Mythcon 44: Day 2
This is why you should go to Mythcon: because when you’re not expecting it, someone will give you an insight that will change your work, open a door, shake up your point of view.
For me that moment came at about 11:25 in the morning. Remember that professor of English from Nova Scotia I mentioned yesterday? Turns out that Prof. Anna Smol presented a talk today (I’m posting after midnight, so technically yesterday) on “Tolkien’s Painterly Style” that clearly delineated the techniques that set the master mythmaker’s prose a cut above the rest. When she contrasted a Tolkien passage with a descriptive passage randomly selected from another author, it was as if blinders had been lifted from my eyes. I could not only see what a fine tuning of my own writing could accomplish, but I’d been handed the tuning fork with which to go for perfect pitch, if I dared. A rare gift indeed!
Another gift arrived in the form of Verlyn Flieger’s focused analysis of tree spirits in The Lord of the Rings. I’ve wanted to meet her for a while now, and I was not disappointed; her approach to mythic work is as insightful as her CV suggested.
Which highlights another plus of Mythcon: Its small scale makes it an intimate gathering where you can’t help but have personal interaction with presenters and honored guests. These people know their stuff to a nearly subatomic level of detail (at tonight’s Bardic Circle, an ace linguist rattled off the Lord’s Prayer first in Old English and then in Middle English, so we could compare the evolution of the language!), which would be intimidating except for the fact that you’ve had ice cream with them earlier in the convention, and they’re all so unassuming and damn friendly.
Not every forum is going to be a match for your particular interest, and sometimes it can be tough to tell which presentations those will be. But there’s enough quality—and fun (Buffy the Vampire Slayer presentation, anyone? Or a performance by a wildly enthusiastic fiddler band?)—that you will stumble onto satisfaction despite yourself.
Your 11:25 AM epiphany awaits.
Thanks for the shout-out! I’m glad you are enjoying Mythcon so much. Just wait till you see the events on tap for tonight!
I can’t wait, JBC! (I should mention that Janet Brennan Croft was the presenter of the aforementioned Buffy paper. Nicely done!)
Thank you even so much!
Thank you for your kind words.
I admire your ability to write a report at the end of the day! I find I’m so conferenced-out by midnight, I’m pretty useless for that kind of thing.