Sponsor: West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA in Creative Writing
Become a Patron!So this is it.
This is my Hippocamp21 talk.
What an experience Hippocamp was this year. Donna Talarico stuck the landing in pandemic times. The degree of difficulty is Simone Biles-esque!
I don’t I’ve worked as hard on any one thing like I did on this Hippocamp talk in a long, long while. I put everything I had into it. That said, I had a very hard time gauging what the audience thought of it. It was a pretty sparse turnout, so far as Hippocamp talks go. Everyone was masked, so I couldn’t tell if people were smiling or dying inside. There were only two questions, whereas most breakout sessions of this nature have several questions.
Naturally I felt like a comic who bombed.
Still, some people came up to me and said they loved it. Not meaning to undercut their good will, I was like, “Really? Cuz it felt dead to me up there and there were no questions …”
They usually said the talk itself didn’t lend itself to questions. It leant itself to thought. In any case, I still gave it my all to the gracious folks who showed up.
Like Shirley Showwalter!
So much fun to hear @BrendanOMeara talk about his CNF podcast interview with @JaneFriedman pic.twitter.com/QjZ566waNz
— Shirley H. Showalter (@shirleyhs) August 14, 2021
I “invited” about 20 of my best friends to give this talk on a range of topics from voice, research, drafting, community, jealousy, and social media.
I brought in tape from:
I tell you, it was a privilege to put this together. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, consider becoming a Patron at patreon.com/cnfpod, as I think I’ll start doing similar things like this (much, much shorter) as Patreon exclusives.
