ARRT Update: Fantasy Boot Camp Notes, Horror Assignment, and a Bonus Video

THIS POST WAS EDITED ON 6/29 TO INCLUDE THE CORRECT NOTES LINK

Earlier this month, the ARRT Speculative Fiction Genre Study met to have our Fantasy Boot Camp.

The detailed notes are now available here. As our notetaker extraordinaire Karen said in her email to members... "feel free to share them far and wide.”

As I have mentioned before, at ARRT we realize that we are lucky to have such an established genre study program AND live in an area where not only is RA education a priority but also we are densely populated so people are able to attend our 6x a year meetings in high numbers.  We take our work seriously when we meet, but we also want to share the knowledge with as many people as possible.

So please, pass these notes on.  Use them to help you, your staff and your patrons. Pass them on to colleagues too.  Just let people know you got them from us.  Thanks.

You can access the notes from this genre study and previous ones [where available] on our web site.

I also want to remind my readers that this genre study is different from all which came before in that we are not looking at authors by genre and subgenre.  Yes we had a SF boot camp, a Fantasy boot camp, and next month I will lead a Horror boot camp, but that was just to define the genres, set the baseline, and make sure we were all on the same page.  After that, we are going to discuss all the genres together by grouping key authors by their major appeal to readers.

We met last week to outline our plans for these meetings which begin with the Doorway of “setting.”  We picked setting to go first because most of these books prominently featuring setting-- especially SF and FSY-- but that also made it harder for us to narrow down the authors we will discuss for that day.

I am not going to reveal those author details now, you will have to wait for the August meeting for that, but I did want to remind you that these meetings are coming and that I AM VERY EXCITED for them. Teaching the genre study this way is going to maximize both the learning by us, the participants, AND provide us with a way to help patrons immediately. The notes will be even better than usual because they will be focused around the WHY people read an author not its subgenre only.

But back to the last boot camp, our next meeting, I will obviously be the horror leader.  Here is the assignment:

Upcoming Meeting: Horror Boot CampAugust 4, 2016, 2-4 PMGlenview Public LibraryFeatured resource: Horror.org (Horror Writers Association website)Assignment:Read Stephen King’s The ShiningRead your choice of any fiction by Joe Hill or Jonathan Maberry (EXCEPT for Maberry’s Joe Ledger thrillers)

Finally, we are asking everyone to watch this conversation between Stephen King and George R R Martin from earlier this month.  We thought it was both a wonderful bridge between the Fantasy assignment [to read Game of Thrones] and the Horror assignment [to read The Shining]. Plus, it was just awesome and fun.