Flights of Foundry 2024 Quick Recap, Day 3
Image by un-perfekt from Pixabay
Catherine Tavares posted her recap of what she attended at Flights of Foundry immediately after the convention. I took a little longer to collect some of my thoughts and notes, but I hope you enjoy! (You can find my previous recaps here.) I’m going to have to do mine in chunks by day, so this post just covers the events on the Sunday (day 3)!
Intro to Speculative Poetry Workshop: Many speculative prose writers find poetry outside of their grasp, but it doesn’t have to be. Poetry presents a wealth of options for telling stories, and it can also help you learn valuable techniques that can apply to prose as well. Learn how to tell speculative stories in poetry through several exercises and sharing your work with your classmates. I’ll also share helpful websites to keep at your fingertips as you continue your journeys in speculative poetry. (Led by me)
This was my second year of offering this workshop, and it was, once again, fantastic! I had a great group of authors who I led through a short introductory lecture on speculative poetry, followed by a few poetry writing exercises. As in the previous year, all of them blew me away with their quickly written poems, and I hope I’ve instilled in all of them the confidence to write more speculative poetry and submit it to markets! I also love this workshop because I write alongside the participants, which means I might also produce something I can submit!
Prehistory: Fact and Fiction: Let’s talk pre-history! There’s cutting edge research on human prehistory out there – how can we transform that new research into compelling fiction? (With Jillian Foley moderating, and Marie Brennan, Stephanie Siebert, and myself speaking)
I jumped on the opportunity to speak on this panel, because even though I’m not an archaeologist or anthropologist, I work with people with those degrees, and in editing their writing, I’ve learned a lot on the topic. Our discussion was wide ranging and looked at archaeology, history, and linguistics, and we easily could have continued talking on the subject for much more time than we had. It was really cool to get to use my day job experience on a writing panel, and I’m hoping for more of these in the future!
10 Minutes of Expertise (Session 2): 7 minute presentations on a topic of your choice paired with 3 minutes of rapid-fire q&a per presenter. Got something you can talk about for 10 minutes? Whether it’s what it’s really like to work in a particular field, how to cook the perfect food of your choice, or how something cool actually works, let’s hear it! (Facilitated by me)
This was another sort of open mic session, during which participants got to share stuff they’ve studied or are otherwise passionate about. We learned about the maker’s movement for court transcription-like keyboards and historical costumes in Bollywood, and I wound up sharing an old Google Slides presentation I’d created early in the pandemic for our Cookie Chat group about what archaeologists really do (following on my enthusiasm for sharing my day job experience earlier). Because this was late in the convention, we didn’t have a ton of attendees for this, so we all agreed to break early and get some rest, which was a great way to conclude the con for me!
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