AFTS Conference – reflections

This weekend past was the Australian Fairy Tale Society conference, on the theme of “Magic Mirrors”.

Art by Erin-Claire Barrow.

It was a lovely online weekend, meeting new friends and old. The AFTS is a small group (with a small and heroic committee!), but the conference attendees were a mix of afficionados, academics, oral storytellers, writers, illustrators, romance reviewers, programmers, publishers, illustrators, a magician — even an archaeologist!

Keynote

Much of the conference was a little bit of a blur for me, as I was preparing for, giving, and then recovering from the keynote presentation. You can get to be as comfortable as you like with off-the-cuff speaking (I’m still all nerves), but art-centric presentations require so much front-end preparation getting the slides in order.

There were, of course, more slides than minutes — I was concentrating on my process around addressing the imagery of fairy tales, as that could be applied to drawing, writing, reading, and academia: finding an aesthetic, the process of “reading” imagery, identifying and recombining elements, and then dealing with that in an Australian context (with examples from Flyaway).

Usually I’d have more of a small-group workshop focus in something like this, but I spaced it out with short individual exercises (agnostic as to medium), and it seemed to work. At least, after the break some people came back having done drawings!

There will be a recording up later in the year for AFTS members.

(I’ve already posted on the speaker’s gift by Spike Deane).

A few other highlights (I wish this were more complete — I had a crushing screen headache most of the weekend, but you can see the program on the AFTS website here or a PDF here).

• I was also on an artist panel with Spike Deane and Monika Diak, which could have been infinitely longer as far as we were concerned (clearly attributable to excellent moderation) and probably would have progressed to a cafe indefinitely had we been at a physical conference. We have such different processes — Spike with her glass, and Monika with her work in Hungary, and both of them with a fine art background, but all loving the shared language of fairy tales. They each gave separate presentations on their work — light and luminous.
• Renée Dahlia and Philippa Borland gave an entertaining and appealing (and informative!) presentation on a diverse range of romance takes on fairy-tale patterns — lots of new books to read.
• Kate Forsyth, in the wake of Snow White and Rose Red, and other tales of kind young women (illustrated by Lorena Carrington), gave a lovely talk on the traditions and dichotomy of kind and unkind girls in fairy tales.
• Leonora Carrington received the 2020 AFTS Award.
• Kathryn Gossow and Patsy Poppenbeek, the editors of the forthcoming AFTS Anthology South of the Sun, gave a breakdown of the process of putting together the anthology and underlying considerations — I always enjoy this sort of consideration of a book, going through briefly touching on each story and the patterns between them.

It was my first fully online conference this year (so far!), and the AFTS conference committee (and overall wrangler of the society, Jo Henwood) did a wonderful job bringing the weekend — and some wonderful — people together, and it was an honour to be invited.

(Apologies to all the people and for all the details left out!).