As reported in the comments of yesterday's journal entry, Clarion will no longer be supported financially by Michigan State University, and they are looking at alternate funding methods, including moving the workshop or taking it independent. Here's the straight scoop from Coordinator Mary Sheridan:

Pardon the mass email, but [Director] Dr. Lister Matheson has received word from the Interim President and Provost that Michigan State University will be unable to support the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop. He has asked that this message be passed on to our friends. Suggestions and comments can be sent to Interim President and Provost, Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Dr. Wendy K. Wilkins. Please copy any messages to clarion@msu.edu.

You may also be interested in the story run by the MSU News Bulletin for Faculty and Staff of MSU on June 26.

I for one am extremely pissed off about this. It boggles my mind that MSU would fail to see that 36 years of workshops have turned out some of the finest writers in our field, who have in turn lauded the workshop to others, causing a constant interest from new writers every single year.

So I say let's flood the Provost's and Dean's offices with emails. Right now, I'm betting they're only looking at the short term money side of things. We need to show them how beneficial Clarion is to MSU, that each year hundreds of people from all over the world fight for the chance to be one of the lucky twenty participants to spend six weeks in East Lansing. We need to emphasize Clarion's prestige, and its importance within the specfic writing community. We need to make them see how bad a decision this would be.

Comrades unite!

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Trampoline edited by Kelly Link

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