In Bristol with Diana Wynne Jones: Day 1
Aug. 10th, 2019 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustWhere did the DWJ Conference experience begin? With a plunge into re-reading the books? Or, as I suggested in my previous post, with getting lost first on the way to the hotel, then within the hotel? At breakfast, when I spotted a fellow guest carrying a copy of Charmed Life, and she joined me and explained that she had won it in a raffle at a convention (possibly London WorldCon), and showed me the tiny slip of paper inscribed: "I belong to Chrestomanci Castle"?
Technically, it didn't start until yesterday afternoon. I spent the morning ambling around a very small part of the city, but I'll save that for a picture-heavy post. Just one tourist view of the waterfront to be going on with:
By midday I was at the Watershed, the conference venue, drinking coffee. Overheard from the next table, "Everybody has to go on a journey, right?" She had no connection with the conference, but once you start thinking about Diana Wynne Jones, you see traces of her world everywhere. The opposite is also true: almost as soon as I had completed registration, put on my dressing gown (in honour of Chrestomanci), picked up my life-saving fan (with the Howl's Moving Castle artwork) and declined the opportunity of a craft workshop, I fell into conversation with someone who knew someone (her cousin) who lived in Durham, was in fact a close neighbour, and whose parents I had known a generation ago. The fantasy world borders the real one, and that cuts both ways.
The first (not exactly) formal paper of the conference was Farah Mendlesohn's Everything I learned about running a convention I learned from Diana Wynne Jones. This had started life as an assemblage of quotations from Deep Secret and accumulated lines from other books: a delightful entertainment for an audience who could be relied on to recognise all the references, and see why they were - or were not - relevant to the organisation of conventions.
Next came a deconstructed panel: Donna White, Martha Hixon and Jackie Stallcup have all taught DWJ in US colleges, and elected to compare notes on this by each giving a paper rather than through a single panel discussion. I have no idea whether this was a good choice. I think they were assuming an audience dominated by fellow educators, and were surprised when a show of hands demonstrated that this was not the case (though I felt the opposite surprise, how numerous they were). I jotted down random notes, mostly quotations that appealed to me, and enjoyed, as I have throughout the conference, the variety of the book covers with which speakers enlivened their presentations. The bad news from this sessions was that students do not universally love Diana Wynne Jones, and those you might expect to love her most, like the Harry Potter fans, tend to love her least. Donna White remarked, plaintively, "I hope I don't offend anyone, but I do think DWJ is a better writer than J.K. Rowling," and we considered the possibility that this was actually the problem. More optimistic, Fire and Hemlock went down better when smuggled into a course on magical realism. And I was intrigued by Jackie Stallicrup's admission that "I always have to re-read DWJ to appreciate her," that the first reading was always disturbing. I wouldn't go that far, but I do find her endlessly re-readable.
I could, at this point, have found myself a group of dinner companions, but I was suffering from overload. I came back to the hotel, checked e-mail, fell asleep for a bit, went out in search of a quiet dinner, didn't actually get lost but did discover that the road I thought I was taking didn't go where I expected it to, ended up in the Shore Café Bar which may or may not be part of this hotel - it seems to have been disowned, and was very quiet, which is what I was looking for. So that was fine.
Technically, it didn't start until yesterday afternoon. I spent the morning ambling around a very small part of the city, but I'll save that for a picture-heavy post. Just one tourist view of the waterfront to be going on with:
By midday I was at the Watershed, the conference venue, drinking coffee. Overheard from the next table, "Everybody has to go on a journey, right?" She had no connection with the conference, but once you start thinking about Diana Wynne Jones, you see traces of her world everywhere. The opposite is also true: almost as soon as I had completed registration, put on my dressing gown (in honour of Chrestomanci), picked up my life-saving fan (with the Howl's Moving Castle artwork) and declined the opportunity of a craft workshop, I fell into conversation with someone who knew someone (her cousin) who lived in Durham, was in fact a close neighbour, and whose parents I had known a generation ago. The fantasy world borders the real one, and that cuts both ways.
The first (not exactly) formal paper of the conference was Farah Mendlesohn's Everything I learned about running a convention I learned from Diana Wynne Jones. This had started life as an assemblage of quotations from Deep Secret and accumulated lines from other books: a delightful entertainment for an audience who could be relied on to recognise all the references, and see why they were - or were not - relevant to the organisation of conventions.
Next came a deconstructed panel: Donna White, Martha Hixon and Jackie Stallcup have all taught DWJ in US colleges, and elected to compare notes on this by each giving a paper rather than through a single panel discussion. I have no idea whether this was a good choice. I think they were assuming an audience dominated by fellow educators, and were surprised when a show of hands demonstrated that this was not the case (though I felt the opposite surprise, how numerous they were). I jotted down random notes, mostly quotations that appealed to me, and enjoyed, as I have throughout the conference, the variety of the book covers with which speakers enlivened their presentations. The bad news from this sessions was that students do not universally love Diana Wynne Jones, and those you might expect to love her most, like the Harry Potter fans, tend to love her least. Donna White remarked, plaintively, "I hope I don't offend anyone, but I do think DWJ is a better writer than J.K. Rowling," and we considered the possibility that this was actually the problem. More optimistic, Fire and Hemlock went down better when smuggled into a course on magical realism. And I was intrigued by Jackie Stallicrup's admission that "I always have to re-read DWJ to appreciate her," that the first reading was always disturbing. I wouldn't go that far, but I do find her endlessly re-readable.
I could, at this point, have found myself a group of dinner companions, but I was suffering from overload. I came back to the hotel, checked e-mail, fell asleep for a bit, went out in search of a quiet dinner, didn't actually get lost but did discover that the road I thought I was taking didn't go where I expected it to, ended up in the Shore Café Bar which may or may not be part of this hotel - it seems to have been disowned, and was very quiet, which is what I was looking for. So that was fine.
