By Elizabeth Donald
We are delighted to be returning to Louisville for Imaginarium, a convention we have attended most of the years since its inception. The Literary Underworld will have its usual booth, as well as the Traveling Bar, of course.
In addition, we have our own panel! Literary Underworld has been in operation for more years than any of us have counted, outlasting many such experiments in author and small press cooperatives. But what the heck are we? A lot of people assume we are publishers, or a self-published hub, or a cult. Okay, no one said cult. It was implied.
So we’ll be holding a panel at Imaginarium to explain what we do, how it started, what evolutions we’ve tried, and the current state of the Underworld. More importantly, we hope to help people understand that we’re all in this together, and a cooperative could possibly be a useful thing for them in their own careers.
Of course, it’s happening in a year where we have an all-time low in Underlords attending. I can’t remember the last time Shrews missed Imaginarium, but he won’t be there this year. Many of our other longtime miscreants will be missing in action, including J.L. Mulvihill, Sara Harvey, and Sela Carsen. Fortunately Jim Gillentine and I will be there, and hopefully Stephen Zimmer, who is both author and publisher in Literary Underworld for mumblety years. We also get to see Angelia Sparrow, who co-founded Literary Underworld with me and Sara Harvey a thousand years ago. (I told you no one kept count.)
At some point between now and Imaginarium, I will have to look up how many years we’ve actually been in operation, supporting small presses and their authors and trundling ourselves to conventions all over the midwest and the south. It’s a labor of love, a love of the written word, of genre fiction and the writers audacious enough to lay their souls bare on the page despite the monumental pressures against them.
So pass the bourbon, and come join us in Louisville on July 18-20. We’d be delighted to see you.
