FC2

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

Fall 2008 Releases

** The Bruise by Magdalena Zurawski **

The Bruise is a novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M-deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one which has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not go away, forcing M– to confront her own existential fears. M–’s wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination is that of the writer, breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. With rhythmic language and allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski reclaims the university bildugsroman as an intelligent and moving form.

** Ledfeather by Stephen Graham Jones **

After burning up all the blacktop New Mexico had to offer with The Fast Red Road and rewriting the Great Plains into a place both more and less Indian than they already were with The Bird is Gone , Stephen Graham Jones has now brought the story up to Montana. And it’s leaner than it’s ever been. Not because it’s about the Blackfeet, who have been schooled by the government on how to starve, but because this time the story is just about one Indian boy, standing in the middle of the road at night, trying so hard to change history. And these next moments, the headlights already throwing his shadow miles behind him, across all of America, these next moments are going to decide everything. Balanced on the knife edge of winter like the Blackfeet have always been, a single act can resonate for generations. This is Ledfeather. The story of Doby Saxon, standing in that road just outside Browning, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like he’s what the last hundred years have been hurtling towards.

And maybe he is.

** La Medusa by Vanessa Place **

La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a brain—a modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions.

Vanessa Place’s characters—a trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others—are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.

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.