Tag: Virginia Kidd

  • More from Milford Fest: Live and In Person.

    More from Milford Fest: Live and In Person.

    In an age when professional magazines are inundated with computer-generated submissions and screen actors can be replaced by CG doppelgangers, there are still activities that remain exclusively in the human domain. I’m referring to in-person events. You can try and simulate them with Zoom and Facetime, but there’s nothing like the real thing, and I…

  • Milford: Authors, The Anchorage, and Arrowhead

    Milford: Authors, The Anchorage, and Arrowhead

    Around the world, the town of Milford in eastern Pennsylvania is famous for its role in the development of science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, James Blish, Virginia Kidd, and Anne McCaffrey are just a few of the luminaries who have traveled to Milford to be part of the…

  • Forward into the Past: Milford Writers Festival

    Forward into the Past: Milford Writers Festival

    Eliot … crashed a convention of science-fiction writers in a motel in Milford, Pennsylvania …. “I love you sons of bitches,” Eliot said …. “You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space…

  • Writing in Private

    Writing in Private

    “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” So said Ernest Hemingway when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1954. And yet, a few decades earlier (according to his recollections in A Moveable Feast) he wrote many of his short stories in public—surrounded by (and occasionally taking inspiration from) the strangers who came and went as…

  • Yesterday Today:
    SF’s Roots on View at Milford Festival

    My previous post concluded with mention of the grand finale at this year’s Milford Readers and Writers Festival and the promise of a follow up post. Here, then, are some of the talking points from our three-hour program at the Milford Theatre, a conversation that considered how science fiction came of age in Milford during the…

  • Looking Ahead:
    This Weekend at the Milford Festival

    Sixty-four years ago, science fiction writers Virginia Kidd and James Blish moved to Milford, PA, into a home that they called Arrowhead. It was there that Virginia Kidd founded the first literary agency devoted to the sf genre and where James Blish and colleagues such as Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm wrote stories that helped…