Ask a Dynamic Duo: Q&A with Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan

In this one-hour live Q&A, writers, editors, and Clarion West instructor super team Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan will share their experiences and lessons learned over 30 years in the publishing industry.  Whether your focus is on novels, short fiction, editing, or collaborating with other writers, bring your questions and come prepared to take notes.

This session meets for one hour on September 26 from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. Pacific.

This class will be held in a webinar format. Video/microphones are not required to participate. No advance preparation is required for this class.

About the Speakers: 

Jack Dann has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral, The Rebel, The Silent, Junction, and The Man Who Melted. He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (three times), the Ditmar Award (five times), the Peter McNamara Achievement Award and also the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. He has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight).

Dann’s work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Castaneda, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Dann’s short stories have been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, Promised Land (a companion volume to The Rebel), and the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann. His collaborative stories can be found in the collection The Fiction Factory. A collection of Dann’s stories for the Masters of Science Fiction Series (Centipede Press) is forthcoming. Dann is also the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy called “the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia.” It won Australia’s Ditmar Award and was the first Australian book ever to win the World Fantasy Award. He has also edited a sequel to Dreaming Down-Under: Dreaming Again. His anthology Gathering the Bones, of which he is a co-editor, was included in Library Journal’s Best Genre Fiction of 2003 and was shortlisted for The World Fantasy Award. His anthology Wizards, co-edited with Gardner Dozois and titled Dark Alchemy in the UK and Australia made the Waldenbooks/Borders bestseller list and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award.

Other publications include: the short novel The Economy of Light; the autobiography Insinuations; and a special edition reprint of Dann’s 1981 novel Junction. He is the co-editor, with Nick Gevers, of Ghosts by Gaslight, which won the Shirley Jackson Award and the Aurealis Award. His 34 volume Magic Tales anthology series, edited with Gardner Dozois, is now available in ebook format. Dann is the managing director of PS Australia, and his latest anthology Dreaming in the Dark—the first volume in the new line—won the 2017 World Fantasy Award. He has also been granted the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by The University of Queensland and is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Communication and Arts. Visit Jack on the web at : https://jackdann.com/

Jonathan Strahan (born 1964 in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is an editor, podcaster, critic, and occasional publisher. His family moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1968, and he graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986. In 1990 Jonathan co-founded Eidolon: The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy and worked on it as co-editor and co-publisher until 1999. He was also co-publisher of Eidolon Books which published Robin Pen’s The Secret Life of Rubber-Suit Monsters, Howard Waldrop's Going Home Again, Storm Constantine's The Thorn Boy, and Terry Dowling's Blackwater Days. In 1997 Jonathan moved to Oakland, California to work for Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field as an assistant editor. He wrote a regular review column for the magazine until March 1998 when he returned to Australia. In early 1999 Jonathan resumed reviewing and editorial work for Locus and was later promoted to Reviews Editor. Other reviews have appeared in Eidolon, Eidolon: SF Online, and Foundation. Jonathan has won the World Fantasy Award, the Aurealis Award, the Aurealis Convenor’s Award for Excellence, the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism and Review, the Australian National Science Fiction Convention’s “Ditmar Award“, and the Peter McNamara Achievement Award.

A twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee, Jonathan won the World Fantasy Award in 2010 for his work as an editor, and his anthologies have won the Locus Award for Best Anthology four times (2008, 2010, 2013, 2021) and the Aurealis Award seven times. As a freelance editor, Jonathan has edited or co-edited more than seventy anthologies, and twenty single-author story collections which have been published in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He also works as a consulting editor for Tor.com where he acquires and edits original novellas (Tor.com Publishing) and short fiction (Tor.com). Jonathan currently produces and co-hosts the Coode Street Podcast with Gary K. Wolfe  (May 2010-present), which was presented with the Hugo Award in 2021, and has been nominated for the British Science Fiction Award and the Ditmar Award.

He also produced and co-hosted the Coode Street Roundtable with Ian Mond and James Bradley. Jonathan married former Locus Managing Editor Marianne Jablon in 1999 and they live in Perth, Western Australia with their two daughters, Jessica and Sophie. Visit Jonathan on the web at: https://jonathanstrahan.com.au/

This event will be held in Zoom. By registering for this class, you agree to follow the Clarion West Code of Conduct and Zoom policies. 

About Our Community Classes:
 

Community classes are offered at low cost and with additional sliding scale options to enable access to high-quality writing instruction, regardless of your economic circumstance. Please choose the ticketing price that best supports your circumstances.

Limited Free Seating: 

We offer a percentage of seats in every class to People of the Global Majority (Asian, Black, African, Latina/o/x, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and/or have been racialized as 'ethnic minorities') for free, regardless of financial need. 

Eligible folks should complete this form to enter the lottery for free seats.  If a seat is available, we will email you 7-10 days before the class begins. For more information, see our equity and inclusion policies.