NEPA Bloggers' Roundtable follow-up

Last night I took part in the NEPA Bloggers' Roundtable presentation, held at the Vintage Theater in Scranton and sponsored by Pages & Places @ Anthology, The Vintage Theater, and Go Lackawanna. I was there at the invitation of Rich Howells from Go Lackawanna, who served as moderator and one of the bloggers on the panel (he has two blogs, Rich Howells and Muckmakers.) I was there representing both NEPA Blogs and my personal blog, Another Monkey. Also on the panel were Tom Borthwick, who blogs about politics at NEPArtisan and is one of the mysteriously few bloggers in Scranton, and Justin Vacula,  who blogs about atheism, religion, society, and related topics.

First off I would like to say: THERE WAS NO TABLE - round or otherwise! Well, there was a small one off to the side, with copies of Go Lackawanna and several other publications; I added a generous pile of NEPA Blogs blog cards to it, and these were mostly gone by the end of the night.


All you need to know, on a card.

 (There was also a counter in the back where wine, coffee, soda, and water were available.)

The Vintage Theater was a cozy place, with seating for about two dozen people and more seats scattered around. The four of us sat in chairs across the small stage and took turns discussing issues and giving insights relating to blogging in general and in Northeastern Pennsylvania in particular. We were videotaped from two angles, though it is entirely possible that I managed to ineptly foul up the recording on the camera that Michelle lent me for the evening; in that case, I may need to beg Rich for a copy of his video. Rich also did a digital audio recording of the event.

We spoke from a little after 7:00 to a little after 8:00, with a Q&A session running through about 8:40 - by which time the theater was filling up  with folks coming to take part in a meeting of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Poets & Writers that was to start at 9:00. After the blog presentation was over, I stuck around to hear the poets. It has been years - maybe decades - since I attended a poetry reading, and who was I to pass up an opportunity for an experience that was essentially dumped in my lap? Plus, poets sometimes have blogs - we have links to a few poetry bloggers already - so the possibility existed that maybe I could pick up a few more bloggers to be listed on NEPA Blogs.

How did the event go? In my estimation, quite well. The four of us shared experiences and information, and interacted well with each other. But I'd be more interested in knowing what members of the audience thought.

NEPA Blogs may be involved in upcoming Pages & Places events - we have yet to receive official notification. I'm looking forward to it, and I encourage you to go!