Conferences, book clubs, podcasts, and radio hours often hire me for speaking engagements. Here’s a small sampling of the sorts of talks I’ve given:

conferences panels

Story Inspiration from Breaking Science

2023 — The wonderful folks who run Heliosphere invited me to moderate and participate in several panels for their conference. One of the panels was Story Inspiration from Breaking Science.

The panel included Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Dr. James Prego, and Sarena Strauss.

We started out hypothesizing from various abstracts we’d come across.

We — mostly me — got a bit trolled by the audience.

Then we started to play with the lightning round.

Great Neck Library Indie Author Roundtable

2022 — Along with with crime/literary novelist Tejas Desai, Children’s Book Author Ama Yawson, crime author Alex Avitabile, and poet Scottt Raven — I met with an audience at Great Neck Library for an indie author roundtable on getting published:

Adam-Troy Castro, Cliff Winnig, Mark Brickhouse, Manny Frishberg, and I walk into a B-Cubed live stream

Adam-Troy Castro, Cliff Winnig, Mark Brickhouse, Manny Frishberg, and I walk into a B-Cubed live stream

Running a Book Club Well

I was on a panel at Heliosphere 2019 on Running a Book Club Well (the program called it “Tips for your Kickass Book Club”). The panel featured Carol Gyzander, Philip De Parto, Lauren Paradise,Eric Parmer. It ventured into nearly every category of book clubs you can imagine.

Magic = Metaphysics of the Author

I was on a panel at Heliosphere 2019 on how Magic Reveals the Metaphysics of the Author within fantasy and science fiction novels. The panel featured Carole Ann Moleti, Alex Shvartsman, Ken Altabef, Lorrain Schein.

Frankenstein: The Intersection of Science and Lit

The 2018 World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore was gracious enough to have me moderate a panel with the fabulous and brilliant Kathy Goonan, (unfortunately Ted Chaing’s train delayed him). Kathy offered a deep drink from her vast experience and knowledge and I think you’ll find it instructive as we continue reading Frankenstein:

Have We Reached Peak Superhero Cinema?

I was on a panel at Heliosphere 2019 that asked the question Have We Reached Peak Superhero Cinema? The panel featured Charlie Jane Anders, Kathleen O’Shea David, Mercy Van Vlack. We talked about whether or not the glut in Superhero films is a good thing or a bad thing.

radio podcasts AMA

First Impressions (U.K) Part 1

First Impressions (UK) Part 2:

The Evening Readness @ DrDoctor.

My friend Kyle Welch and I debated whether or not All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy had any conflict, how conflict’s defined poorly in narrative circles, and how Dungeons and Dragons taught me conflict.

Being’s Ultimate Nature.

Vijay R. Nathan, the librarian of the Queen’s Library, invited me on to The Truth to Power Show to do a reading and talk about the hardest, most personal parts of my story and philosophy. For whatever reason that morning (I had to catch the train at 5am), I kept saying “Vedantic Buddhism,” which should be “Vedantic Hinduism,” though it could be argued that Buddhism came out of Hinduism. More on the Vendata and the monotheism of the Upanishads here. This episode broadcast live on Radio Free Brooklyn to morning commuters twice over.

Fireside: A Word on Words

Jeremiah Jones, musician and publisher, invited me onto the Fireside podcast to do a reading and to talk about his Evangelical community’s obsession with steering clear of cusswords, profanity, vulgarity, and blasphemey. I fought Fireside with fire, using both C.S. Lewis’ Four Letter Words and examples from the Bible to critique this assumption in the episode A Word on Words.

The Science Fiction Fantasy Alliance AMA

2022 — The delightful mods of the Science Fiction Fantasy Alliance (SFFA) hosted their first AMA and invited me to come and talk. Here’s the recording of what went down: