incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

troisroyaumes asked for advice on moderating con panels, and I kind of blurted out words all over in response. Here is a tidied-up and expanded version for my future reference.

My philosophy of panel moderation is that I'm facilitating and directing a conversation among as many people as possible. The panelists are people who, if programming has done its job, have already demonstrated that they have something interesting to say on the topic. So through the panelists, we can get a concentrated burst of focused discussion out there. Then the audience will extend that in their questions—et voilà!, we've just had a conversation about something we're all interested in, with more people than would be practical if we were just sitting around in a bar.

This philosophy means I take a pretty active role as a moderator. I don't enforce a "now each person answer this question down the line" style, because I find that stultifying, but I direct traffic a lot:

• I plan the structure of the panel. I find this critical to my feeling like the panel has been productive.

  Ahead of time, I confer with the other panelists about what they'd like to talk about. Then I sketch out the main topics that we're going to cover, possibly with a preferred order, and I keep that visible in front of me, crossing things off as I go. We may not cover every thing or in the order I planned, but having a plan helps me keep things moving and cover as much ground as useful.

• I attempt to balance the flow of conversation between panelists.

  For instance, I ask panelists to follow-up on something they've just said that seems to raise obvious questions or demand elaboration, while promising another panelist who's indicated they've got something to say that they're next (and then make sure to follow through). Or I ask panelists who've not spoken yet on a particular topic if they have anything to add. (This is why I like to sit at the end of the table, so I can see all the other panelists at once.)

• I attempt to balance the flow of conversation with and among the audience.

  I do this in two major ways. First, I usually take audience questions at the close of major topics (not waiting until the end but not jumping in during the middle of a topic either). Second, I prioritize audience questions from people who haven't spoken yet.

  (I say both of those up front, because I like transparency and find it useful. And I'm explicit when I take audience questions too: "I see you, I just want to see if anyone who hasn't spoken has something to add"; or, "Okay, in the front in the green shirt, then the second row in the red hat, then across the aisle with the dragon, then we need to move on because we're running out of time: go.")

• Regardless of my plans, I listen to what the other panelists and the audience are interested in, and let that be my guide as long as it's still within the scope of the panel description.

  Once I was doing a panel with a very similar description to another I'd done, and it went in entirely different directions, so I threw out my plans and tried to fall back on "make sure everyone gets heard, make note of follow-up directions and try to use them to keep discussion going when it seems like one topic is exhausted." Another, my structure turned out to be too ambitious because a lot of people wanted to express, in very heartfelt ways, personal responses to the first part of my three-part structure, and it seemed obviously important to let that conversation happen without cutting it off too abruptly.

• ETA: one more I forgot: if it's a potentially fraught panel, I state extra ground rules up front to try and keep the panel from derailing in predictable ways (examples in one of the posts linked above). And, though you'll probably never need it, have the contact information for con security on you, too.
• ETA 2: include everyone in the conversation by remembering basic accessibility principles, thanks to sasha_feather in comments for the reminder. Make sure people can understand you/others: tell the audience to interrupt if something is inaudible; use microphones where available; show your mouth for lip-readers; summarize audience comments; don't rely solely on eye contact to identify audience members. Describe any visual materials being displayed. And not exactly accessibility, but on the topic of inclusiveness: don't assign gender to audience members (that is, don't say "the woman in the green shirt" when calling on people).

tl;dr: moderating panels is about making the conversation be the best it can. There are different ways to make that happen; these are mine.

What are yours?

(Also: no, I am not at WisCon this year. We are going to the UK for the Worldcon and I don't have enough vacation time. Alas. I hope those of you who are there have a great time.)

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Behind the cut. This is exciting!

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Here's the conference program for Pippi to Ripley: The Female Figure in Fantasy and Science Fiction, being held at Ithaca College in NY on May 5. I'm giving a talk "An Introduction to Mary Sue and Her Critical Uses and Abuses," on a panel that also has a talk on Women in Refrigerators and on gender-swap fic, so I'm looking forward to it a lot. (Also, Tamora Pierce is the keynote speaker, which is cool.)

Question for you all: it seems to me that I don't see Mary Sues (or Gary Stus, if you prefer that terminology) in slash fic. First, of course, I see very few canon/OC slash pairings (people seem to do crossovers if they aren't feeling any of the canon dynamics). But the slant taken on canon male characters in slash seems to me to be geared toward making them objects not subjects, or to put it more concretely, woobiefication seems to be undertaken to make them suffer more prettily for the authors'/readers' aesthetic appreciation, not so that authors/readers can use them as placeholders for themselves. But this is just my impression and, of course, I don't write the stuff, so what do you all think?

(By the way, I had not noticed TV Tropes' opening quote when I picked this icon. Great minds, apparently.) comment(s) | add comment (how-to) | link

[Written on the train today after the wifi went out.]

I have literally been carrying paper notes from Arisia around in my shoulder bag since January, hoping to find time to write up some of the other panels. I particularly wanted to do the one about unreliable narrators, which was late at night and sovay and I got a little tipsy on fatigue and trading references, to the point where we kind of--well, not kind of, did--took over the entire panel. Fortunately I know the other panelists (ckd and Sarah Smith) were well able to interject if they wanted to.

Unfortunately my notes are more cryptic than useful at this point, months later. But what the panel boiled down to is that sovay, especially, and I can apparently come up with more kinds of unreliable narrators than I would have thought. I'm not going to go back and quote the panel description because it was pretty weird and unhelpful, but we definitely did not agree with its suggestion that an unreliable narrator correlates in any useful way with genre.

Let's see, how to organize what I do remember or can reconstruct? We talked about the usual unreliable first-person narrators, those who are doing it deliberately (famous Agatha Christie book, Liar which I have not read, Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief [with a digression into why everyone should read those books, or at least the first three]), The Fortunate Fall which opens with the narrator promising us that we will close the book knowing less about her than we did before--I don't know if we know less, but we certainly do not know how she feels about the events of the end of the book) and those who are unreliable because they are, e.g., writing for their own eyes and so leave things out/phrase things in a realistic but potentially misleading way (Agyar, other epistolary works). There's also the narrators who are unreliable just because people are unreliable--I think I told the anecdote of being in court, hearing my opponent say something and thinking, "Ah-ha! A concession!" and writing it down, and then getting the audio recording and discovering it was no such thing. We mentioned The Innkeeper's Song, which is multiple-first, as an example doing of this well.

Then we went further afield: is there such a thing as unreliable third? Well, there's the tight-filtered third that e.g., Lois McMaster Bujold does, that is very strongly colored by the POV character's personality and limitations, so they might draw incorrect conclusions etc., but it's usually reasonably clear to the reader the way they're limited. There's the third-person POV character who is carefully not thinking about things (one of Garrett's Lord Darcy stories). (I was talking with coffeeandink recently about a story, fanfic so it's not known to most of you, where I guess the POV character was doing this so much that I literally could not tell how the POV character, or half the other characters, felt about anything emotional, which was kind of frustrating.) I think the third-person question is where an example sovay gave comes in, a book called Camomile Lawn which involves a present-day thread and a retrospective thread that interplay revealingly.

We went off into fake histories, where the historical and mythical interpretations of events are shown to be different from "what really happened," or at least how the characters they were happening to understood them--Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna. Then there's the weirdness that is Mary Gentle's Ash, which sovay described because I didn't like it and have forgotten most of it, but which seems to have had the act of translating and publishing history change the present day (?). And there's the cheerful disregard for accuracy that is Paarfi in Steven Brust's Dumas pastiches, where Paarfi is writing historical romances with, for instance, conversations between only two characters, neither of whom would ever talk to him (probably he has ones between characters who die before they could have either, too). (I'm sure we could do an entire panel on narrators in Brust.)

I have a note that says "trauma," which I think is meant to refer to another reason why a narrator of whatever type might be unreliable. I also have a note that says "Twin Peaks," and I have no idea what we meant.

Anyway. That's what I remember or can reconstruct at this point, at least while my brains are melting out of my ears in this sauna-like Amtrak train. What are your favorite unreliable narrators, what are some interesting variations or possibilities that you've seen, what are some examples you don't think worked? (Mark spoilers, please.) comment(s) | add comment (how-to) | link

Lunacon was kind of a mixed bag for me. My panels were so-so and I'm not sure the demographic is what I've come to want in a con. But on the whole I'm glad I went; I'm not sure if I'll go back, it depends on logistical factors and how programming looks and so forth, but at least I've been.

Most of my panels there's not much to say about. The first one was on the Hobbit movie; it was fun and had a good crowd, though it is not super-useful to have on a panel that is explicitly about the details of a movie adaptation, someone who's never seen the movie and rejects the entire idea.

The next panel was the only panel I really want to talk more about—though I'm happy to answer questions or hear thoughts about anything:

When the Magic Comes Back

From Queen City Jazz to Bordertown to Tinker to The City, Not Long After, magic coming back to our mundane world is one of the few ways we see fantasy set in the future. Why is it so often associated with apocalyspe? Do authors just not want to have to write about science and technology trying to come to grips with magic and vice versa, or is something more fundamental going on?

Carole Ann Moleti (m), Myke Cole, Kate Nepveu, Laura Anne Gilman, Michael A. Ventrella

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And then my Saturday ended with three panels that all had very, very few people come, which was kind of depressing. ( Collapse )

Then I went to my room and re-read more of A Memory of Light and then went to the MaltCon party (a regular event, hence the name), which scifantasy had recommended to me and which Dennis McCunney was kind enough to invite me to. I had a good time, though I did not partake of any of the alcoholic beverages. People did attempt to diagnose what I didn't like about the one whisky I'd had previously, which was kind of hilarious because it involved "Did you make this face?", complete with example (conclusion: too much peat; recommendation: Irish whisky), but I never got around to implementing the recommendation.

Bed at a reasonable-ish hour for cons, up for breakfast and finishing my AMoL re-read, literally half an hour before the panel discussing it . . . at which we had one audience member, who hadn't read it yet. But they said they wanted spoilers, so we talked a lot about all our many feelings, occasionally stopping to explain things to them. I am going to do booklog posts about that book next, though, so I'm leaving that for now.

Then I packed and checked out and headed to the EReading Device Petting Zoo. Unfortunately I'd discovered earlier that my beloved 5" Sony eInk reader refused to charge and its battery was super-low, so I spent some time nervous about whether I'd be able to demonstrate it for people, but it came through and I got to show three different people that and my Nexus 7 and give them specific advice. That made me happy, even if I had to do so while the rest of the panelists were talking.

(I am going to also do a Nexus 7 post next, so I will hold off on talking about that too. Also the Sony only disliked that charger, for some reason, so all is well.)

Anyway, Lunacon is a reasonable drive away and there may be years when it overlaps usefully with family visits. But honestly I'm starting to feel much more engaged by cons that have reasonable proportions of people my generation or even (gasp!) the one before it and of non-white people (or, if I can't get proportionality, breaking double-digits would be something). And though I realize there were significant logistical hurdles in people finding programming that interested them this year, again, I can't help but feel like my programming interests are not a good match to those of the larger con membership. So, I guess we'll see; I won't rule out a return but I'm not very excited by the prospect or feeling a big shot of fannish energy (in contrast, I rode the Arisia high for weeks afterward, and I still want to at least write up my scribbles from the unreliable narrators panel where sovay and I got a little drunk on examples).

Next fannishly, drafting my Mary Sue quasi-academic talk for early May, and then WisCon!

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where scifantasy was kind enough to bring me to program-participants registration; we'll see if tomorrow the tour sunk in or if my brain was just too tired to absorb anything.

At any rate, I am here, I have permanent-markered myself a name tent (which smells so strongly that I am tempted to put it in the room's fridge, or maybe out on the balcony), I have a program grid and there doesn't seem, on a fast glance at the late-night programming, to be anything awful there--and hey, fans of color meetup in the con suite tomorrow at 1 p.m.!--so all in all, things are pretty decent. Now I am going to make preliminary notes for my many, many panels tomorrow and then go the fuck to sleep.

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I am moderating a panel tomorrow on fannish migrations, the description for which is:

Online Fandom Migration
Birch
Sat 4:00 PM

As the center of fanfiction and other online creative fannish activity moved from individual websites to LiveJournal to AO3 to Tumblr, what changed about fannish culture? What if you don't like the new platform? Who is still hanging out on the old ones and why? And where is it going next?

Kate Nepveu (mod), Arthur D. Hlavaty, Joshua Kronengold, Ben Yalow

But I am not a fanfic writer, nor do I use Twitter much or Tumblr at all, and I suspect that my co-panelists are largely the same.

Since I hate panels that are about something completely different than their descriptions, talk to me! I hope to be able to recruit people at-con, but if not, at least I can bring in second-hand comments and ask for reactions, parallels, etc.?

(The move to AO3 I can talk about, I watched that and I use AO3 as a reader.)

I'm posting this to my little-used Twitter, but do feel free to post it on Tumblr—seriously, the only one I have is for Con or Bust—just please at least drop links here, so I can find the comments? *is aware of irony*

Thanks for helping me make this a better panel!

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Collapsing in a little heap and quivering.

Which is to say: here is my Lunacon schedule for this weekend, which will test my limits. (I deliberately offered to do more than usual because I wouldn't be there Friday and I'd been invited. I think this may be one more than I asked but I can't decide what to drop, so . . . )

ETA: updated as of Thursday night; possibly still not final?

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Anyone else going? Apparently the programming schedule is traditionally issued very close to the actual con (which is next weekend), so I don't know what if anything I'm on yet, but I'll be eating meals at some point, at least. (I'm getting in late Friday and leaving Sunday mid-day sometime.)

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I've had a lovely time! I'm about to have breakfast and then hide in my room until checkout working on Con or Bust's website upgrade. But if we talked and you'd like to associate DW/LJ handle (or blog, or Twitter feed, or whatever) to face, I would love it if you'd comment here—all comments are screened, and you don't have to be logged in (and on DW, I can reply to you without automatically unscreening).

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