The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

This week many of us at Locus will be off in Florida at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, affectionately known as ICFA. This is an academic conference that also attracts a number of writers and editors. It runs from March 16 to March 20, and this year features Guests of Honor Connie Willis, Terry Bisson, and Andrea Hairston.

In honor of ICFA, which also, in a way, kicks off our convention season, I’ll be running some features over the next few weeks on teaching science fiction. I mean this in two different ways: either teaching sf as literature to students in high school or college classes (who may or may not have ever encountered the genre before), or teaching people who want to write sf/f in MFA programs or at workshops such as Clarion. I’ll be posting the first of these essays later in the week.

I’ll also be running and recording podcasts with some of the people who help make ICFA, and the field as a whole, so interesting and memorable. This will start in the next post with a podcast featuring Cecelia Holland and Ellen Klages, with more in the weeks to follow.