Readercon sked
I’ll be at Readercon this weekend-if you are as well, say hello.
Here is the one panel I’ll be on…really looking forward to this one, noon on Friday.
“In Search of Lost Time: History and Memory in Historical and Speculative Fiction. Alan DeNiro, David Anthony Durham (L), Lila Garrott, Andrea Hairston, Howard Waldrop. “[I]n places like the Caribbean, West Africa and so on, we have two distinct elements. We have history which is written in books about the white people—how they came to Guadeloupe, how they colonized Guadeloupe, how they became the masters of Guadeloupe—and you have memory, which is the actual facts of the people of Guadeloupe and Martinique—the way they lived, the way they suffered, the way they enjoyed life. We are trained to rely more on our memories and the memories of people around us than on books”—Maryse Condé, explaining the genesis of her new novel Victoire: My Mother’s Mother. Clearly the best historical fiction attempts to bridge the gap between these two modes of understanding by bringing the richness of memory to the rigor of history. But it’s also a commonplace that history is the trade secret of speculative fiction. How is the interplay of history and memory in imaginative literature like and unlike that of historical fiction?”
Those are the kinds of questions I think about every day as I work on the new novel (set in the late 17th century).
I’ll also be reading at 2:30 on Friday for 30 minutes.
