Mythcon and Me

Icon by Peg Ihinger

I spent last weekend mostly at Mythcon 2024, the annual convention of the Mythopoeic Society. It’s held in a different place every year, and this year, that place was Minneapolis. We regularly have a multitude of SF-style conventions here (including, but not limited to, Fourth Street Fantasy, Convergence, Diversicon, Narrativity, various relaxacons, and a wide assortment of small cons focused on specific games, comics, shows, or whatever), but we’ve only had Mythcon once before, so I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.

Mythcon is a much more scholarly convention than I’m used to. It’s the only one I can remember attending that has both a writer guest of honor and a scholar guest of honor. Generally, when I ask a convention if they’d like me to be on any panels, they point me at the head of programming and/or a form on the web site where writers and people with interesting expertise can express interest or offer panel ideas. This time, the first response was, “Oh, do you have a paper you want to present?” (I didn’t.) They did have a track of panels, and one of author readings, both of which I got scheduled in for.

The con ran roughly four days, starting Friday and ending Monday. Friday I spend listening to readings and poking around the dealer’s room, which was small but intense and included a rare book dealer and several small presses along with a heavily laden table set up by Dreamhaven Books, one of our local SF bookstores. I spent around $50 on books by authors I hadn’t heard of before, who’d done interesting readings.

Saturday, I was a bit late in arriving, due to massive highways-under-construction near my house. I got there in time to hear the last bit of Brian Attebury’s scholar guest-of-honor speech, and I’m going to have to find a copy somewhere so I can read the first part. When I got there, he was talking about the ways different cultures draw the lines around genre in different ways, which never totally overlap, so that looking through a different cultural lens means including or excluding different things and seeing the resulting story differently, even including the things that both cultures agree on.

I went straight from there to my reading (From The Dark Lord’s Daughter) with Caroline Stevermer (who read from the sequel-in-process to The Glass Magician and a teaser from a new WIP with the working title Dorothy Parker, Wizard, which was amazing) and Tyler Tork (who read from the sequel-in-process to The Goodnight Agency). I already have The Glass Magician but Tyler’s sequel sounded interesting enough that I got a copy of The Goodnight Agency.

Then came one of the truly delightful parts of conventions like this: having lunch with a bunch of really smart, well-read people, half or more of whom you have never met before, but with whom you end up discussing everything from obscure Arthurian poetry to whether you are lucky or unlucky to have missed that panel this morning.

When I got back to the con after lunch, I had about half an hour before the next presentations started, so I went back to the dealer’s room. There were a couple of things I’d spotted the day before that I wasn’t sure whether or not I already owned, and I had remembered to check on them after I fed the cats and before I came back to the convention. One of them was sold out, but the other two were still there, so I picked up those and browsed a bit, ending up with a $60 book bill.

My first afternoon presentation was a paper on several character pairs in The Two Towers – people like Aragorn and Denethor, or Saruman and Gandalf, who are in similar situations faced with similar choices, but who make opposite decisions. The focus was mainly on Sam vs. Smeagol/Gollum, and Sam’s decision to take up the ring and continue the quest after he thinks Frodo has been killed by Shelob. I really liked the presentation, particularly since the presenter was careful not to attribute to J.R.R. Tolkien any intentions that he hadn’t explicitly said (somewhere else) that he’d had when writing the story. That is, the presenter didn’t say “obviously Tolkien intended Saruman and Gandalf to represent opposite sides of an argument;” he just said “in the text, these are two people who are alike in these ways, but who choose very different actions, and this is what happens as a result.”

Then I went to a “close reading workshop” focusing on Charles Williams’ Arthurian poetry, which I have loved since I discovered them in college. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was interesting.

Sunday was my busy day—a panel on L. Frank Baum and his work, and one on Midwestern Fantasy (i.e., fantasies by Midwest writers who’ve used the landscape or other specific aspects of the Midwest in their books). I think my favorite bit on that panel was Eleanor Arneson talking about a scene in which a dragon chases her heroine down the Nicolett Mall and crashes into the IDS Tower (which is all windows and reflects the sky so birds—and obviously dragons—run into it). The Baum panel was a lot of fun, too. In between, I ended up back in the dealer’s room, and spotted another couple of things that the small press people had put out as the first batch of offerings got sold. I think I got out of there for around $70 that day.

Then there was the banquet, which had excellent food, followed by Eleanor Arneson’s guest-of-honor speech about the worth of writing during dark times, followed by the Mythopoeic Awards (the winner in the Children’s Literature category was a graphic novel by K. O’Neill titled Moth Keeper, which sounds wonderful and which was later described to me as “numinous,” which to my mind is exactly the sort of thing that should win this award).

Monday morning I Zoom-attended the panel on the nominees and winners of the Mythopoeic Awards (real life got in the way of actually going back to the hotel). All of the other nominees sounded marvelous, which means I now have another huge long list of books to get and read…

So that was my Mythcon. I’m very glad to have gone, and I am almost as glad to be back to work in my normal routine. Next week, you’ll get a proper post on writing.