You may or may not have heard that as of January 1, 2004, I'll be stepping down as editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons (after four delightful and fascinating years), to be replaced by Susan Groppi -- more details on that can be found here.
This isn't an e-mail about that, though. This is an e-mail about the next project.
I've thought for some time that the field could use a literary arts foundation, of the type that exists for mainstream/academic lit, that would work to develop exciting new (and perhaps experimental) voices, to raise money for awards and grants, to help authors and small presses find additional funding, to operate a clearinghouse website providing information of interest to such writers and presses (answering questions like: Which academic mfa programs are open to genre fiction? Where can I apply for writing grants? Where might I find workshops useful to me? What about affordable writing retreat spaces? Where are the best market lists? etc.). I think this could provide a great service to the field, and I'm interested in working on it.
I want to emphasize right here that this group is in no way meant to be opposed to SFWA, or Broad Universe, or any other primarily-commercial writers' organization. Rather, it would be designed to serve a different side of what genre writers might need; ideally, it would work in harmony with the existing organizations, complementing the services they already provide.
I'm looking for people interested in joining a mailing list to discuss what the goals of such a foundation should be, and how we might best implement them. And after discussing and forming our goals, I'll be looking for some of those people to put in some time volunteering to help put those goals into place -- with webmastering, with providing content for the website, with serving on awards/grants committees, with fund-raising.
If interested, please send an e-mail to join the discussion list to: specfic_foundation-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. And once you join, you may want to read through any archived messages to the group, just in case we've started without you. :-)
Thanks!
- Mary Anne