Janice Lee—
Excited about &NOW coming up this weekend. Will you be there?
http://andnowfestival.com/
Reporting more soon, during & after the conference.
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Brian Evenson’s &NOW Reading
Please enjoy this three part video of Brian Evenson reading at &NOW last fall. He read “South of the Beast,” a story he says he wrote in his late twenties, as well as “Windeye,” published in PEN America 11, and then “A Pursuit” and “Invisible Box,” both from Fugue State.
(via @Caketrain)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhiOKyBwNUA
Parts 2 and 3 after the break.
Literature’s Material Circumstances
Blake already posted about &Now, but I want to put up more about one panel titled “Writing’s Dirty Secret: An Investigation of Literature’s Material Circumstances.” This panel was run by Jeremy Davies and AD Jameson and was really interesting because it tried to get at some of the more process-based questions about writing habits. How do we write? What do we use to write? Time of day? And so on. Standard questions really, but questions that might not get the focused treatment they deserve.
The panel led to more discussion between Matt Kirkpatrick, Lily Hoang, and myself later that night. Lily echoed a remark that panelist Vanessa Place made: that to answer these kind of questions was somewhat frustrating because of how predictable our answers are, as the questions and our answers are so bound up in what we think a writer ought to say when asked “how do you write?” Place asked during the panel something like this: how many of our writing habits come not from what works best for us but what we think ought to work best for us based on some idealized notion we have about what it means to be a ‘writer’?
Swallowing &Now
Just got back from a long weekend at the &Now Conference in Buffalo. It was a great long trek with many heads and panels, focused on the termed ‘experimental’ end of things. Lots of discussion and reading going on and heads chomping. The social elements aside, here’s a report from the field of things I attended.
