My First Mythcon Roundtable!

 So, MythCon 51 is about halfway through its first day .... but, luckily for me, the roundtable I had to moderate is now complete! One of my little terrors about academic, in fact, is the challenge of moderating a conference panel or roundtable. On one hand, the task is super easy, and your main job is just to be invisible. On the other hand, the task is so easy that a moderator-induced catastrophe is all the more cringe-worthy.

And moderating a roundtable isn't actually all that easy. For this one, we had a roundtable featuring 3 of last year's winners of the Mythopoeic Society Award, one critic and two novelists. Since I'd only read the critic, I had to hurry up and read the two author's books, plus do enough google-research to ask intelligent but open-ended questions of the panel.

We managed to get through 3 of my 5 prepared questions, which I should perhaps have anticipated, before opening things up to the general Q&A. Anyway, since I did an insane amount of preparation for this thing, I'm posting my brief intro and questions here. (And yes -- I was nervous enough to write everything out.)

For what it's worth, though, things ended up going swimmingly.

So, without further ado.....

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Q&A with Mythopoeic Award Winners

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT
Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to our Q&A with three of last year’s winners of the Mythopoeic Award. With us today, we have Theodora Goss, who’s currently joining us from Budapest, and who won the Adult Fiction award with Snow White Learns Witchcraft, a lyrical and haunting retelling of fairy tales; Yoon Ha Lee, who won the Children’s Literature award with The Dragon Pearl, a fast-paced space opera adventure touched by Korean folklore; and James Gifford, who won the Myth & Fantasy Scholarship award with A Modernist Fantasy, which lays bare a vein of modern fantasy texts—including novels by Mervyn Peake, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Chip Delaney—that all reflect anarchist political theory. My name is Dennis Wise, and I’ll be your moderator today.

For today’s roundtable, our format’s gonna work like this: me and our panelists will have a 30-minute discussion on topics ranging from diversity in fantasy to literary style and criticism, after which point, for the last 15 minutes, I’ll open the floor to questions from the audience. In the meantime, I’ll ask everyone in the audience to mute your microphones, and once we get to the Q&A, just use the “raise hand” function in Zoom, and I’ll try to get to as many questions as we can. Also, please remember that this session is being recorded, so if that’s something that might affect your desired level of participation, keep that in mind.

Now, James, Dora, and Yoon, you guys can stay unmuted through the entirely our discussion, and feel free to hop in at any point and make this roundtable as conversational as possible. I got a list of five prepared questions here, but if we get a good discussion flowing on a topic, I’m more than willing to keep things loose.

So, all good? Any questions?

DIVERSE CULTURAL BACKGROUNDS IN FANTASY
Great! So, for my part, I’d kinda like to kick things off by asking about the idea of diversity in fantasy, because if I had to identify the one major trend in contemporary fantasy publishing and academic criticism, which is my own special area, it’s that there seems to be this fervent desire to hear from and about voices and cultures that go well beyond the medievalism that’s familiar to us from the western and northern European traditions. And I think this is a very good question for this panel because, in a sense, we have a remarkable diverse panel here. Yoon Ha Lee is Korean-American, Dora is Hungarian-American, which shows up very much I think in Snow White Learns Witchcraft, and even James, you’re from …. hold on, let me see if I can get this right …. ca-NA-da? Is that how you say that? Cahn-a-da?

So, I wondered how you all viewed the current trends of diversity in contemporary genre fiction, how do you see yourselves as working within those trends?

CRITICISM
Keeping on the idea of a relationship between SFF and criticism, we have two fiction writers and an academic scholar on this panel. One of my major interests, being an academic myself, is how these two activities—fiction writing and criticism—can intertwine to really advance the cause of speculative fiction. I know that, historically, some writers have felt somewhat antagonistic to critics, but we have unusual panel here in that most of us are critics and everyone here has been a teacher of one sort or another. James and Dora, you both currently have academic appointments at universities, and Yoon, you have a degree in math education from Stanford. So I wondering how everyone saw the relationship between fiction and literary criticism, especially within speculative fiction? Is it beneficial, symbiotic, wholly separated, or what? And by literary criticism, you can take either formal peer-reviewed academic criticism, or the kind of criticism you find in Locus or the Los Angeles Review of Books. So what possibilities does criticism provide speculative fiction writers, and what kind of limitations, if any, can you see?

POETRY vs. PROSE IN SPECULATIVE FICTION
Now I’d like to turn to the idea of style, and initially with the idea of prose and poetry in speculative fiction. As you know, our awards are all about mythopoesis, the transformation of myth in modern fiction, and there’s a comment from Ursula K. Le Guin that’s always stuck with me. In The Language of the Night, she writes the essential quality of great fantasy is style, and I think we can expand that to include science fiction texts that have mythopoeic qualities as well. For my, the idea of style is usually one of lyrical prose passages that read almost like poetry …. and that brings up a very obvious question, namely, “What do you do with actual poetry?”

And I think this is a great panel for that topic. Dora, obviously Snow White Learns Witchcraft is a mixed collection of prose and poetry, and you’ve won a couple Rhysling awards. Yoon, you’ve published some verse yourself, and your prose has often been praised as lyrical, and even James, you have this—what I think is—a very unusual scholarly bridge from writing about anarchist and modernist poetry in your first monograph to discussing, in A Modernist Fantasy, a number of prose fantasy texts.

So I really want to ask two questions here.

First, what does everyone think about the interrelations of prose and poetry in contemporary speculative fiction?

And second, more specifically, what kind of future does poetry have in a field mostly dominated by prose fiction?

FOLLOW-UP QUESTION:
Yoon, a follow-up question if I may. When looking at one of your interviews, I came across the following nugget that absolutely mesmerized me. You said that, “Up until early high school, the people I wanted to write like, style-wise, were Simon R. Green (still one of my favorite authors) and Piers Anthony.” Now, I realize that you were qualifying that with the phrase “up until early high school,” so I don’t want to make too much of your comment about Piers Anthony, but he’s also someone that most fans of genre fantasy around our age have encountered before, and I know James is doing some work on him right now. For the benefit of the audience, Anthony is best known for his fantasy Xanth series of books, but one of the most common criticisms of him—even from early in his career—has been that people usually haven’t thought highly of his style.

So I wondered if you could care to expand on Anthony, or even Simon R. Green, when it comes to style ….and for an open question for the panel, since many of you are lyrical writers yourselves, what do we think of the influence on genre fiction of writers who have what we might consider to be a more “pulpish” style?

THE GREAT FANTASY TRADITION
Finally, maybe for this last question, we can step back for some historical context. For Dora and Yoon, how do you see your work in relation to the fantasy/SF tradition—do you look at the kind of thing we tend to celebrate from the Inklings as important to their work, or do you perhaps look to alternative strains, such as those outlined in Gifford’s book, for inspiration?