I haven’t written about the workshop much (at least on here—in private correspondence I’ve written extensively) but since I attended last year, in the summer of 2009, I’ve grown as a reader, writer, critic, observer, tactician, &c. My friends there—and I, gloriously, count my instructors among my friends—recommended books to me that have made the last few months a delight; my memory of past conversations, and the letters we write continue to lay fresh avenues of thought; I have an extended family built on shared, self-imposed affliction and composed of the finest people I have had the privilege to live with, cheek-by-jowl. Nothing I’ve done compares.

The instructors this year are excellent. Delia Sherman, George R.R. Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer. And, if I may repeat myself: Samuel R. Delany. Samuel R. Delany is teaching this year. Samuel R. Delany. Yes.

So I say again, with fervency and earnest eyes and overly familiar hand-pressing: If you write short stories, apply to the Clarion workshop. Today is your last day. Midnight according Pacific time, so you slobs on the east coast have until three.

The Tourist is the first Park story I read. I found it online before I went to Clarion, and enjoyed it; though, like most of Park’s work, the story made me sad for the broken world and the sympathetic sad people who live in it. In this story, Park plays with time travel and personal loss; he asks, “What if cosmological time ran backward to our personal sense of it?” and “Will you forgive me, Suzanne?” Narrated in his characteristically soft-spoken, at times melancholy and self-referential, one-off first person.

He often casts this doppelganger voice, though the character differs from story to story&mdashthe various Paul Parks, who aren’t the physical writer, but who are sometimes also writers on their own, sometimes referring to fictional versions of the physical Paul Park’s other stories, sometimes reimagining their alternate universe spouses having conflicts in a once more removed universe. This could be confusing, but in the end I don’t think the myriad Paul Parks should distress anyone: in an interview with The SF Site, Park says: “It’s just that we all share the same name—a vexing coincidence, of course, but ultimately trivial.” And of course the other Paul Parks are Paul Park, but no more significantly than any other character he writes is Paul Park.

There was no story in this collection I disliked, which is a feat; the stories I liked and remember best are: If Lions Could Speak, The Breakthrough, Tachycardia, The Lost Sepulcher of Huascar Capac.

And a quote from Samuel R Delany’s About Writing:

To learn anything worth knowing requires that you learn as well how pathetic you were when you were ignorant of it. The knowledge of what you have lost irrevocably because you were in ignorance of it is the knowledge of the worth of what you have learned. A reason knowledge/learning in general is so unpopular with so many people is because very early we all learn there is a phenomenologically unpleasant side to it: to learn anything entails the fact that there is no way to escape learning that you were formerly ignorant, to learn that you were a fool, that you have already lost irretrievable opportunities, that you have made wrong choices, that you were silly and limited. These lessons are not pleasant. The acquisition of knowledge—especially when we are young—again and again includes this experience.

Clarion 2009 is going swimmingly. Hope everyone is well.