Wiscon Day 1, Part 2

[bcholmes]

Things I've forgotten to mention. I went to a bit of the Gathering this year. There's something about the Gathering that often brings out the worst of my social anxiety; I can't explain it. But I went to the Tea and Zines table and chatted with wrdnrd, raanve and littlebutfierce. I got to hear some interesting talk about zines (which, I confess, I've never really had much exposure to). Plus, raanve caused interpretive jazz to happen. Um. On the subject of mortality. So, that was interesting.

On Friday night, I had a fun dinner with erik at the little Nepali place that I like so much. Then I came back and attended a panel:

Where are Your Gods?

Where are your gods? On or off the page? Do you choose to publicize your beliefs or do you keep them private? Do you choose to risk alienating more traditional readers by an alternative spiritual path or do you stand up as an example? Do you feel ostracized for holding more traditional or conservative beliefs? Does your spirituality inform your writing? Can you be a monotheist but build a world of many gods? How important is it that your audience knows where you are coming from? Join us for a discussion of the role of personal religious belief in your writing.

P.C. Hodgell, Ada Milenkovic Brown, Suzy Charnas, Moondancer Drake, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Pamela K. Taylor

They covered a lot of ground in the panel. I especially enjoyed Pamela Taylor's and Moondancer's contributions. There was some discussion about cultural appropriation, and a lot of talk about fictional pantheons. There were some angles that I would have been interested in hearing about. Like, for some reason, I really enjoy films about the Catholic priesthood. Priest (1994) and The Order and The Rite and films like that. Some of these films are supernatural films that accept that Catholic doctrine seems to be the truth. I've never been Catholic, but I nonetheless enjoy the films, and am willing to just take the theology at face value. So I wonder: how comfortable can a writer be writing about an existing religion as if it's real. (I've only read one of the Archangel books by Lyda Morehouse, but I suspect that's a similar example).

She was never posed this question, but Moondancer's responses seemed to suggest that her sense of authenticity seemed to come from keeping the stuff that's true in her life true in her books. Others described saying what they wanted to say about religion in one book, and then never really going back to that for fear of seeming like they had a particular bugaboo.

Eventually, though, the panel mostly devolved into a bunch of book recommendations.

Immediately after that panel, I went to do a quick volunteer job, and then hung out on the party floor for a while before heading to bed relatively early. I've been fighting a cold for a few days, and thought that an early night would be a good thing.