Looking at your list, I see two distinct clumps: the Minneapolis/Scribblies clump (Brust, Dean, Wrede, Shetterly, Bull, with John M. Ford as an honorary member) and the New England group (Kushner, Sherman, Willey, Windling). The East Coasters had Borderland; the Minnesotans had Liavek. Members of each group tend to credit one another in their acknowledgements.

Is there really more going on here than a group of friends who like the same sort of thing, and who share similar writing goals? If there were an FoM school as such, I'd expect to see a steady stream of new novels in the subgenre, written by people who weren't part of the original movement.

A friend of mine pointed out elsewhere that the Kushiel novels probably qualify. (She said, shooting down her own argument)

Betsy HP