- I remembered that one of Phil's Clarion instructors was
Kelly Link, but I hadn't realized she lives in Northampton. I saw a note about Kelly on Salon that pointed at an Interview with Kelly in the Well. She mentions Clarion, just a bit - I'm a big believer that workshops are good for writers, although the benefits are not necessarily the obvious ones. I think you learn more from reading and talking about other people's stories than you do from getting feedback on your own work.
She seems like an interesting person, but having an open forum is less interesting (I think) than having a set of questions (moderated, perhaps) that the writer could respond to.
The Pioneer Valley has a large population of writers and there are always lots of activities to support writers. A great place to look is the Lifestyle calendar in the Valley Advocate. I need to get out and take advantage of more of this stuff.
Phil and I have started playing a game of TacOps. When I was in graduate school, we used to play TacOps quite a bit, but we haven't played in several years (since we started playing StarCraft, probably). TacOps is a strategic war game that simulates the games with little chits that represent military units. Almost every extant military unit is available in the game (although the version we're using is a bit out of date, a focuses primarily on US and Soviet units. There are a huge variety of realistic scenarios that have been extensively playtested. After the gulf war, the author released a set of new scenarios and included one that simulated what a big engagement between the US and the Republican Guard might have looked like and as an explanation for why there weren't more: because they were all completely one-sided slaughters of the Iraqi army. In the scenario we're playing, the US has two 155mm howitzers, two F18 sorties and has a couple of Apaches that arrive half-way through the game. By constrast, in the current conflict, anytime any clash with Iraqi forces is predicted, the US carries out dozens of sorties and the ground forces are backed up with multiple helicopter gunships. I'd buy the new version of TacOps in a heartbeat if it were carbonized (to run natively in MacOS X). Until then, I'll keep using the version I have now. It's still a great game, even if my units are locked in the early 1990s.