The fourth year of Sirens focused on the theme of “tales retold.” Presentations on female fantasy characters and authors were welcome as well.
Dates
October 11–14, 2012
Location
Skamania Lodge, Stevenson, Washington
Conference - Guests of Honor - Schedule - Books and Breakfast - Reading List
Programming - Vetting Board - Call for Proposals
Guests of Honor
Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale” by Tin House, and is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the final novel in a trilogy, The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold (FC2 2011), and Horse, Flower, Bird, a collection of stories with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet (Coffee House Press 2010). She has edited three anthologies including the World Fantasy Award winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010). Her fiction and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Fence Magazine, Bookforum, Puerto del Sol, Bomb Magazine, Marvels & Tales: The Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Arizona, and is founding and acting editor of Fairy Tale Review.
For more information about Kate, please visit her website, which includes her blog.
Nalo Hopkinson has published five novels and numerous short stories, and has edited or co-edited four anthologies, most in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. She is a recipient of the Locus Award for Best New Writer, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers. Her works have won a World Fantasy Award, a Gaylactic Spectrum Award, an Aurora Award, and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic (twice), and have been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, the James R. Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Brown Girl in the Ring was also a finalist in Canada Reads. Nalo holds an MA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She has served as faculty for Clarion East, Clarion West, and Clarion South, and she is a founding member of the Carl Brandon Society.
For more information about Nalo, please visit her website, which includes her blog, or her Twitter.
Malinda Lo’s first novel, Ash, a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian twist, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Lambda Award for Children’s/Young Adult, and was a Kirkus 2009 Best Book for Children and Teens. Her second book, Huntress, a companion to Ash, was published in April 2011 and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Her two-book young adult science fiction series, beginning with Adaptation, will be published in fall 2012. Prior to her work as an author of fiction, Malinda was an entertainment reporter, and was awarded the 2006 Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for Excellence in LGBT Journalism by the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and has master’s degrees from both Harvard and Stanford.
For more information about Malinda, please visit her website, which includes her blog, or her Twitter.
Schedule
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- Thursday
- Friday
- Saturday
- Sunday
Books and Breakfast
Friday, October 12, 2012
Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins by Emma Donoghue
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne Valente
The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Roses and Bones: Myths, Tales, and Secrets by Francesca Lia Block
Sailor Moon (manga, being re-released as Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon) by Naoko Takeuchi
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
Saturday, October 13, 2012
A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce
The Dark Wife by Sarah Deimer
Mella and the N’anga: An African Tale by Gail Nyoka
Peaceweaver by Rebecca Barnhouse
The Sigh by Marjane Satrapi
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (trans. Keith Gessen and Anna Summers)
Reading List
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2012 Accepted Programming
PAPERS AND LECTURES
Papers and lectures feature one or more presenters talking about the topic at hand. The specific style and formality of each presentation varies according to the speaker: some may be more formal readings of scholarly papers, with or without time for questions at the end; others may be relatively informal lectures with more audience participation.
Adaptation and the Distorting Mirror: Little Red Riding Hood and The Company of Wolves
Courtney Bates
Courtney Bates is an MA student at the University of Regina. Her research interests include contemporary fairy tales and eco-poetry. She has been published in FourW and recently edited the latest volume of [SPACE]. Four of her fairy tale poems will be published in an upcoming anthology by Requiem Press. She writes about fairy tales and poetry on her blog at http://www.poetcourtney.blogspot.ca/.
Neil Jordan’s film,
The Company of Wolves, is based on a selection of short stories from Angela Carter’s collection,
The Bloody Chamber, which are themselves adapted from the Little Red Riding Hood tale type. This paper explores adaptation as it relates to the transition from text to film, as well as the transition from girlhood to womanhood, through the motif of a distorting mirror used in
The Company of Wolves. The distorting mirror is a useful symbol for adaptation because it reflects what it posits to be a “true” image while also changing what it mirrors.
Sponsor:
University of Regina Students’ Union
The Dark Side of Happy Endings
Jennifer Gale
Jennifer Gale once left bowls of milk outside her bedroom door so that brownies would clean her room. She still hasn’t forgiven them for denying her request. She has a master’s degree in theology and the arts, during which she examined the portrayal of religions, both real and invented, in science fiction. She writes fantasy and science fiction for young adults and children, and has a deep interest in how the stories we grow up with shape our understanding of our culture and of ourselves.
This paper explores why we shy away from the darker aspects of fairy tales, myths, and religious stories when we retell these stories. There will be time for discussion and sharing built into the presentation, so that attendees can discuss how they view the darker aspects of these retold stories.
Desires of Older Women: Queer Possibilities in Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch
Rachel Steiger-Meister
Rachel Steiger-Meister is a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she also studies Irish language and folklore and teaches LGBTQ literature and fiction writing. She is a recipient of Carve Magazine’s 2012 Esoteric Award for LGBT-themed fiction, and in 2011 she served as guest fiction editor for the fairy tales issue of the online publication Lavender Review. Rachel has presented her creative and critical work in Ireland and England, in addition to sundry locales in the US.
This paper offers a queer close reading of Emma Donoghue’s 1997 collection of retold fairy tales,
Kissing the Witch, with a focus on the book’s subversive intergenerational relationships (platonic, romantic, erotic) between older and younger women. These relationships are integral to the individual tales in the collection and to the collection’s structure overall, offering a queer vision of a new, female fairy tale world.
Fact and Fantasy: Bringing Legend to Life through Historical Research
Diana L. Paxson
Diana L. Paxson is a writer of fantasy who lives in Berkeley, California. Her first book was published in 1981. Since then she has published 29 novels, including the Chronicles of Westria and the Avalon series that continued the work of Marion Zimmer Bradley. She is also well-known as the author of “retold tales”—historical fantasies including The White Raven, the story of Tristan and Iseult; The Serpent’s Tooth, King Lear; the Wodan’s Children trilogy, a retelling of the Siegfried story; a trilogy on the legend of Fionn MacCumhail; and The Hallowed Isle, an Arthurian tetrology.
To bring the old tales to life for the modern reader, we need to root them in history. Diana L. Paxson talks about seeking the truth behind the stories of Iseult and Branwen, Cordelia, Brunhild and Gudrun, and the women of the Arthurian cycle, and how and where she found insights and answers.
May the Narrative Be Ever in Your Favor: Storytelling in The Hunger Games
Meg Belviso
Meg Belviso holds a BA in English from Smith College and an MFA from Columbia University. During the week, she chronicles angel encounters as Staff Editor of the bi-monthly magazine Angels on Earth. As a freelance writer she has written for many different properties, including the Wishbone series, which retold literary classics starring a Jack Russell terrier.
In the Hunger Games arena the right story can keep a tribute alive—and bring the Capitol down. This paper looks at
The Hunger Games as a battleground of stories: the Capitol’s propaganda, Peeta’s star-crossed romance, Cinna’s call for revolution. And it looks at the girl at the center of these narratives. Katniss Everdeen finds herself cast as the hero of everyone else’s story, while unable to see herself as the hero of her own. Folk hero, ingénue, reality TV star—Katniss is all and none of the above.
Modern Poets, Ancient Tales
Valerie Estelle Frankel
Valerie Estelle Frankel has won a Dream Realm Award, an Indie Excellence Award, and a USA Book News National Best Book Award for her Henry Potty parodies. She is the author of five new and forthcoming books on pop culture: From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey in Myth and Legend, Buffy and the Heroine’s Journey, Katniss the Cattail: An Unauthorized Guide to Names and Symbols in The Hunger Games, Teaching with Harry Potter, and the inside look at fandom, Harry Potter: Still Recruiting. She keeps an extensive database of retold fairy tales and lessons on the heroine’s journey at http://www.vefrankel.com/.
Many poets are adapting myths, viewing them through new eyes. “Persephone the Wanderer” and “A Myth of Innocence” by Louise Glück analyze Persephone through modern psychology, questioning how she felt about her abduction by the dark god as she struggles to find an identity outside the realm of her suffocating mother. In Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Descent of Inanna,” too, the questing goddess is presented as a troubled young woman who must confront her angry dark side. Both authors cast a new psychological light on these most ancient and primal of myths through the beauty of their poetry.
Obedience Training: The Domestic Educations of Girls Raised by Wolves
Brenda Mann Hammack
Dr. Brenda Mann Hammack is Associate Professor of English at Fayetteville State University, where she also serves as Managing Editor of Glint Literary Journal (http://www.glintliteraryjournal.com/). Critical publications include essays on Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire and Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s “Green Tea.” Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including A capella Zoo, Gargoyle, Toad Suck Review, Steampunk Magazine, and Arsenic Lobster. She recently led a workshop on the “True Fairy Tale Poem” for the Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative. Dr. Hammack is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in poetry.
This essay examines the way in which Angela Carter and Karen Russell recast the historical rehabilitation of savage girls in their respective short fictions, “Wolf-Alice” and “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.” These narratives, along with poetry by Janet McAdams and Bhanu Kapil, will serve as imaginative interrogations of the gendered pedagogy that informed the attempted re-educations of Marie-Angélique Leblanc, the Wild Girl of Champagne, in the eighteenth century—and Kamala and Amala, the so-called Wolf Girls of India, in the twentieth century.
Postmodern Scheherazade: Catherynne M. Valente and the Poetics of Mythpunk
Allison Stieger
Allison Stieger is a mythologist and writing instructor who is passionately interested in the analysis and promotion of the retelling of myth and folklore. She holds an MA in mythological studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and has been working with the Joseph Campbell Foundation since 2004 to promote the “mythic conversation” in the Seattle area.
Catherynne M. Valente’s masterful duology
The Orphan’s Tales is a nested story, told to a prince by a mysterious girl who lives in the Sultan’s garden. In these tales, Valente explores and retells a cornucopia of world myths and folklore, while refracting them all through a postmodern and feminist lens. This paper examines Valente’s approach to the retelling of these tales, including her upending of the traditional tropes of myth and fairy tales. The paper presentation will include music from S. J. Tucker’s pair of albums inspired by
The Orphan’s Tales.
Songs in Fiction—Not Just for Ballads Anymore
Caitlin Kirchenwitz
Caitlin Kirchenwitz has been a wearer of many hats, most of them having to do with words. She’s been writing, singing, and teaching songs professionally since she first demanded to sing with her mother at the age of twelve. Now she’s teaching composition at the college level, and combining as many of her loves as she can in the process.
The sense of sound is difficult to incorporate into prose, and is one of the neglected senses in prose work. One often-overlooked way to incorporate sound is to include a song, either in the background or performed by a lead character. From the standpoint of a writer of both prose and song, Kirchenwitz will take a look at some authors who are known for using song. This presentation will begin to help attendees feel more comfortable with the use of songs in their own work, and get them comfortable with writing their own songs to use.
Voicing the Drowned Girl: Reviving Ophelia
Lacey Skorepa
Lacey Skorepa is an MA candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she studies English literature with a concentration in fairy tales. She is currently working on an Angela Carter-focused MA thesis under the direction of Kate Bernheimer. She graduated from Western Illinois University in 2011 with a BA in English literature and philosophy.
This essay explores Angela Carter’s revisionings of Ophelia in three of her texts:
Love,
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and “The Lady of the House of Love.” Throughout these texts, connections between Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Gothic representations of Ophelia, and Carter’s characters are illustrated. The essay further seeks to examine the progression, development, and growth of the Ophelia character throughout these three texts.
Papers and Lectures
- | - Panels
- | - Workshops
Roundtable Discussions
- | - Additional Presentations
- | - Afternoon Classes
PANELS
Panels feature several speakers discussing a topic before an audience. Panels may take questions or discussion from the audience, but are not required to do so.
Beyond Werewolves: Telling and Retelling Shapeshifter Stories
Janni Lee Simner, Cora Anderson, Mette Ivie Harrison, Andrea Horbinski, Cindy Pon
Janni Lee Simner’s post-apocalyptic YA fantasy trilogy—Bones of Faerie, Faerie Winter, and the forthcoming Faerie After—is set after the war with Faerie has destroyed the world, leaving behind a land filled with deadly magic. She’s also published an Icelandic saga-based fantasy, Thief Eyes (featuring a shapeshifting polar bear); four children’s books; and more than thirty short stories, including one in the Welcome to Bordertown anthology. She’s currently working on a New Mexico-based fantasy (featuring shapeshifting ravens, owls, jaguars, and javelinas).
Cora Anderson has been an avid reader of everything she could get her hands on for as long as she can remember. She is especially fond of fantasy and young adult literature, both prose and manga. Cora has a history degree from the University of Southern California, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where she reads, cooks, and plays entirely too many video games. She is currently working on a young adult novel about a were-pigeon.
Mette Ivie Harrison writes YA fantasy, including Mira, Mirror, about the mirror in the Snow White fairy tale, and The Princess and The Hound, an original fairy tale, as well as the upcoming The Rose Throne series. She also is a competitive triathlete and an ultramarathoner.
Andrea Horbinski is a PhD student in Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, researching hypernationalist manga, and is the editorial assistant for Mechademia, a peer-reviewed journal of anime, manga, and fan culture studies. She has discussed anime, manga, history, folklore, and fandom at a variety of academic and fannish conferences, and is the 2012 Chair of the Internationalization & Outreach Committee of the Organization for Transformative Works.
Cindy Pon is the author of Silver Phoenix (Greenwillow, 2009), which was named one of the Top Ten Fantasy and Science Fiction Books for Youth by the American Library Association’s Booklist, and one of 2009’s best fantasy, science fiction and horror by VOYA. The sequel to Silver Phoenix, titled Fury of the Phoenix, was published in April 2011. Her first published short story will appear in Diverse Energies, a multicultural YA dystopian anthology from Tu Books (November 2012). Cindy has also studied Chinese brush painting for over a decade. Visit her website at http://www.cindypon.com/.
From pookas and kitsune to selkies and frog princes, shapeshifters have long played a role in the stories we tell. Although wolves may be contemporary fantasy’s most beloved werecreatures, other animal shifters appear everywhere from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books to Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake novels. This panel will take a wider look at the range and nature of shapeshifters of all species in folklore and fantasy novels, at the varied stories different creatures lead us to tell and retell, and at where our fascination with taking on forms not our own comes from in the first place.
Fans and Fandom as (Re)Tellers of Tales
Andrea Horbinski, Marie Brennan, Rachel Manija Brown, Hallie Tibbetts
Andrea Horbinski is a PhD student in Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, researching hypernationalist manga, and is the editorial assistant for Mechademia, a peer-reviewed journal of anime, manga, and fan culture studies. She has discussed anime, manga, history, folklore, and fandom at a variety of academic and fannish conferences, and is the 2012 Chair of the Internationalization & Outreach Committee of the Organization for Transformative Works.
Marie Brennan habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and Onyx Court series of London-based historical fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire, the last of which was named one of Kirkus Review’s Best Books of 2011. She has also published more than thirty short stories, in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. More information can be found at http://www.swantower.com/.
Rachel Manija Brown has written and sold books, graphic novels, TV series, magazine articles, short stories, poetry, and a video game. She is the author of the memoir All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India, about her ashram childhood. She and Sherwood Smith collaborated on the animated TV series Game World, which they sold to the Jim Henson Company, and on the post-apocalyptic YA book series The Change. Rachel lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is studying at Antioch University to receive her MA in clinical psychology.
Hallie Tibbetts has worked in a variety of media, social work, education, event planning, and administrative positions, and is currently a research and fundraising assistant in human services. She graduated from the Denver Publishing Institute in summer 2010. In her spare time, she volunteers for Narrate Conferences and the Cybils awards, blogs about books, beta reads, and is a publishing intern.
It’s a common jump from loving a book, a story, a TV show, or a movie, to wanting to play around with its elements oneself. Fandom offers many girls and women a space in which to do just that. This panel looks at fandom and fans as retellers of tales, asking questions such as: what kinds of stories do fans choose to retell? What are some of the most common, or most interesting, kinds of fannish retellings? What is the line between “fannish” and “professional” retellings of stories such as fairy tales? What makes fandom (and retelling) original and creative?
Sponsor:
Amy Tenbrink
Fantasy by the Numbers: Decoding the Writer Hive Mind
Jennifer Udden, Amy Boggs, Emily Gref, Rachel Kory, Bridget Smith
Jennifer Udden is a young agent with Donald Maass Literary Agency and assistant to Donald Maass. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2008 and focuses on representing speculative fiction and imaginative mysteries.
A lifelong lover of story, Amy Boggs worked at a small children’s bookstore throughout her teenage years. At Vassar College, story was still her focus as she took classes on fairy tales, One Thousand and One Nights, and tapestries. She now works with speculative fiction of all flavors at Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Emily Gref is an associate agent at Lowenstein Associates literary agency.
Rachel Kory is an associate and digital strategist at Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc.
Bridget Smith is a graduate of Brown University and an associate agent at Dunham Literary. Apart from books, she likes television, swords and seas, and ancient things.
Five young agents from four leading literary agencies want to know: what is going on in the writer hive mind? To this end, they played detective in May and June of 2012, taking a look at their slush piles with an eye for data. Who is writing what? What does the slush pile have to say about race, gender, and theme, especially as concerns fantasy? And how does this play out in publishing writ large?
The Female Gaze and Female Desire in Fiction
Kate Elliott, Nalo Hopkinson, Malinda Lo, Sarah Rees Brennan
Kate Elliott is the author of numerous works of fantasy and science fiction. Her most recent Spiritwalker Trilogy (Cold Magic and Cold Fire) is an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency adventure fantasy with airships, sharks, and lawyer dinosaurs. In her spare time, she paddles outrigger canoes.
Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born Canadian, is a novelist and short story writer. Her young adult novel The Chaos appeared from Margaret K. McElderry Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in April 2012. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Malinda Lo’s first novel, Ash, a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian twist, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award. Her second novel, Huntress, a companion novel to Ash, is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her young adult science fiction duology, beginning with Adaptation, will be published in September 2012. She lives in northern California with her partner and their dog. Visit her website at http://www.malindalo.com/.
Sarah Rees Brennan is the author of Unspoken and the Demon’s Lexicon trilogy, and co-author of Team Human. She has also written many rambling LiveJournal and Tumblr posts!
Much fiction, and much of our society, is viewed from “the male gaze.” This is a perspective in which expectations of what matters and what is worth being written about, as well as the way in which characters and events are seen and described, is from what might be called a “male view” of the world. What, then, is the female gaze? How do stories change when seen from the point of view of female desire and female agency? How do we read those stories differently? And does the critical establishment view such stories differently than those written with the more “normative” male gaze?
Sponsor:
Suzanne Rogers Gruber
Gender Masquerades
Mette Ivie Harrison, Malinda Lo, Dene Low, Janni Lee Simner
Mette Ivie Harrison writes YA fantasy, including Mira, Mirror, about the mirror in the Snow White fairy tale, and The Princess and The Hound, an original fairy tale, as well as the upcoming The Rose Throne series. She also is a competitive triathlete and an ultramarathoner.
Malinda Lo’s first novel, Ash, a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian twist, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award. Her second novel, Huntress, a companion novel to Ash, is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her young adult science fiction duology, beginning with Adaptation, will be published in September 2012. She lives in northern California with her partner and their dog. Visit her website at http://www.malindalo.com/.
Dene Low started her science fiction and fantasy journey with Heinlein, moved to Andre Norton, then Asimov, and then Tolkien, peppered with stories in all genres. She has lived her fantasy: husband, children, pilot’s license, PhD, publications, and thousands of miles on her own motorcycles. The trick is knowing what parts of the fantasy are the most rewarding, and dealing with the parts that border on horror.
Janni Lee Simner’s post-apocalyptic YA fantasy trilogy—Bones of Faerie, Faerie Winter, and the forthcoming Faerie After—is set after the war with Faerie has destroyed the world, leaving behind a land filled with deadly magic. She’s also published an Icelandic saga-based fantasy, Thief Eyes (featuring a shapeshifting polar bear); four children’s books; and more than thirty short stories, including one in the Welcome to Bordertown anthology. She’s currently working on a New Mexico-based fantasy (featuring shapeshifting ravens, owls, jaguars, and javelinas).
In television and movies, which characters are subverting our views of gender by playing the opposite role from the one that the audience expects? And what does this do to the audience? Are these shows helping us to see how gender is itself a masquerade, or do they fall back on old roles?
The Huntress and the Dude in Distress: Gender Roles in The Hunger Games
Rachel Manija Brown, Faye Bi, Marie Brennan, Artemis Grey, Shveta Thakrar
Rachel Manija Brown has written and sold books, graphic novels, TV series, magazine articles, short stories, poetry, and a video game. She is the author of the memoir All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India, about her ashram childhood. She and Sherwood Smith collaborated on the animated TV series Game World, which they sold to the Jim Henson Company, and on the post-apocalyptic YA book series The Change. Rachel lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is studying at Antioch University to receive her MA in clinical psychology.
Faye Bi was a flashlight-under-the covers reader ever since she made the conscious decision to emulate Matilda Wormwood at age nine. After earning an honors degree in anthropology at Columbia University, she began her current career in book publicity at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. Each day, she communicates with reviewers, librarians, teachers, authors, and others who love books, and considers herself living every reader’s dream.
Marie Brennan habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and Onyx Court series of London-based historical fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire, the last of which was named one of Kirkus Review’s Best Books of 2011. She has also published more than thirty short stories, in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. More information can be found at http://www.swantower.com/.
Artemis Grey was raised on fairy tales and the folklore of Appalachia. She’s been devouring books and regurgitating her daydreams into written words since childhood. She writes books for young adults, with a passion for capturing that elusive moment when it’s possible to choose between leaving the wonderment of childhood behind and carrying it with you throughout life. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found wrestling horses and playing with tractors. She hopes to make her readers look at the world they’ve always seen, and see the world they’ve always envisioned.
If people let her, Shveta Thakrar would eat books for dinner. Since they won’t, she settles for writing Indian-flavored fantasy. Drawing on her heritage, her experience growing up with two cultures, and her MA in German literature, she likes to explore the magic that is just out of sight as well as that which stands right in front of our faces. Other things that interest her include feminism, cultural and racial notions of beauty, and how language influences how we think. Shveta is currently working on a YA novel featuring Indian fey, bleeding thumbs, and family secrets, all in Philadelphia.
This panel will discuss gender and gender roles as they relate to characters in Suzanne Collins’s
The Hunger Games trilogy. We will focus our discussion on the changing roles of Katniss, Gale, and Peeta, but will also explore gender roles as they pertain to secondary characters and to the societies of Panem.
Retelling History
Marie Brennan, Andrea Horbinski
Marie Brennan habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and Onyx Court series of London-based historical fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire, the last of which was named one of Kirkus Review’s Best Books of 2011. She has also published more than thirty short stories, in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. More information can be found at http://www.swantower.com/.
Andrea Horbinski is a PhD student in Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, researching hypernationalist manga, and is the editorial assistant for Mechademia, a peer-reviewed journal of anime, manga, and fan culture studies. She has discussed anime, manga, history, folklore, and fandom at a variety of academic and fannish conferences, and is the 2012 Chair of the Internationalization & Outreach Committee of the Organization for Transformative Works.
Whether it simply uses the culture of the period or features real people and events in starring roles, whether it hews closely to reality or flings in vampires and zombies, historical fiction takes the past and reshapes it for a modern audience. What methods do writers use to retell history in fiction? And what obligation does the writer have to their source?
Women Who Run with Wolves and Dance with Dragons
Rachel Manija Brown, Cora Anderson, Janni Lee Simner
Rachel Manija Brown has written and sold books, graphic novels, TV series, magazine articles, short stories, poetry, and a video game. She is the author of the memoir All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India, about her ashram childhood. She and Sherwood Smith collaborated on the animated TV series Game World, which they sold to the Jim Henson Company, and on the post-apocalyptic YA book series The Change. Rachel lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is studying at Antioch University to receive her MA in clinical psychology.
Cora Anderson has been an avid reader of everything she could get her hands on for as long as she can remember. She is especially fond of fantasy and young adult literature, both prose and manga. Cora has a history degree from the University of Southern California, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where she reads, cooks, and plays entirely too many video games. She is currently working on a young adult novel about a were-pigeon.
Janni Lee Simner’s post-apocalyptic YA fantasy trilogy—Bones of Faerie, Faerie Winter, and the forthcoming Faerie After—is set after the war with Faerie has destroyed the world, leaving behind a land filled with deadly magic. She’s also published an Icelandic saga-based fantasy, Thief Eyes (featuring a shapeshifting polar bear); four children’s books; and more than thirty short stories, including one in the Welcome to Bordertown anthology. She’s currently working on a New Mexico-based fantasy (featuring shapeshifting ravens, owls, jaguars, and javelinas).
From the magic horses of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series to the psychic wolves of Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s
A Companion to Wolves, fantasy novels have featured a wide variety of soul-bonded animal companions. These bonds, which range from wish-fulfillment fantasy to outright horror, are as diverse as the creatures themselves. This panel will discuss the tropes and themes of the animal companion motif, and explore the metaphoric nature of the bonds between women and their very special animals.
Papers and Lectures
- | - Panels
- | - Workshops
Roundtable Discussions
- | - Additional Presentations
- | - Afternoon Classes
WORKSHOPS
Workshops are hands-on explorations of a topic. This category can include writing workshops, practice in strategies for teaching and learning, craft-based presentations, and other hands-on and highly interactive topics. Please note that the seating in workshop rooms is very limited to allow the presenters the maximum hands-on teaching time for each attendee, as well as to control costs that the presenters incur in providing materials. Thank you for your understanding.
The Beast Within: Creating Memorable Minor Characters
Anne Osterlund
Anne Osterlund is the author of three young adult novels: Aurelia, Academy 7, and Exile, all published by Penguin Books. Her fourth novel, Salvation, is scheduled for release in January. Academy 7 won the Spirit of Oregon Award sponsored by the Oregon Council of Teachers of English for the best young adult novel of 2009. It was also an Oregon Book Award finalist and a nominee for the ALA/YALSA Popular Paperback Award. Anne presents writing-related talks and workshops for conferences, book events, and school visits.
From swan maidens to werewolves, traditional tales have a long history of bestowing animal traits on fairy tale characters. Come learn how to use that tradition to your own writing advantage! Create minor characters with the power to leap off the page, linger in the reader’s mind, or make your audience laugh out loud.
Dramatic Dialogue
Anne Osterlund
Anne Osterlund is the author of three young adult novels: Aurelia, Academy 7, and Exile, all published by Penguin Books. Her fourth novel, Salvation, is scheduled for release in January. Academy 7 won the Spirit of Oregon Award sponsored by the Oregon Council of Teachers of English for the best young adult novel of 2009. It was also an Oregon Book Award finalist and a nominee for the ALA/YALSA Popular Paperback Award. Anne presents writing-related talks and workshops for conferences, book events, and school visits.
Use theatrical techniques to turn dialogue into drama. Nervous about writing fight scenes? Struggle with adding action to dialogue? Come choreograph an argument between the Heroine and the Hero, write your own dramatic dialogue for prose, and practice weaving dialogue together with action, setting, and emotion. Crowns, swords, and rubber chickens will be present!
How to Write a Sestina
Laura LeHew
Laura LeHew is an award-winning poet with over 375 poems appearing in over 175 national and international journals. She received her MFA in writing from the California College of the Arts, held writing residencies from Soapstone and the Montana Artists Refuge, and interned for CALYX. Laura currently facilitates two critique groups and a book-length manuscript critique group. She is the past president of the Oregon Poetry Association (and former contest chair), and is currently on the steering committee of the Lane Literary Guild. Laura edits Uttered Chaos (http://www.utteredchaos.org/).
A sestina is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet, for a total of 39 lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time. Bring six end words and come write a sestina.
Papers and Lectures
- | - Panels
- | - Workshops
Roundtable Discussions
- | - Additional Presentations
- | - Afternoon Classes
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS
Roundtables are interactive discussions of a topic led by a moderator, and attendees are encouraged to take an active part in the discussion. Please note that seating in roundtable rooms is very limited to allow everyone in the room the opportunity to participate.
E-books, E-readers, and Digital Fantasy
Amy Wilson
After several years in the travel industry, Amy Wilson returned to school to feed her other loves: literature, history, folklore, and writing. When she’s not doing homework or wrangling unruly characters and plot into submission, she enjoys watching baseball and planning her ideal summer vacation: a road trip to each major league ballpark.
This roundtable will explore the digital options available for readers of fantasy, and will also examine the rapidly-changing digital publishing landscape.
Everything’s Better with Giant Robots: Retellings and Adaptations in Anime and Manga
Cora Anderson
Cora Anderson has been an avid reader of everything she could get her hands on for as long as she can remember. She is especially fond of fantasy and young adult literature, both prose and manga. Cora has a history degree from the University of Southern California, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where she reads, cooks, and plays entirely too many video games. She is currently working on a young adult novel about a were-pigeon.
Many anime and manga series are adaptations or retellings of stories from other media. For instance,
Saiyuki is a retelling of the Chinese classic
Journey to the West, and
Romeo x Juliet is an expanded and elaborated-on version of the Shakespeare play. This roundtable will discuss retellings in anime and manga, and will explore the way that tropes and themes common to anime mesh with the original narratives they are adapting.
Fairytales Retold: The Unusual Adaptations
Valerie Estelle Frankel
Valerie Estelle Frankel has won a Dream Realm Award, an Indie Excellence Award, and a USA Book News National Best Book Award for her Henry Potty parodies. She is the author of five new and forthcoming books on pop culture: From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey in Myth and Legend, Buffy and the Heroine’s Journey, Katniss the Cattail: An Unauthorized Guide to Names and Symbols in The Hunger Games, Teaching with Harry Potter, and the inside look at fandom, Harry Potter: Still Recruiting. She keeps an extensive database of retold fairy tales and lessons on the heroine’s journey at http://www.vefrankel.com/.
We all know about the big series: Gail Carson Levine’s books, the Simon Pulse imprint, and the
Snow White, Blood Red series, plus hundreds of romance novels and even erotica. But what have writers done that appears truly special? What’s new and different for the new century? And what’s so amazing people can’t stop talking about it? This roundtable will discuss all the stand-out novels, from Malinda Lo’s
Ash to
Cinder by Marissa Meyer and
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, and will go on to consider this year’s Snow White movies and shows like
Once Upon a Time and
Grimm. By the time we’re done, we’ll have an amazing list of retellings.
A Limited Palette of Girls
Kate Elliott
Kate Elliott is the author of numerous works of fantasy and science fiction. Her most recent Spiritwalker Trilogy (Cold Magic and Cold Fire) is an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency adventure fantasy with airships, sharks, and lawyer dinosaurs. In her spare time, she paddles outrigger canoes.
In American culture there are strong visual and cultural images and assumptions associated with celebrity, Hollywood actresses, and the “ideal” woman. This can include any number of diverse aspects of personhood, from gender identity to religion to ethnicity to personal appearance to personality, ambition, background, and goals. Is there a limited palette of girls and women in our fiction? How diverse are we really, and what limitations do we put on ourselves as writers and readers?
Sponsor:
Hallie Tibbetts
The Mockingjay as Folklore—Retelling and Re-examining Katniss’s Story
Katie Hoffman
Like many others of her generation, Katie Hoffman grew up with Hermione, Lucy Pevensie, and Alanna of Trebond. Her childhood years were full of anxiety about the fate of mankind, and admiration for some truly epic female warriors. Not much has changed now that she’s grown, except that she hopes her heroines use correct grammar when they save the day.
Can Suzanne Collins’s
The Hunger Games be understood as folklore? Katniss’s journey is that of the archetypal hero in many aspects. If viewed from a folklore perspective, the narrative role of storytelling and the storyteller is complicated, especially in regards to Katniss’s story versus the Mockingjay’s, and in the ownership and creation of that storytelling process. After outlining folklore conventions evident in
The Hunger Games, we will discuss how this perspective alters and illuminates the role of stories retold, again and again. Perhaps we can even answer the question behind it all: just whose story was Collins telling?
Sponsor:
Lauren Kent
Stories That Get Around: Shared Themes in Folklore
Erynn Kerwin
Erynn Kerwin is a veggisaurus from Minnesota by way of Colorado. This is her fourth Sirens conference and first time on the Pacific side of life. She enjoys crafting, sewing, bicycling, playing ukulele, and making friends with bibliophiles and writers.
Join us as we examine the fabric of tales from around the world in order to identify the common patterns, universal elements, and Jungian archetypes woven within them. We’ll thread our way through examples of sea maidens, conditional betrothments, and old bone mothers from various cultural cloths, and will do our best to unfold the significance of these symbols in our modern world.
Virgin Savior to Murderous Succubus: Women’s Sexual Roles in Fantasy and Folklore
Cindy Pon
Cindy Pon is the author of Silver Phoenix (Greenwillow, 2009), which was named one of the Top Ten Fantasy and Science Fiction Books for Youth by the American Library Association’s Booklist, and one of 2009’s best fantasy, science fiction and horror by VOYA. The sequel to Silver Phoenix, titled Fury of the Phoenix, was published in April 2011. Her first published short story will appear in Diverse Energies, a multicultural YA dystopian anthology from Tu Books (November 2012). Cindy has also studied Chinese brush painting for over a decade. Visit her website at http://www.cindypon.com/.
Why can only a virgin girl tame a unicorn? And what is the origin of the succubus—always a beautiful, seductive woman, who is not only hyper-sexual, but often intent on killing her male lovers? How have these portrayals of women in mythology and folklore affected fantasy writing to this day? And how much of women’s sexuality in current fantasy novels is reflective of our own modern social mores?
Sponsor:
Amy Tenbrink
When Worlds Collide: Fanfiction and Publishing
Amy Wilson
After several years in the travel industry, Amy Wilson returned to school to feed her other loves: literature, history, folklore, and writing. When she’s not doing homework or wrangling unruly characters and plot into submission, she enjoys watching baseball and planning her ideal summer vacation: a road trip to each major league ballpark.
This roundtable will discuss published works that trace their origins to fanfiction, published authors who write fanfiction, authors who either condone or promote fanfiction, and authors who do not. We will explore the value of derivative works in a thoughtful and objective manner.
Sponsor:
Suzanne Scott
Papers and Lectures
- | - Panels
- | - Workshops
Roundtable Discussions
- | - Additional Presentations
- | - Afternoon Classes
ADDITIONAL PRESENTATIONS
Creating Proposals, Abstracts, and Compendium Submissions for Sirens
Sirens Staff
Members of the Sirens staff and this year’s vetting board will be on hand to answer questions.
Are you thinking of submitting a program item for next year? Want tips on how to prepare your ideas for consideration by the vetting board? We’ll cover abstract formats for papers, panels, workshops, afternoon classes, and roundtable discussions. Also, your talk, paper, workshop, or roundtable discussion can become part of a published book: every other year, Sirens produces a compendium of presentations. We will discuss formatting issues, editing, bibliographic citation and why it matters, and some differences between writing for oral delivery and writing for print. The presentation will be very informal; attendees are welcome to drop in for a few minutes to ask a quick question or to use the time for group brainstorming.
Sponsor:
Suzanne Scott
Papers and Lectures
- | - Panels
- | - Workshops
Roundtable Discussions
- | - Additional Presentations
- | - Afternoon Classes
AFTERNOON CLASSES
Dance with Me!
Rebecca Mintz
Rebecca Mintz’s first experience with Scottish country dance was being dragged through the Flowers of Edinburgh in 2001. She had no idea what was happening, but she loved it. While attending Western Washington University, she had the opportunity to learn more, and in May 2009, Rebecca earned her Preliminary Teaching Certificate from the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. She currently enjoys dancing with both the Southwest Washington State and the Portland branches of the RSCDS.
There are many ways to tell a story, including with dance. Please join us for an introductory class on Scottish country dancing. This is a fun and social style of group dancing (and it’s really hard to step on your partner’s toes!). The class will include two ceilidh (informal) dances, one basic ballroom dance, and the stories they tell. Enthusiastic participation is necessary, but previous experience is not.
Siren with a Sword: Fencing 101
Manda Lewis, Marie Brennan
Manda Lewis holds a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering and served in the Air Force for seven years. She is currently working on her master’s of tourism administration at George Washington University full-time, and is looking forward to putting it to use in the event and meeting planning industry. Manda has always made it a habit to draw, color, and doodle on just about everything within reach and loves themes far more than anyone really should. She also loves a mean game of Quidditch. Manda has been a volunteer for Phoenix Rising, Terminus, and Sirens for the last five years.
Marie Brennan habitually pillages her background in anthropology, archaeology, and folklore for fictional purposes. She is the author of the Doppelganger duology of Warrior and Witch, and Onyx Court series of London-based historical fantasies: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, A Star Shall Fall, and With Fate Conspire, the last of which was named one of Kirkus Review’s Best Books of 2011. She has also published more than thirty short stories, in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. More information can be found at http://www.swantower.com/.
Have you always wanted to join your favorite character on the training grounds where she first picks up a blade? Have you wished yourself in her place as she readies for the attack? This class will provide you the opportunity to do just that! Join us as we explore the history, terminology, and rules of the sport of fencing. Then you’ll take up a foil and practice what you’ve learned with your fellow attendees. You will see that fencing is not simply about overpowering your opponent, it’s about planning and strategy. We recommend wearing comfortable or athletic clothing.
Thread Magic: Hand Sewing for Beginners
Manda Lewis, Erynn Kerwin
Manda Lewis holds a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering and served in the Air Force for seven years. She is currently working on her master’s of tourism administration at George Washington University full-time, and is looking forward to putting it to use in the event and meeting planning industry. Manda has always made it a habit to draw, color, and doodle on just about everything within reach and loves themes far more than anyone really should. She also loves a mean game of Quidditch. Manda has been a volunteer for Phoenix Rising, Terminus, and Sirens for the last five years.
Erynn Kerwin is a veggisaurus from Minnesota by way of Colorado. This is her fourth Sirens conference and first time on the Pacific side of life. She enjoys crafting, sewing, bicycling, playing ukulele, and making friends with bibliophiles and writers.
Alanna, in Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet, says that a woman with a bit of string in her hands can bring down a troupe of armed knights if her will is strong enough. Thread magic weaves its way throughout fantasy literature, and we’ve even seen some of our favorite characters dabble in textile arts for fun or necessity. This class will teach participants the basics of construction and decorative stitching. By the end, participants will create a final project for charity, and will be a little more armed when they find a bit of string in their hands. A $2 donation for materials is requested.
Papers and Lectures
- | - Panels
- | - Workshops
Roundtable Discussions
- | - Additional Presentations
- | - Afternoon Classes
Vetting Board
Cora Anderson has been an avid reader of everything she could get her hands on for as long as she can remember. She is especially fond of fantasy and young adult literature, both prose and manga. Cora has a history degree from the University of Southern California, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where she works as a technical writer. When not working, writing, or reading, Cora enjoys cooking, playing video games, and exploring Seattle.
Sharon K. Goetz works for a print-and-digital project that creates critical editions. Too fond of textuality for her own good, she has also written software manuals, taught college writing courses oriented around speculative fiction and King Arthur, and completed a Ph.D. investigating medieval English chronicles amidst their manuscript contexts. Sharon served as Academic Programming Coordinator for Terminus and Phoenix Rising and as Programming Secretary for The Witching Hour; in 2002 she chaired the Medieval Performativity conference that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the UC Berkeley Beowulf Marathon. Amongst Sharon’s leisure pursuits are reading widely, playing video games, and volunteering as a Strange Horizons copy-editor.
Mette Ivie Harrison writes romantic fantasy for the young adult market, including Mira, Mirror, The Princess and the Hound, The Princess and the Bear, and the newly-released Tris and Izzie. She has a PhD in Germanic literature and languages from Princeton University, and wrote her dissertation on the topic of the female Bildungsroman in the eighteenth century.
Andrea Horbinski is a PhD student in Japanese history at the University of California, Berkeley. She was previously a Fulbright Fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, researching hypernationalist manga and is the editorial assistant for Mechademia, a peer-reviewed journal of anime, manga, and fan culture studies.
Mallory Clare Loehr is the editor-in-chief of Random House Books for Young Readers, where she has worked for twenty years! She edits everything from six-page board books to six-hundred-page young adult titles, with a particular fondness for fantasy geared toward any age. She is Tamora Pierce’s editor for the Tortall books featuring Kel, Alianne (Aly), and Beka Cooper. Other fantasy/SF authors she has edited include Isobelle Carmody, Esther Friesner, and Lauren McLaughlin. She has also worked on all the Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope Osborne—the ongoing best-selling series that has launched many a fantasy reader. Mallory is in publishing because she is a reader first and foremost, although her reading volume has been stunted by the arrival of two children. Once upon a time she read ten books a week, frequented flea markets, and danced Argentine tango late into the night. Now she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two small(ish) children, and one cat. In her (little) spare time, she reads as well as organizes libraries at home, at work, and at her son’s school. She is addicted to parentheses and footwear.
Sherwood Smith writes fantasy and science fiction novels and short fiction. Her stories have been finalists for the Nebula and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, and her characters, including Meliara, Wren, and Inda, are fantasy favorites. Her recently published works include Crown Duel and its prequel, A Stranger to Command; the four Inda books; Sasharia en Garde: Once a Princess and Twice a Prince; Senrid; the Wren series; and stories in Lace and Blade, Firebirds, and Firebirds Soaring: An Anthology of Original Speculative Fiction. In September 2010, DAW published Coronets and Steel, a Ruritanian romance. In addition to coauthoring the Exordium series with Dave Trowbridge, she has published novels set in others’ worlds, including Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda, L. Frank Baum’s Oz, and (with Andre Norton) the Solar Queen and Time Traders universes.
If people let her, Shveta Thakrar would eat books for dinner. Since they won’t, she settles for writing Indian-flavored fantasy. Drawing on her heritage, her experience growing up with two cultures, and her MA in German literature, she likes to explore the magic that is just out of sight as well as that which stands right in front of our faces. Other things that interest her include feminism, cultural and racial notions of beauty, and how language influences how we think. Shveta is currently working on a YA novel featuring Indian fey, bleeding thumbs, and family secrets, all in Philadelphia. She blogs at http://shveta-thakrar.livejournal.com/.
2012 Call for Proposals
CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Sirens
Stevenson, Washington
October 11–14, 2012
A conference on women in fantasy literature presented by Narrate Conferences, Inc.
Sirens, a conference focused on literary contributions by women to the fantasy genre and on fantasy works with prominent female characters, will take place October 11–14, 2012, in Stevenson, Washington, near Portland, Oregon. The conference seeks papers, panels, interactive workshops, roundtable discussions, and other presentations suitable for an audience of academics, professionals, educators, librarians, authors, and fantasy readers.
The theme for 2012 is “tales retold,” and presenters are invited to explore fantasy based on extant stories. Programming prompted by the theme is encouraged; presenters are not limited to this theme, however, and proposals that address specific aspects of a work or series, works related by other themes, and studies of the fantasy genre across all disciplines are encouraged as well. A non-exhaustive list of sample topics includes literary analyses of novels; studies of genre history; use of fantasy works in schools and libraries for education; examination of related business and legal issues; media and fan studies; craft-based workshops in writing, art, and publishing; and overviews of how fantasy works fit into larger contexts.
Presentation submission to the vetting board is by online system only. No other format or contact will be considered. The online submission system is located at <http://www.sirensconference.org/submissions/>.
The deadline for proposals is May 6, 2012, and notices regarding proposals will be sent no later than June 2, 2012. Those requiring an early decision in order to obtain travel funding should contact the programming coordinator at (programming at sirensconference.org).
At the time of proposal submission, presenters must provide an abstract of 300-500 words, a 50-100 word presentation summary for publication, and a presenter biography of no more than 100 words. Those wishing to submit a proposal for an interactive roundtable discussion may submit a brief explanation of a topic and a list of 10-15 sample discussion questions in lieu of a formal abstract; workshop proposals may be formatted as lesson plans. Afternoon classes—interactive demonstrations of interest to fantasy readers that may be less formally related to the theme—may also be presented as lesson plans. Presenters must be available to attend the conference in its entirety; no partial or day registrations will be offered.
Conference papers will be collected for publication at a later date. Presenters must be registered for the conference no later than July 1, 2012. For more information about programming, the review process, suggested timing and structure of presentations, audio-visual availability, and proposal submissions, please see the Sirens website at <http://www.sirensconference.org/programming/>. Questions specifically about programming may be directed to (programming at sirensconference.org), and general conference inquiries may be sent to (help at sirensconference.org).
Sirens is a presentation of Narrate Conferences, Inc., a 501(c)(3) charitable organization with the mission of organizing academic, literary, and exploratory educational conferences that address themes of interest to scholars, educators, students, professionals, and readers. For inquiries about Narrate Conferences, Inc., please write to (info at narrateconferences.org).
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Conference - Guests of Honor - Schedule - Books and Breakfast - Reading List
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