125 Years of Klarkash-Ton
Why does Clark Ashton Smith's work endure? Panelists discuss the Emperor of Dreams and his lengthy career.
Darin Coelho Spring (moderator), Scott Connors, Ashley Dioses, Wilum Pugmire, Richard Stanley
Darin Coelho Spring lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Northern California with his wife and two daughters. He is a bookseller with a passion for imaginative literature and an active presence in the local arts community. In his spare time over the last ten years, he has created several of what he terms “epic home movies” but his documentary on Clark Ashton Smith is his first film intended for a wider audience. It is nearly four years in the making.
Richard Stanley made his feature film directing debut with 1990's acclaimed Hardware, starring Dylan McDermott and Fields of the Nephilim's frontman, Carl McCoy. His second feature, Dust Devil, was an unconventional story of an otherworldly serial killer in South Africa, and has a rabid cult following due to its striking visuals and beautiful landscape photography, plus its decidedly Weird taint. He also has created a number of independent, award-winning documentaries, an adaptation of Clarke Ashton-Smith's "Mother of Toads," and wrote and directed H. P. Lovecraft's Color Out of Space feature, produced by Spectrevision, starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, and Q'orianka Kilcher.
Scott Connors is an independent scholar living in northern California who specializes in the life and work of Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and other writers of weird fiction. Recently his five volume edition of Smith's Collected Fantasies was reprinted in trade paperback by Night Shade Books. His latest book, In the Realm of Mystery and Wonder, a collection of Smith's artwork and prose poems, was published this year by Centipede Press. Connors has twice been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award, and he received the Founders Award at the 2015 HPLFF. His work has been translated into both French and German. Les Editions Mnémos, the foremost publisher of fantasy works in France, asked him to write the introductions to their three volume set of Smith's work. His work has been published in Skelos, Lovecraft Annual, Weird Tales, Weird Fiction Review, All Hallows, Studies in Weird Fiction, Publishers Weekly, The Explicator, and academic books published by Rowman and Littlefield and Greenwood Press.
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since his days as a Mormon missionary in Omagh, Northern Ireland (1973). He has written for a number of anthologies (Black Wings, The Children Of Cthulhu) and last year had tales reprinted in such anthologies as The Book Of Cthuhlu and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird. These past few years has seen him writing like an obsessed lunatic, and his many books include The Tangled Muse, Some Unknown Gulf Of Night, Gathered Dust And Others, and Uncommon Places, The Strange Dark One: Tales Of Nyarlathotep, and Encounters With Enoch Coffin (written in collaboration with Jeffrey Thomas).