Just came across the following on the Mythopoeic Society website. I'm hoping the formatting comes through okay.
Mythcon 50
August 2-5, 2019
Mythcon 50
Looking Back, Moving Forward
DRAFT logo by Sue Dawe
San Diego, California
August 2-5, 2019
The Mythopoeic Society's final celebration of our three fiftieth anniversary celebrations: our 50th Annual Mythopoeic Conference!
Theme: Looking Back, Moving Forward
Our theme is a head-nod to Roman mythology's Janus, the god of
beginnings and endings, gates and doorways, transitions and passages and
duality.
So we are moving forward into the future while also, at least for
this Mythcon, looking backward toward the place from where we've come.
Call for Papers will be available soon.
Local artist and Mythcon favorite
Sue Dawe has agreed to run the art show and is currently working on our logo;
she gave permission to share this draft image at the top of the page.
Guests of Honor
John Crowley - Author Guest of Honor
John Crowley
was born in December, 1942, in Presque Isle, Maine, where his father,
an Army Air Corps doctor, was stationed.
He spent the war years (of which he remembers nothing) in Greenwich
Village, in a family of women: his mother, older sister, aunt and
grandmother,
and baby sister. After the war his father resumed his medical practice
in Brattleboro, Vermont, and then in 1952 took the family to Martin,
Kentucky
(pop. 700) to be medical director of a small Catholic hospital. John
read Sherlock Holmes and Thomas Costain and
Gods, Graves and Scholars,
and decided to be an archeologist.
Two years later Doctor Crowley got a better job — head of the student
infirmary at Notre Dame College (now University). John taught himself to
write blank verse, composed the beginnings of tragedies, and planned for
a career in the theater. He went to Indiana University, where he
dropped that idea,
majored in English and wrote poetry. Upon grduation, he went to New York
City. There he planned to make films, wrote screenplays that were not
produced,
and began working on documentary films. He also began writing novels,
beginning with a science fiction tale (
The Deep, 1975)and then another
(
Beasts, 1977). But he had also begun writing a much larger and odder work, which would not be finished for ten years:
Little, Big
was published in 1981 and won the
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award
in 1982. By then he had moved to the Berkshires in
western Massachusetts, where he met a woman he hired, on their first
date, to do research for him on a documentary. After some years of
friendship,
courtship, collaboration, they married and had twin daughters. In 1992,
through the intervention of Yale professors who had come to admire his
work,
he got a job teaching Creative Writing as an adjunct and later a
half-time Senior Lecturer, from which eminence he retired in June of
2018.
John won his second
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 2018 for
KA: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. We include
the closing paragraph from his
acceptance remarks
here: “When he was in his eighties,
the English writer Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, said at a
literary dinner set out for him that the way to gain honor in British
literary life
is simply to live long enough. I don't think that that's the American
standard. Which makes me doubly happy at the age I have reached to
receive again this honor that once before came to me, close to the
beginning of my career. My thanks to all who brought this about.”
Meanwhile he has all along continued to write books and stories, some
magical, most historical in one way or another, none of them very much
like any
of the others. They are described on the pages of
his website, which also includes his blog.
Verlyn Flieger - Scholar Guest of Honor
Verlyn Flieger
is a specialist in comparative mythology with a concentration in
J.R.R. Tolkien. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in
Tolkien, Celtic, Arthurian, Native American, and Norse myth. She holds
an M.A. (1972)
and Ph.D. (1977) from The Catholic University of America, and has been
associated with the University of Maryland since 1976. Retired from
teaching at
the University of Maryland in 2012, she is Professor Emerita in the
Department of English at UMD. She teaches courses online at
Signum University.
Her best-known books are
Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World (1983; revised edition, 2002);
A Question of Time: J. R. R.
Tolkien's Road to Faerie, which won the
1998 Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies; and
Interrupted Music:
The Making of Tolkien's Mythology (2005). She won a second
Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies in 2002
for
Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, which she co-edited with Carl Hostetter, and a third
Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies in 2013 for
Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien.
With David Bratman and Michael D. C. Drout, she is co-editor of
Tolkien
Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review.
Verlyn has also written
Pig Tale and
The Inn at Corbies’ Caww, a novella,
Avilion in
The Doom of Camelot,
an anthology of Arthurian fiction edited by James Lowder, and a short
story, “Green Hill Country” in Doug Anderson's fantasy anthology,
Seekers of Dreams.
Location
Please join us in
San Diego, California, for Mythcon 50. San Diego is a wonderful
"destination city" where Mythcon has been held only once before in 1991 (
Mythcon 22)
and is well worth the return.
Early Mythopoeic conferences
were held primarily at colleges and universities,
a more-affordable option back in the late 1960s through the 1980s; in
the last decade Mythcons have been primarily hotel-based and we find
this to
be a kind of two-edged sword: hotels are almost always more comfortable
in which to stay
but much more challenging for shared meals,
which many of us really enjoy. They are more expensive housing but
sometimes less expensive function space (we must guarantee a high-enough
number
of room nights and spend a lot of money on food and beverage) but very
expensive audio/visual support. These choices are always the challenge
in
planning every Mythcon.
For Mythcon 50, we are harkening back to our roots and will be on a university campus with very nice meeting space.
Registration is now open
here.
Specific details and room & board packages will be available soon.
Our plan will include breakfast and dinner (Friday and Saturday) or
banquet
(Sunday) in the room & board package; lunch will be on our own with
many close options from which to choose. For people who aren't able or
willing
to stay in a dorm, there are several hotels on the trolley line, to
which we'll link in the future.
