an author named Smith

So I attended the one-day Clark Ashton Smith conference yesterday, held in the old Carnegie Library - now just a historical site, devoid of books or historical displays - in Smith's hometown of Auburn, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. In Smith's day this was still the city library, and the self-educated author probably got most of his education from books here.

But despite the local boosterism, accentuated by a panel discussing Smith's life here, neither Smith nor any of the panelists hailing from Auburn liked the place much. They thought it a tiresome backwater of a town. I found it charming as a one-day visitor. And my sandwich from a local deli (the con offered to fetch lunch for us if we'd order and pay in advance) was delicious.

The programming was held in the library's one large room. The organizers said the attendance was 80-90; I counted closer to 50. The attendance was largely but not entirely male. And almost all white. And largely but not overwhelmingly old.

Besides writing ornate fantasy stories, Smith also wrote SF, and he began as a once-promising poet, and he also was an artist (drawing and sculpture). The day was occupied with panels discussing all these things, and full of enlightenment on Smith's style, artistic goals, and ethos. Despite his obscurity, a case was made that he was a substantial artist worth studying.

Two panelists were particularly interesting to hear. S.T. Joshi, the well-known weird fiction scholar, is - as you'd guess from his writing - lucidly voluble and erudite. He challenged the otherwise universally-held belief that the reason Smith stopped writing weird fiction in the late 1930s was as a reaction to the deaths in short order of both his parents and his colleague/friends H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. I guess we'll find out when Joshi's biography of Smith is published later this year. I got a glimpse at a proof copy; it is not as overwhelmingly large as Joshi's Lovecraft biography.

The other liveliest panelist was the fiction author Cory Goodfellow, who read aloud the opening paragraph of Smith's "The Abominations of Yondo" in a voice so sepulchral that I'd buy a full-length recording of him reading Smith stories.

Downstairs in the basement were book dealers, but the two books I wanted to buy were only in one copy and sold to someone else before I could get them.

I didn't know anyone else there, but the attendees were friendly, and I didn't feel downgraded for not being a real connoisseur or expert; there were others there who clearly had only just begun reading Smith. This was fun, the panels were all interesting throughout (including the other participants) and since this was not a far drive from home, I'm glad I took the trouble to come.