny Morgan, graded, taught, and then packed up and went to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Fl. There I spent another four days with writers, scholars, and artists talking about all things fantastic, grotesque, monstrous, and uncanny. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s Weird Fiction Review did a special “12 Days of Monsters” celebration week in honor of ICFA, for which I wrote about the grotesque menageries of Greg Simkins. My presentation on The Island of Dr. Moreau and the contemporary artist Patricia Piccinini went pretty well, given that it was at 8:30 in the morning (a ridiculous time for anyone to be awake). China Mieville, Kelly Link, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen were the guests of honor, but that was just icing on the cake to spending time with Theodora Goss, Maria Headley, Kat Howard, Ben Loory, Daryl Gregory, Ted Chiang, Deanna Hook, Karen Lord, and Charles Vess, and so many more wonderful writerly humans. I think Jeff VanderMeer and Maria Headley both sum up the spirit of the conference in their posts: The Restorative Qualities of ICFA and Strawberry Daiquiris Blended with Beast. I’ll be writing a more proper ICFA post for Fantasy Matters later this week.
Last, but not least, my short story “Evangelical Wonderland” came in out in Prick of the Spindle.
Alas, I’m still on the road. This coming weekend is the American Comparative Literature Association conference, and I apparently felt the need to do two conferences back to back. But this post has lots of lovely links for you to click on and read, so it should keep you busy for a little while.
Nancy Hightower 