cathschaffstump | Serious Wiscon

There will be two Wiscon posts this year, and rather than doing them chronologically, I'm going to do them thematically. This year, I felt very much like two people at Wiscon. First-time author Cath, who flitted around socially and went to readings gets the frivolous Wiscon post. Deep-thinking Cath who went to readings that she couldn't fit a square peg in, well, she's writing today.

One of the things that this Wiscon had going for it was that there were some fairly serious guests. Both Mary Anne Mohanraj and Nnedi Okorafor write books that no one else can write, given who they are and where they sit culturally.

I was particularly affected by Nnedi's readings from Who Fears Death. Nnedi told us the book is about what's happening in the Sudan right now. It also pulls in biographical experience, and is in part about the death of her father. It will be a book that matters. My innate professor sense tells me that it could be a book that transcends genre. It was a book that was emotionally wrenching to write, and she did not back away from that.

There were other authors that stepped right up to the plate, and wrote books that perhaps only they could have written--that spoke uniquely to who they were in space and time.

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.