So, Benjamin Rosenbaum and I had so much fun teaching a week of speculative fiction writing together for Clarion, we’re thinking of doing it again for the SLF. It’d be summer 2025, so I’m trying to leave myself plenty of time to plan. I finish my school board term in May 2025, and am hoping to shift some of that service time / energy to the SLF.
If we can figure this all out, it may eventually evolve into something like Clarion Midwest. We’ll see.
This is an exploratory sort of post. I’m tentatively thinking of this:
a) a 7-day in-person Chicagoland workshop (expecting that people will be arriving on Saturday and leaving on Sunday)
b) possibly a concomitant retreat option (would cost notably less), where you don’t workshop with us, but join us for meals and evening conversations.
(We may also put together a remote workshop, but for this post, I’m focusing on the in-person option and logistics.)
Trickiest thing to figure out is access — cost-wise, we can keep costs down if we hold it at my house, but my old Victorian house is not wheelchair-accessible.
I’m tentatively hoping to have the workshops at UIC instead, if the department is interested in co-sponsoring this program. UIC is 7 miles from my house, so ideally, we’d be able to put people up in the dorms on campus (no idea if this is possible, need to explore), and stay concentrated there (lots of great local restaurants, plus walking distance grocery stores and cheap student food, possibly the option to cook? need to explore).
But perhaps also do some outdoor events at the house on the weekends — grilling in the backyard, probably. Maybe optional field trips to Hemingway House in Oak Park, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio? (Alternatively, we can stay focused in downtown Chicago, and do field trips to the Art Institute, riverboat architecture tour, etc.)
Access question — if we do anything at my house, I don’t have an accessible restroom, but there are ones at the library a few blocks away, and we can have a volunteer with a car to run people to the library. That seems a sort of clunky solution, so I welcome additional brainstorming, especially from folks who use a wheelchair.
Thoughts?
(Pic from last year’s teaching at Clarion.)
