pameladean | (no subject)

As an antidote to the broken washer, I want to talk a little about the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention. Please note that the pre-registration deadline has been extended to May 31st.

One or two people have asked about the name, so here's the history as I recall it. There's a cartoon depicting a row of restaurants, with signs in order like this: "Best pizza in the city," "Best pizza in the country," "Best pizza on the planet," "Best pizza in the galaxy," and the last one, a tiny place with a long line of people outside it, says simply, "Best pizza on the block." During our first couple of years, Fourth Street was in a downtown hotel on, in fact, Fourth Street, and we used the motto "Best fantasy convention on the block" to indicate the combination of humility and ambition that we brought to the project.

Other people probably would tell this differently, but that's how I recall it.

I was supposed to write an essay months ago for the website, but I have been finding it difficult to bring up coherent memories. Fourth Street was a great deal like disappearing under the hill, visiting the very far lands of Faerie. It was, at least, if Faerie had chocolate-covered coffee beans and a wedding party leaving at six a.m. so that the participants, including the bride and groom, could be back at the convention for the start of panels at ten; if Faerie included Samuel Delany, leaving in the middle of a panel to catch his plane home and stopping the standing ovation he was getting with the startling words, "No, no, sit down and do what you're doing. This is valuable work"; if Faerie included Jane Yolen and Patricia McKillip doing a joint guest of honor speech; if it included Patrick Nielsen Hayden standing up out of the audience and demolishing the entire premise of a panel and providing a new one, all in a paragraph; if it included a membership so involved in the programming that moderators were sometimes obliged to say they would take only questions, not comments, until later in the hour; if it included sitting around at five in the morning while music was still going on in the other room, discussing simultaneously Dorothy Dunnett, the vagaries and virtues of fountain pens, the flavors of jelly beans, and the proper use of violence in fantasy. A few local writers, both established and aspiring, used to leave early on Sunday, followed by the pleas of their friends to stay longer, because the programming had made them want to do nothing except go home and write. Cally Soukup once stayed up for 72 hours straight at a Fourth Street, because there was always somebody to talk to.

It's ten years later now, and we're all different, and some of us are gone, but we're going to try to recapture that feeling. Elizabeth Bear, known to many of you as

matociquala, is our guest of honor, and long before this revival was thought of, reading her journal used to remind me of Fourth Street.

I'm looking forward to it with the same mixture of glee and trepidation as I always did -- it would take me a long way away and sometimes send me home again unsettled. It doesn't matter if you recognize any of the names I mention above. If you love fantasy, or are curious about it, do think about coming.

Pamela

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From:

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if Faerie had chocolate-covered coffee beans and a wedding party leaving at six a.m. so that the participants, including the bride and groom, could be back at the convention for the start of panels at ten

I just want you to know that I love this mental image. A lot.

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