Clarion!

Wed, 03/25/2009 - 15:13 — Rhetor

I am delighted (and astonished) to announce that I will be attending the next Clarion Writers Workshop in San Diego this summer, from June 28 to August 8. I knew about this a while ago, but we weren't supposed to tell anyone until our names appeared on the Web site as the Class of 2009.

My seventeen fellow students are from as far away as Australia and Ireland, and I'm relieved to note that that at least two of them are near my own age (I was afraid I'd be "the old guy" in the group). Some of them are already professional writers of one sort or another, others are graduate students, teachers, etc.

As some people here might not have heard of Clarion, it's a six-week intensive workshop, nonstop reading, writing, critiquing. (I just looked at the Week One calendar. Critique of student story #1 begins at 8:00 a.m., first day. Critique of student story #4 ends at noon, same day. Next day, repeat.) The workshop was founded by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm in 1968, and its graduates include Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Nalo Hopkinson -- you get the idea.

This summer's instructors (in order of presentation) will be Holly Black, Larissa Lai, Robert Crais, Kim Stanley Robinson, Elizabeth Hand and Paul Park. So you can imagine that I'm bouncing up and down in my chair as I write this.