Each week during the workshop, we present one of our six current instructors reading his or her best new work from recent books, unpublished stories, or novels-in-progress. The featured reader also answers questions about writing, teaching, editing, and other topics.
The 2009 Clarion West Summer Reading Series ended July 28. This was the third year we were able to offer the readings for free and our second year in a row inside the University Book Store. Attendance was solid, with all readings attracting over 50 people, and more than 70 at the final reading. The series was a resounding success.
We’ll post details of the 2010 Clarion West Summer Reading Series on our website early next year. Until then, you may want to find out about this month's author events at the University Book Store; the readings they host are often of interest to the Clarion West community.
The readers for the 2009 Clarion West Summer Reading Series were:
John Kessel - June 23 John Kessel writes elegant, ironic speculative fiction about gender and memory. His controversial “Stories for Men” received the 2002 Tiptree Award, and he's also the winner of the Nebula, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. Watching Kessel read his own work is a bit like watching Hamlet being played by a wry-mouthed, self-effacing, but wholly genuine prince. His most recent book, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence, collects a decade’s worth of his short stories.
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Karen Joy Fowler - June 30 Karen Joy Fowler, author of New York Times best-seller The Jane Austen Book Club, writes illuminatingly of the contradictions that tug at the human soul: the inner struggle between imagination and convention, compassion and contempt, sanity and desire. Wit's End, her most recent novel, pits a literary biographer against time, scandal, and death. Fowler will read from a new work of fiction.
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Elizabeth Bear - July 7 Elizabeth Bear, one of fantasy and science fiction's rising stars, has published twelve novels and over fifty short stories and poems since her first professional sale in 2003. She mixes speculative elements with mystery, thrillers, and romance, and has received multiple nominations and awards, including the Campbell and Locus, and a Hugo for her 2007 story “Tideline.”
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Nalo Hopkinson - July 14 Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born author, editor, and teacher living in Canada. She draws on her Caribbean heritage to create a powerful and unique voice that is beautiful both on the page and when read aloud. Hopkinson's brave, uncompromising fiction challenges our assumptions about history, race, and gender. Her recent novel, The New Moon's Arms, won Canada's Prix Aurora and Sunburst awards.
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David G. Hartwell - July 21 David G. Hartwell, Senior Editor for Tor Books and founder of the influential New York Review of Science Fiction, has published many of the important SF writers of the past forty years, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of both science fiction and fantasy. Not only does he know where the bodies are buried, but he did some of the spade work himself. Hartwell will be interviewed on topics of art and commerce by the always-provocative Seattle writer Eileen Gunn.
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Rudy Rucker - July 28 Rudy Rucker is a prolific and idea-rich writer whose work lies (or, perhaps, writhes) at the intersection of science fiction, philosophy, and mathematics. An early cyberpunk and a fascinating thinker with an unpredictable and inquisitive mind, he is the author, most recently, of Postsingular and Mathematicians in Love. What he will read and say is anybody’s guess, but it is bound to be brainfood. Rucker is the 2009 Susan C. Petrey Fellow.
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The 2009 Clarion West Summer Reading Series was presented by Clarion West and University Book Store, and co-sponsored by King County 4Culture and Amazon.com.
