This past Saturday I volunteered at the 2nd annual Toronto SpecFic Colloquium, where lovers of all things genre fiction came together to listen to some fantastic speakers talk on this years topic “Modern Mythology”. It was a great day, and I’m really glad I got to be a part of it.

The speakers included Mike Carey, Peter Watts and Emily Pohl-Weary but for me the highlight was Caitlin Sweet and Lesley Livingston. The two of them are clearly great friends so it was a lot of fun to watch them banter back and forth about fantasy and writing, frequently including the audience in their discussion. Their topic was “Making up Worlds…and Words” but they frequently went off on seemingly random tangents that were sometimes hard to follow but always massively insightful.

As fantastic as the speakers were, one thing that especially impressed me was the crowd! The audience was asking such intelligent questions throughout the entire day, which really brought out some interesting points from the speakers. Granted, it is usually pretty safe to assume that a group of people who are all passionate about reading will be intelligent but I know I couldn’t dissect and analyze all of the topics the way so many of the attendees did.

If you’re in the Toronto area, next years colloquium is planned for October 20th. You should definitely check it out as you will definitely take a way a whole new perspective on your most beloved genres. This was only the second year of the event and it is already largely successful and so I can’t wait to see what they do next year.