History That Never Was

I spent five days at Worldcon in Seattle as a panelist/participant and also as an attendee. It was a wonderful time, filled with a lot of walking but also a lot of meeting and talking to people!

Wednesday, I read from Sure Shot in Cobalt City: Homecoming to a small but appreciative audience. I also attended a table talk with Trevor Quachri from Analog Science Fiction and Fact, listened to a panel on writing weird fiction, heard Eugenia Triantafyllou read from her novellette “Loneliness Universe,” listened to a panel on shared universes (featuring Cobalt City’s own Nathan Crowder), and went to an academic track presentation by Alison Clarke in which she talked about Black women authors and her own poetry and writing in relation.

Thursday, I went to Amanda Cherry’s reading from her Cobalt City short story collection, Afoul and Affairs and took a workshop on writing horror from Linda D. Addison. This was my shortest day of the convention, but the two things I did were both wonderful!

Friday, after a lovely brunch, I went to Nino Cipri’s table talk, where we talked about horror writing and reading recommendations. Then I gave my presentation on Historical Research for Non-Historians to a PACKED house, followed by my autograph session.

Saturday was a pretty long day! I started off with coffee with Jeremy and some other alumni from the writing workshop he did in Kansas many years ago. Then I went to panels on science non-fiction poetry, newsletter marketing, and solo TTRPGs for writing. We didn’t wind up staying as long as I’d originally planned, but we also did some dealer’s room shopping!

Sunday, I had two poetry panels, one on history and poetry and the other on giving and receiving feedback for poets. Both of these were wonderful, and the other panelists on the latter were kind enough to do a live critique of a poem I had drafted and offered up for critique. Their insights on that are going to be super valuable when I revise it! I also helped host a small tea party, which was a wonderful way to relax and also recharge (caffeine!) on that last day of the convention!

I’ll be posting more about some of the insights I got in coming weeks, as well as watching some of the recorded panels that I couldn’t attend!

Tags: panel, readings, worldcon

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, August 25th, 2025 at 6:00 am and is filed under Recap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.