That I have done and still do academic conferences is not a secret; I’ve mentioned it more than a few times. That I have focused a lot of that doing on the International Congress on Medieval Studies, held on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is also not a secret; in this webspace, I’ve written for or about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, if not also elsewhere, as well as referring to it in my About page, my reported Abstracts, and my too-slowly-ongoing Fedwren Project. It should not be a surprise, then, that when the Tales after Tolkien Society, of which I remain a member and an officer, posted its initial call for papers for the 2026 iteration of the Congress, I took note.

I had known about the sessions that are on offer for the 2026 Congress; I was involved in drafting the texts of the proposals and discussion of what and how to send them out. I was somewhat surprised to see that three sessions got accepted; the cosponsored one is not unusual, but that there were two paper sessions in addition was. Tales after Tolkien does not often do so well, but I guess, given the alignment of the three sessions (all of them treat adaptation more or less explicitly, each focusing on a different aspect of how the medieval gets re-presented to current-contemporary audiences), that there’s an expectation of papers to fill the sessions. (If you have an idea, send it in to them; it’ll be nice to have the company.)

I’ll be doing my part, as might be expected. One of the things about having so many scholarly somedays as I have is that I can easily pull on one or another of them for such purposes, take the opportunity the demand to produce provides to develop an idea I have had in passing. Given how many such somedays I’ve pointed out–most frequently with reference to Robin Hobb, as might be expected, but not exclusively with reference thereto, I don’t believe–I should have no trouble looking back and finding one thing I can pitch for a roundtable and another I can pitch for a paper session. (Congress rules prohibit presenting in more than one of each kind of session, with one notable exception that I’ll not get into here.) A roundtable talk generally runs five minutes or so, with discussion following, and that translates into something like 750 words; my normal blog posts run around 500 words anymore, so stretching to half again that much is not too much of a struggle. A conference paper is more variable; for me, such things run from around 2,600 to around 3,900 words, depending on how many other people are in the session–eminently doable for work I care about and that will necessarily have some citation and quotation in it (meaning I don’t have to come up with the whole text; I just have to identify what text needs to be present, which is its own challenge). I’ll have things to say, to be sure.

Determining just what my topics and approaches will be will take some doing, of course. So, too, will deciding whether or not I will attend the Congress in person or only remotely. The latter has been how I have done things in the past several years, not only because of COVID-19 dislocations but also because of my own attenuation from academe and, frankly, financial concerns. Getting from central Texas to Michigan isn’t easy or inexpensive, after all, and time away from my family is not always good for me. (That said, time to myself is not always bad for me, either, and it may well be good for them to have some time with me away…) I’ve got time to make some of those choices, though, and I look forward to putting in the thinking time of making them–as well as the time and effort I will spend on putting together my presentations.

Somehow, even after all the time, even after the disappointments, I still enjoy doing this kind of work.

It’s not just conference-writing that I do, though I do that. Maybe you could use some help with yours? I definitely do that.

Or you can send your support along directly!