Clans of the Alphan Moon
This past week while my pal Robert Crais was out in San Diego teaching at Clarion, it was my very great pleasure to teach two days at the Alpha SF, Fantasy & Horror Writing Workshop held at the U of Pittsburgh-Greensburg campus. If you’re unfamiliar with Alpha, it’s a week-long intensive workshop for high school aged writers.
As with Clarion and most other college-level writing workshops, applicants are accepted based upon writing samples. Thus even before arriving I had read their writing and knew that I was dealing with young writers who know something of their craft. I was preceded at the workshop by Sheila Williams and Theodora Goss, and the final days would be in the very capable hands of Tamora Pierce.
What really bowled me over, though, was that I had a Swarthmore workshop student, Jen Spindel, who had turned in a draft of a YA science fiction novel to me in May, and when I informed her that I would have to put the reading of that on hold while I read the Alpha submissions, she told me, “Say hi to them for me there. I started this novel as the thing I wrote at Alpha.” It seems they’re everywhere, and they look just like the rest of us.
I’ve since been discussing with other writers--Judith Berman in particular--the demographics of this year’s Alpha, notably that it was 17 girls and 3 boys, and that all but a couple of the submissions were fantasy and not science fiction. I know that they’re more likely these days to be exposed to fantasy than science fiction in the YA category, and I’m wondering if that’s why. Fantasy and vampires reign, and sf itself seems the worse off for this.
In the meantime, I expect to see the names Courtney Crites, Haris Durrani, Tina Tseng, Katherine Broeker, Danniel Benner and many of the other Alphans in print in the future.
If you have a high school aged student who has the bug to work in the genres of the fantastic, you might want to consider this fine workshop. You can look into Alpha at http://alpha.spellcaster.org/