Welcome to the Smith Circle

Come join us for A Rendezvous in Averoigne.

The Smith Circle: A Clark Ashton Smith Conference will be held on on January 10th, 2026, the Saturday before Smith's 133rd birthday.

The conference will be in Smith's hometown, Auburn, California. It is a 1-day, ticketed event and will start at 10am.  

It will be held at the historic Auburn Carnegie Library (175 Almond St.) that Smith used himself, and was the setting for a scene in is The Devotee of Evil story.

Tentatively, there will be 5 discussion panels including a lunch break, with a variety of authors, artists and scholars as guests. Please see the Event Schedule for more information.

Tickets are now available here.

Please contact us at TheCASmithCircle@Gmail.Com with any questions. And be sure to share across your social media.

Thanks, and look forward to meeting you next year.

Panelists

Panelists will start to being announced next week.

Event Schedule

The event will start at 10AM with the following panel schedule:

10-10:50 - Smith and his life in Auburn
11-11:50 - Smith's Poetry
12-1:30 - Lunch Break
1:30-2:20 - Smith's fiction: Year of the Yondo
2:30-3:20 - Smith's art
3:30-4:20 - Undecided 5th panel

Panels subject to change.

In addition to the panels, there will be:

• A self-guided tour of significant sites in Smith's life. More information can be found here.
• Hopefully a display of Smith art and memorabilia.

Tickets

Tickets are $35 and can be purchased through the Paypal link below. It will take you to a secure Paypal connection but you don't need a PayPal account to use it, just a credit card.

There is limited seating, and if tickets are sold out in advance, there will be no tickets available at the door.

If you'd like to help by reducing the PayPal fees, please use the QR code below instead to access the PayPal.

In order to ensure appropriate business practices, we will not take Friends and Family payments via PayPal.

IMPORTANT!!!! The Auburn Carnegie Library was built in the early 1900s and unfortunately has not yet been brought up to American with Disability Act accessibility compliance. They do have a plan to make it accessible, but it is unknown if changes will be completed in time for the conference. Currently, the main room where the panels will be held is up about 10-15 steps and the parking is a few blocks away and requires walking up a hill to get to the library. There will be a drop off area in front of the building.  Please be aware of this in mind when buying tickets.

Purchase tickets



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Donations

If you are unable to attend, but would still like to help support the conference, please consider making a donation towards the conference costs.

If you'd like to help reducing the PayPal fees, please use the QR code below to access the PayPal link.

Make Donation



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Lodgings

A block of rooms have been reserved at the Holiday Inn Auburn. You can book the discounted room rate until Dec 12, 2025 using this link: https://tinyurl.com/CASHotel.

The link is for a 2 night stay (Fri Jan 9- Sat Jan 11), but the room rate is still valid for either one of the 2 nights, just modify the dates.

The booking as part of the block of rooms includes breakfast for 2. More information can be found on this flyer: https://tinyurl.com/CASHotelFlyer

The hotel is about a 10-minute walk, or very short drive, from the Auburn Carnegie Library, where the conference will be held.

Auburn is close to a number of ski resorts in the Sierra Nevada mountains, so hotels can fill up with skiers sooner that would normally be the case. So be sure to book early.

There are also a number of other hotels about 10 min further north on the I-80 freeway from the event site.

Traveling

Travel to Auburn, California is pretty easy since it's less than an hour from the Sacramento Internation Airport (SMF).

Other major airports within a reasonable drive are:

• San Francisco (SFO) - Multiple bridge tolls. Have to drive way out of the way to avoid tolls.
• Oakland (OAK) - Can avoid bridge tolls.
• San Jose (SJC) - Can avoid bridge tolls.

I would strongly not recommend flying into Reno, Nevada. With The Smith Circle taking place in January, there's a very good chance the road between Reno and Auburn would at least require snow chains, if not be completely closed.

Tolls
When travelling out of the Bay Area, crossing any major bridge will require a toll. A list of toll bridges can be found at https://511.org/driving/bridges.

Paying cash for bridge tolls is not an option. You can find out about payment options at https://511.org/driving/bridges/paying-tolls.

There are also express lanes on the freeways which cost a toll, but they are always optional. There will always be regular non-toll lanes along side the toll lanes.

Travel Time
Auburn is on the way to a number of ski resorts in the Sierra Nevada mountains. So, travelling to Auburn, even from Sacramento, can easily have heavier than normal traffic, especially on a Friday/weekend. Please allow extra time for traffic.

Public Transit

There are also options for traveling on public transit via Amtrak trains. Oakland and San Jose airports both have an Amtrak train station within a 10 minute drive. For San Francisco airport, you will probably want to take the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to get to the Emeryville Amtrak station. Sacramento airport has the Yolobus line that runs to the Sacramento Amtrak station about every 30 min-1 hour.

Once at one of the 4 Amtrak stations, they all run on the same Capitol Corridor line. The 3 Bay Area stations also offer a combination of train and bus options that arrive in Auburn at different times.

Below is the current time table for the Sacramento-Auburn leg of the Capitol Corridor train. Current fares are $30-50 from one of the Bay Area stations to Auburn, and $15 from the Sacramento station to Auburn.

Route	Days	Departure Time	Arrival Time
Sacramento to Auburn	Mon-Fri	5:57 PM	7:06 PM
Sacramento to Auburn	Sat-Sun	6:03 PM	7:06 PM
Auburn to Sacramento	Mon-Fri	6:35AM	7:32 AM
Auburn to Sacramento	Sat-Sun	7:55 AM	8:54 AM

Times and fares subject to change

Amtrak
YoloBus
BART

Tours

I have put together a list of enough Smith-related sites that I've developed a driving/walking tour of a number of key locations around Auburn, including the 4 commemorative spots to Smith, and a number of other areas of interest. I will be creating a self-directed tour based on this information which you can take while you're in town for the conference.

If you are unable to make the event and happen to be passing through Auburn, you can contact me at TheCASmithCircle@Gmail.Com in case I'm available to meet you and give a guided tour.

Who was CAS?

The short biography below might be helpful if you're new to Clark Ashton Smith.

Born in 1893 near Auburn, California, Clark Ashton Smith rarely left the area for the 1^st 61 years of his life.  Living the whole time in a wooden cabin with no running water or electricity, and only a wood stove for heat, he and parents scraped by on their meager earnings.  Smith was mostly self-educated, saying he read the dictionary and encyclopedia front to back multiple times. 

After the publication of his 1^st poetry collection, The Star-Treader, at the tender age of 19, Clark Ashton Smith was lauded as the “Keats of the Sierras”.  Unfortunately, due to ill health, and financial hardship, he was unable to capitalize on this success.  He intermittently published further poetry collections, never gaining the same accolades for his poetry as before.

Since Smith wasn’t selling what little poetry he did write, a friend encouraged him to try his hand at fiction.  Between 1930-1938, Smith had published more than 90 short stories.  With 50 of his stories and many of his poems gracing the pages of Weird Tales, he became good friends with HP Lovecraft, and corresponded with him and Robert E Howard until their deaths.  The 3 of the authors frequently shared aspects of their stories between them, with Smith inventing the Book of Eibon, and Tsathoggua, the toad god, which Lovecraft ended up using in a published story before Smith.

Smith’s writing has been described as florid or purple prose by some.  He utilized his extensive self-taught vocabulary, weaving in poetic cadence and flare, to give the reader an other-worldly experience.  The themes of his works focused on hubris, punishment, and loss, with a healthy dose of morbidness and sensuality.  He had many different settings in which he worked: Hyperborea (ancient pre-ice age Earth, not to be confused with R.E. Howard’s Hyboria), Zothique (far-flung future Earth at the dying of the sun), Poseidonis (last continent of Atlantis), Averoigne (haunted medieval France), modern day set around his hometown Auburn, and multiple planets on which he set his science fiction stories.  You can probably sense Smith’s theme of death and finality just from the many of the setting descriptions.  The Ballentine Adult Fantasy series published 4 collections of his work: Zothique, Hyperborea, Poseidonis, and Xiccarph (science fiction stories).

Unfortunately, after Lovecraft, Howard and both of his parents die in an 18-month period, Smith largely stopped writing.  During his younger period of ill health, he had turned to painting, drawing and sculpting, and now continued them as his main creative endeavors.  He had showings of his art in New York, San Francisco and Paris, along with frequently showing pieces in his local library and Auburn store front windows.  Smith was one of the very few Weird Tales authors who illustrated some of his own stories.

The Death of Malygris, Weird Tales, April 1934

If you are interested in reading Clark Ashton Smith’s works, Hippocampus Press has published many of his settings https://www.hippocampuspress.com/clark-ashton-smith.  All of his fiction has been published in chronological order by Nightshade Books.  All of his fiction, poetry and many pictures of his art are available at the Eldritch Dark website http://www.eldritchdark.com/.  You can listen to the unfortunately defunct The Double Shadow podcast which covered of his stories one setting at a time: https://thedoubleshadow.com/, and the current Strange Shadows podcast that is going through his works in publication order https://strangeshadows.buzzsprout.com/. 

Finally, I live near Smith’s hometown, Auburn, California, and produce a 2-page zine giving a more local view of Smith and his environment.  https://clark-ashton-smithery.blogspot.com/

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?819

https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/smith_clark_ashton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith

About

Hi, thanks for your interest in The Smith Circle: A Clark Ashton Smith Conference. I had been a fan of Smith for a while, when I discovered I live nearby his hometown of Auburn, California.

Being able to easily visit Auburn and the different library collections in the area, I started a 2-page zine on Smith, trying to provide a more local viewpoint. The zine, 12 Leagues to Averoigne, is part of the Trigon Amateur Press Association which covers pulp era subjects.

My zine has had articles on the local collection of Smith's books and art, interviews with Smithian luminaries, and published previously unknown Smith related ephemera. The (mostly) monthly zine has been published for about 2 years.

In late 2024, I made a Smithian connection with a book store employee. It started an on-going conversation which led to a showing of The Emperor of Dreams, the Smith documentary, at the book store. Conversations at that event spurred me organize this conference.

I hope you're able to make it to the conference and take in Auburn and the Carnegie in all its telluric delights.