If you happen to be in the Denver area, don’t miss out on Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. The exhibit will be held at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, 12 October 2012 through 3 February 2013.
Postscript features the work of over fifty artists and writers exploring the artistic possibilities of language. Presenting works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that raise questions about how we read, look at, hear, and process language today. A major current underlying the exhibition argues that the field of literature known as “conceptual writing” can be seen as engaging in a provocative dialogue with the field of contemporary art, producing new insights into the meaning of both literature and art. Co-curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Andrea Andersson, Postscript is the first exhibition to examine the work of conceptual writing, investigating the roots of the movement in the art of the 1960s and 70s and presenting contemporary examples of text-based art practices (from www.mcadenver.org).
One highlight of the exhibit will surely be Alexandra Grant’s G. babel, a 7×22 foot painting, composed after FC2 author Michael Joyce’s Was. babel has been described as Alexandra Grant’s most ambitious work to date. Inspired by Michael Joyce’s text, babel portrays clusters of encircled words spread out across a nearly 24-foot-long horizontal plane. Photos of babel can be seen on Grant’s webpage here.
And if you haven’t read Was (FC2, 2006) by Michael Joyce then by all means pick up a copy asap! Was is a wonder work, half-poem half-narrative, an often comic nomadic history whose main character is the fleetingness of information itself.
Postscript should be a fantastic exhibition, and it will feature additional FC2 authors as well, such as Mark Amerika, Vanessa Place, and others.
The exhibit is located at MCA Denver: 1485 Delgany Street, Denver, CO 80202. Museum hours are Tuesday through Thursday from noon to 7pm. Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 7pm. More information can be found at MCA Denver’s webpage.
FC2 is pleased to announce that the reading periods for the annual Sukenick and Doctorow book prizes will begin August 15, 2012 and extend through November 1, 2012.
The FC2 Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize was started in 2006 as a way to find emerging authors whose aesthetic visions harmonize with the innovative aesthetic vision of FC2. The prize is open to any U.S. writer in English who has not previously published with FC2. The winner receives publication and $1,000. The 2011 winner of the Sukenick Prize is Sarah Blackman’s Motherbox. Novelist and FC2 Board Member Jeffrey DeShell will serve as judge for the upcoming 2012 contest.
The FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize was started in 2008 to bring established innovative writers to FC2. The prize is open to any U.S. writer in English with at least three books of fiction published. The winner receives publication and $15,000. The 2011 winner of the Doctorow Prize is Mac Wellman’s Linda Perdido. Writer and artist Rikki Ducornet will serve as judge for the upcoming 2012 contest.
Submissions to both the Sukenick and Doctorow prizes can be made to FC2’s electronic submissions manager starting August 15, 2012. For additional information and submission instructions, please go to http://www.fc2.org/prizes.html.
This year’s &Now Conference–Tomorrowland Forever!–will take place October 13th-15th at UCSD.
&NOW is a festival of fiction, poetry, and staged play readings; literary rituals, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects; and intergenre literary work of all kinds, including criti-fictional presentations and creatively critical papers.
FC2 will hold a Flash Fiction Reading on Thursday, October 13th at 5:00 PM in the DeCerteau Room of the Literature Building. Participating readers include Lucy Corin, Jeffrey DeShell, Amelia Gray, Noy Holland, Matt Kirkpatrick, Lance Olsen, Joanna Ruocco, and Elisabeth Sheffield.
Go to the &Now webpage for more information, a full conference program, and a UCSD campus map.
Fiction Collective Two will accept submissions for both the Ronald Sukenick/ABR Innovative Fiction Prize and the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize through November 1st.
For more information visit FC2.org.
And click here for a conversation on HTMLGIANT about small press book contests. Lance Olsen talks about the Sukenick and Doctorow Prizes, along with editors from Les Figues , Starcherone , and Noemi .
FC2 authors Debra Di Blasi, Lance Olsen, and Rob Stephenson will be reading at Unnameable Books this Sunday, October 9th.
7:30 p.m./Unnameable Books/600 Vanderbilt Ave/Brooklyn, NY
Dzanc’s rEprint Series publishes contemporary literature in electronic forms. The series focuses on works that have recently gone out of print and great books in print that have yet to be converted to an e-form.
Titles by FC2 authors Brian Kiteley, Noy Holland, Michael Martone, and Stephen Graham Jones are forthcoming. Dzanc’s rEprint series will publish no less than 15 titles by one of the founding members of the Fiction Collective, Jonathan Baumbach!
Please help pass the word that we are accepting applications for the fourth annual Fiction Collective 2 (FC2) Writer’s Edge workshop, held March 19-21, 2009, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at the Universidad International. This year, the FC2 Writer’s Edge will be held in conjunction with the American Book Review (ABR) Writer’s Conference, held March 16-18.
Sponsored by FC2 and ABR, the conference will feature workshops on innovative fiction, panels, a faculty reading, open mics for participants, and myriad conversations about experimental prose.
For more information on both the FC2 Writer’s Edge and ABR Writer’s Conference, including descriptions of the workshops and information on how to apply, please visit the following URL:
http://fc2.org/edge09/edge.html
The 3rd annual Writer’s Edge conference was held at Portland State University from July 25th to July 27th. This was my first time at the conference – I’ve heard amazing things about it from past participants and the conference blew away my expectations. Portland’s an amazing place: amazing food (and drink!), great weather (especially for me escaping the Utah summer for the weekend), friendly people, the best bookstore (period), and for a weekend this summer, home to the center of innovative writing. For three days an all-star line-up of faculty writers joined the greatest concentration of talent, creativity, innovation, and enthusiasm I’ve ever had the pleasure of joining.
It’s taken me a couple weeks to pinpoint exactly why the Writer’s Edge is so good. There’s the usual conference/workshop benefits – camaraderie, the rare experience of being surrounded by people gathered with a common passion, and new friends, yes, but more than anything else I came away with a bunch of new stuff – not a tote bag full of journals and books – but burning ideas and inspiration. For me (and I suspect many other participants) the Writer’s Edge isn’t just about community (although that’s a large part). It’s about writing. And that’s what I flew home with: a notebook full of words, a renewed enthusiasm, and a real sense of community that tells me that the state of reading and writing is alive and well and more than any other time in recent memory, in good hands (our own).
Here’s how it went down:
The conference hit the ground galloping with Lance Olsen’s workshop The Mosaic Mind: Fiction as Collage in which Lance and workshop participants explored the possibilities in applying collage techniques to fiction. In Lance’s words, using “the process of cutting up and cutting off” to liberate narrative. Lidia Yuknavitch’s workshop, Wrestling the Novel, opened with a discussion of the difficulties of the novel: how we define a novel, how we write a novel, and moved into the possibilities of the novel, ending with a massive write-in in which participants worked on the seed of a massive collaborative novel. Steve Tomasula’s M(M)MW: Multi(Modal)Media Writing workshop immersed participants in the possibilities on the page that exist beyond the written word in illustration, video, audio, and animation. Kate Bernheimer’s Fairy Tales Almost Blue encouraged participants to come to our writing with a “virginal mind” and explored the possibilities of the marvelous and fantastic in the form of the fairy tale. And, in Noy Holland’s Usage is More Powerful than Reason, participants got down and dirty with our sentences: ripping them to shreds and stitching them together. In addition to the workshops we managed to squeeze in a faculty reading at Powell’s and an amazing lightning-reading by participants. The panel discussion on Sunday on the state of publishing transformed into a group discussion on the state of our community, the state of innovation, the state of the art. In the words of San Diego’s Rocket from the Crypt: the state of the art is on fire.
So, I’ve got more ideas than I know what to do with – more than enough to keep busy until next year’s Writer’s Edge (to be held in Cuernavaca, Mexico!) Details on that will be posted soon.