I’ve been in downtown St Louis, wearing holes in my shoes. Ok, so that wasn’t my primary reason for haunting the city. I was at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference. I was on a panel discussion on the Romance track, presented by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Crystal Jordan, who is both an author of erotic romance as well as a university librarian, invited me, Jeannie Lin and Amanda Berry to sit in with her on a panel called “Romance Publishing: Canadian Romance, ePublishing, and Erotica, Oh My!”

The highlights of the conference:

Seeing Crystal again. Squeeeee!!! We even hugged!

I see Jeannie and Amanda every month at my MORWA meetings, but I like hanging out with them.

Finally meeting James Buchanan, who I’ve bumped into here and there online, but we finally shook hands.

And honestly, meeting Sarah Frantz who is this powerhouse of intellect and drive and genre love. She also has the coolest accent. What can I say? I love accents! She is part of the brains behind the awesomeness that is the Teach Me Tonight blog.

I wasn’t able to get to the conference until Thursday night when the folks on the Romance track met up for dinner. And it was soooo cool! I *never* hear people discuss romance novels like this! We’re always too afraid of hurting someone’s feelings because, at the very least, we understand the sheer wretchedness of the process of writing, submitting, getting rejected, getting the contract, finding the agent, going through revisions and edits and marketing and…This business is not for the faint-hearted. Even the worst writer who has ever been published (not self or vanity published) has gone through the wringer like everyone else.

Although, let me back up a minute. The first thing I attended was not the dinner. It was the business meeting of IASPR before dinner. As a non-academic, it had nothing to do with my professional interests, but Amanda Berry and I looked at each other part-way through this discussion of finding PhD programs and writing papers and said, “Dang. And we thought romance publishing was hard.” Being an academic is brutal.

So, dinner was awesome and we were there for over 3 hours, just talking and yelling across tables and generally getting to know each other.

Friday was the day of the panel I was on and I got there for the panel before, then stayed well after, as well.

My world is very insular. I keep my head down, hang out on one forum primarily, write my blog and hope people read, and try to get some words on the page.

To go to this conference and realize that people are seriously discussing romance in critical terms was mind-blowing. They’re talking about food in romance (I missed that panel and I’m bummed), creating a community through film and internet presence, discussing the actual internet presence of romance readers and reviewers like SBTB and DA (Jane Litte was there. It’s not fair that she’s so gorgeous AND smart.), Canadian romance, erotic romance, gay interpretations of Dracula, TSTL heroines and uber-assholes in Christine Feehan’s Carpathian series…and that was pretty much just Friday!

Saturday started off with sexism, racism, heterosexism, fetishism in romance, interracial romance in film – but also an interesting point about how AA fiction has always focused on the struggles of being AA as opposed to just being part of a relationship – in essence, romance creates a space for AA women not to have lit-angst, discussing dress and gender roles, the idea of a true anti-heroine in romance (that one engendered a lot of discussion at lunch as we tried to figure out if we’d ever seen one. The answer, probably not, according to the terms defined in the paper.), and tons of Twilight stuff (oy). The final papers were all about HEAs: what constitutes them, satisfying and unsatisfying endings, ambiguous endings, happy-for-now endings, genre expectations…It was awesome and Sabrina Darby, a fellow Romance Diva and author, was one of the presenters.

One of my favorites was a paper called “She quoted Shakespeare! The inclusion of highbrow literature in popular romance novels” presented by Tamara Whyte from University of Alabama. Basically, I loved it for its discussion of all that cultural connectivity that I talk about.

But over and above all the lit-nerd stuff that I love so much, I enjoyed getting to know people with whom I would otherwise never connect. After everything was over on Saturday, 7 of us piled into my car and we headed over to the Arch. We couldn’t go up as it was closed for the day, but we just wandered around and enjoyed the gorgeous weather. We were in that happy-tired state, half-wired/half-wiped.

The PCA IASPR conference takes place in the days right before RWA 2011 in NYC. (Edited per Sarah’s clarification) I think I’m going to start saving my pennies because I would LOVE to see these folks again.

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