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The FC2 Writer's Edge Schedule - March 19-21, 2009
THE WORKSHOPS REALITY FICTION
Creativity, we may imagine, resides in the imagination of the new. It's cheating to use found texts and other objects. Yet at the same time the body of already-existing texts and artifacts is a vast archive too fantastic to consign to the dustbin of literary (and extra-literary) history. In fact, there is already a rich tradition of literature that imports bits of the world. And those bits needn't be limited to literary texts. Newspapers, songs, legal documents, textbooks from any number of disciplines, medical records, maps, photos, and other images-not only is it not cheating to use such materials, but it opens up a new set of possibilities for writing into, out of, and/or about the historical record. For writers interested in investigating techniques of representing and referring to the phenomenal world and its infinite pasts and presents-techniques of incorporating its material effects into fictional work-this workshop will offer examples of, discussion of, and exercises in salvage, rereading, quotation, recycling, imitation, cut and paste, (re)appropriation, repetition, reproduction, revision, parody, hoax, and other acts of unoriginality. In preparation, you may want to acquaint yourself with the following fictions: Don Quixote, Kathy Acker; "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," Jorge Luis Borges; A Humument, Tom Philips; Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed. STEALING BEAUTY: "TRANSLATING" FROM THE SISTER ARTS
"Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal." -T. S. Eliot ANAEROBICIZE YOUR PROSE So one argument and I don't necessarily disbelieve it is that punctuation is just a parasite that all it is is the side effect of writing words down in these lines that it's just a clumsy visual approximation of the natural rhythms of speech that in prose fiction are pretty much exactly what's supposed to lull the reader into a state where the story can work or or a better way to say it maybe is that that unbroken patter and burble and spike of words is what transports the reader not off the page but into it face first ankle deep and evermore. But yeah, sometimes a comma sure is nice, right? Here we'll talk about this, both in terse, nervous, over-punctuated sentences we try to laugh off and in long unbroken fragments that wander and forget themselves and then find each other in surprising ways. And we'll do some writing as well. And never stop THE CALIFORNICATION OF HISTORY Despite frequent (and frequently naïve) claims to the contrary, innovative fiction is neither necessarily ahistorical nor dehistoricized. Rather, it continually questions our culture's suppositions about what constitutes historical knowledge, embracing the counter-intuitive recognition that texts are simultaneously self-conscious linguistic and formal systems shut off from the world and active participants in larger sociopolitical contexts. In this workshop, which will consist of mini-lecture, conversation, and two exercises, we shall explore the practical and theoretical joys, problemitizations, assumptions, and possibilities in engaging with the past(s)-"real" and imagined-inventively in writing. In preparation, you may want to acquaint yourself with the following fictions: Da Vinci's Bicycle, Guy Davenport; History of the Imagination, Norman Locke; Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell; Nietzsche's Kisses, Lance Olsen. BORDER CROSSINGS One of Gloria Anzaldúa's major contributions to United States academic and creative writing and discussion was the term mestizaje, meaning a state of being beyond binary (either-or) conception. In her theoretical works, Anzaldúa calls for a "new mestiza," which she describes as an individual aware of her conflicting and meshing identities who uses these "new angles of vision" to challenge old ways of thinking, being and writing. The work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña concerns the U.S.-Mexican border itself, immigration, cross-cultural identity, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures and races. His artwork and literature also explores the politics of language, the side effects of globalization, "extreme culture," and new technologies from a Latino perspective. Unlike what might happen at an academic conference, as creative writers we will be "inhabiting the territory" of their texts, and moving through their language as citizens of an unnamed country with identities forming at a border of language and geography. We will push ourselves through two major writing exercises meant to reinvent identity stories. In some ways we will be deconstructing whiteness and the position of the "U.S." writer. We will also create a blog that "performs" our "texts" as an extension of the workshop. In preparation, you may want to acquaint yourself with the following: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzuldua; The New World Border and Dangerous Border Crossers, Gómez-Peña. You may also want to check out some of Gómez-Peña's performance work at the Video Artist Database: http://www.vdb.org/ ONE ON ONE one-on-one conferences will be available with workshop faculty to those participants who would like individual interaction. The ABR Writer's Conference: Fiction and Poetry Workshops HOW TO GET PUBLISHED IN HARPER'S
What are the connections between the work that people do and the Latino experience as part of America’s “working-class majority”? How do working-class experience, identity, history, and struggle shape Latino writing? What cultural work does the essay perform, in terms of what it allows us, as readers and writers, to see, understand, and produce?
A JOURNALIST'S VIEW OF CREATIVE NON-FICTION
For a text to be considered creative nonfiction, it must be factually accurate, and written with attention to literary style and technique. Forms within this genre include personal essays, memoir, travel writing, food writing, biography, literary journalism, and other hybridized essays.
CONTRADICTORY MUSIC
One often hears that much of the meaning of a poem is created through the music of the poet’s language—but how do we read that music? This workshop will focus on how poets use the music of language—meter, rhythm, the sounds of words—to create meaning in their poems. It will also offer suggestions to student writers about how they might more clearly HEAR their own work as they compose it.
"YOU MAY ASK YOURSELF" Second person point of view has been creeping toward legitimacy in the past couple of decades. It’s difficult to find any literary magazine not featuring at least on story told in second person every volume year. Yet it’s often derided as gimmicky and derivative. In this workshop, we’ll consider just what second person can do in comparison to first- and third person; we’ll investigate the types of stories best told in second, along with the varieties of second person. Students should acquaint themselves with Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer,” Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Reginald McKnight’s “Soul Food”. FC2 is one of the few alternative presses in America devoted to publishing fiction considered by America's largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu. Please visit us at: http://fc2.org
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