A panel I moderated at Dragon Con this year for the High Fantasy track was on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Started off a little shaky, but it turned into one of my favorite panels this year. For starters, I got there a little later than I would have preferred because of the insane amounts of people traffic. I was also starving, not really getting a chance to eat in a while. So, I smiled at the room that was already sort of packed, took my seat at the panel table as moderator and then jokingly asked the audience if they minded me eating something really quickly (if I promised not to chew into the microphone). That got me some nice chuckles and a couple “Go Ahead’s” so I was able to nom my PBJ. Because when you are a) disabled and b) got weird allergies, you travel with food on you, all the time. When you’re those things and working a convention like Dragon Con, you develop certain skills. One of those being a complete lack of shame. Another being eating when and where you can cause sometimes back-to-back panels don’t always give you time to eat much.
I finished my sandwich and then was keeping an eye on the time because I believe good moderators should make every attempt to start and end on time. I described it once to a non-nerdy relative as the panel schedules being a lot like train schedules, when everything is running well and on time. There’s a little bit of flex time to reset the rooms and get people seated (and for panelists to arrive) but not a lot of it. The time kept creeping closer and closer to start time and with me still being the only person at the table, I started to get a little nervous. Being the only person upstage generally has only happened on purpose previously (writing workshops where I’m teaching baby writers).
Start time hit and I swung into the normal housekeeping stuff (this is our charity for the year, please raise your hand for questions cause I’m autistic and need that signal, and please rate this panel in the app) before just turning to the packed room and going “Okay, since we’re a couple of panelists light, what do you all say about switching this over to a book club type thing? I have a couple of starter questions and then we can take the discussion wherever you want it to go.” I also double checked to see if we had any 16 and youngers in the audience so we could all gauge if we needed to stick to euphemisms or if we had some wiggle room (we did not have any and the entire room relaxed a little more).
We tossed around the basic questions I had prepared and then got into a fantastic discussion of this weird little poem and its enduring resonance since its publication. If you have never read this before, let me point you to where you can read it freely on the Poetry Foundation’s website, Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti. Go read it and then come back and let me know what you thought.
One of the most fascinating things about this poem is that its interpretations are as varied as the number of readers it has reached. It is a fantastic example of Victorian poetry, serving as both a religious and moral allegory while also exemplifying the Victorian socio-economic milieu and also pointing out the inherent gendered double-standards of the time. The fantasy elements combined with the uncertain line between prose and poetry lend it to have a very nursery rhyme quality to it. The poem is enchanting; it spellbinds you with the images it conjures.
We talked about forbidden romances, sexual temptations, the bonds of sisterhood, vampirism, sin and redemption. How the poem also could serve as an example of addiction and recovery. We talked about when we first found the poem. One person literally read it right before the panel itself. His question was about what we got out of the poem if we read it young. My interpretation the first time I read it, at 7 years old, was that the poem was about not taking candy from strangers. At 20, I had a completely different interpretation based around roofies in drinks, sexual assault and the recovery from that. Others had similar stories, some people found it young, and some didn’t.
We were, as a group, having a super fantastic discussion that we were all really sad to have to stop when it was time. We didn’t all agree but we all came at it from a place of just wanting to understand and be understood. It kind of restored a little bit more of my faith in humanity’s ability to have non-toxic discourse. It was the best kind of discussion, I learned things, and the audience learned things.
What had started as a kind of shaky thing turned into this wonderful experience and I was really grateful for it. Definitely one of my favorite experiences at con this year.
