The Future Is Fiction

I'm so excited about this event that I made my own flyer for it. This is it! Some friends and I put these up around Oakland last weekend.

If you don't know Cory Doctorow, consider that he found success as a writer despite completely rejecting the corporate copyright system. Imagine having the courage of conviction to give your books away for free. I'm a big believer in open source and digital rights, but like most writers I cling to the rights to my own work, as if poems could be collectors items if we just make them scarce enough. So I'm eager to hear what Doctorow has to say on writing to make change.

If you don't know Carol Queen, I can tell you her collection Pomosexuality was life-changing for me when I was in college. I still reference it to this day. She's author of many books, including the classic Exhibitionism for the Shy. Like Cory Doctorow, her writing and her activism are intertwined. She was one of the founders of the one of the first gay youth groups in the US, and during the AIDs Her writing on safe sex during the AIDs crisis left the page and led to the development of improvements to the SAR training vital to sexologists. She's cofounder of the Center of Sex and Culture.

David Holper is the poet laureate of city of Eureka. This rising star revived the Dharma Bum spiritual pilgrimage on Mt. Tamalpais. His first novel grapples with climate change, capitalism, fast food and patriarchy...and did I mention it's funny?

If you are a writer and you want to make change in the world, this is the event for you.

Well it's the event for me, anyway. 💅

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxX9wQ_3B3Ee33oJEh5Vav74RmnbYWApvP?si=JPVsOyFe1mHS_XgC

“Here we are, back in our old situation: surprise or suspense. And we come to our old analogy of the bomb: you and I sit talking and there’s a bomb in the room. We’re having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn’t mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! the bomb goes off and they’re shocked—for 15 seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, insert the bomb, show that the bomb is placed there, establish that it’s going to go off at one o’clock—it’s now a quarter of one, ten of one—show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. “Look under the table! You fool!” Now they’re working for ten minutes, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds.”

From "Get Out of the Shower": The “Shower Scene” and Hitchcock's Narrative Style in 'Psycho' By Despina Kakoudaki

This gets at something I find challenging in writing a novel: when to reveal and how much to reveal. I've heard some advise that the author should never hold information back from the reader, more like Hitchcock is advising here. But then at the other end of the spetrum you have writers like J.J. Abrams who specialize in using a lack of info to get the audience to ask "What's in the box?".

"Get Out of the Shower": The “Shower Scene” and Hitchcock's Narrative Style in 'Psycho'