PNCA’s Low Residency Creative Writing Summer Residency begins on June 22! Join the LRCW program for a series of events, readings and workshops with an incredible group of writers. We welcome new faculty LaTanya McQueen and Guest Artists K-Ming Chang and Melanie Stevens!

All faculty talks and readings are open to the public, via streaming through PNCA’s Youtube Channel

*The July 1st Event at the IPRC requires signing up through Eventbrite

Faculty Talks & Readings

Wednesday, June 22

7pm: Opening Night Reading: Vi Khi Nao, Sara Jaffe

Friday, June 24

9-10am: Talk: Alejandro de Acosta

7pm: Reading: Alejandro de Acosta, Jay Ponteri, Joanna Kaufman,

Saturday, June 25

9-10am: Talk: Alison C Rollins

7pm: Reading: Alison C Rollins, Brandon Shimoda, Jess Arndt

Sunday, June 26

9am-10am: Talk: Vi Khi Nao

Monday, June 27

9am-10am: Talk: LaTanya McQueen

Friday, July 1

10am-11am: Talk: Jay Ponteri

7pm: Reading: An Evening with K-Ming Chang & LaTanya McQueen IPRC

Faculty Talk Descriptions

Writing-Life-Translation (one year) Alejandro de Acosta

I’ll speak about some of what’s involved in an ongoing translation process, or project, that intersects with my own writing and research in an open and aleatory fashion. I had already realized there’s no single event of publication; as of this year it’s clear there’s no longer a single text to be translated. I’ve realized, or accepted, that I don’t have a method; I only have a process to the extent that each day of work is porous, open to idiosyncrasy, discovery, explorations, and experiments. Among other topics, I’ll discuss the role of guiding phrases as maxims, the invention of new linguistic registers and argots, and the use of real-time messaging and video chat technologies to dialogue with authors, readers, and audiences.

Writing Vulnerability LaTanya McQueen

This talk will be on creating vulnerability in one’s creative nonfiction. We will discuss what approaches we as writers can take toward being emotionally vulnerable in our work, and we will discuss practices that will help us move away from any blocks that might hinder us.

Texts:

“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel

“Criteria for Negro Expression” by Zora Neale Hurston

“All Apologies” by Eula Biss

“Self-Portrait in Apologies” by Sarah Einstein

Links to Pieces:

Hempel

Hurston

Einstein

The Art of Collaboration Vi Khi Nao Writing is generally solitary, but it doesn’t have to be. In this lecture, we will discuss the nature of collaboration: the art of cowriting, participating (how to start and sustain one), and generating literary and artistic products with others. Collaboration can be seen as an impelling generative mechanism for producing new, exciting, and prolific work. It can also be seen as an antidote to stagnation: an innovative, gentle method of self-reflecting, auto-altering, meta-critiquing, and reverse-editing our own work through the agglutinated literary style with others. You will be given an opportunity to collaborate in this talk.

The Visitors: Notes on my Creative Reading Practice Jay Ponteri This lecture describes my creative reading practice that I assume, perhaps wrongly, to be rather unusual. For me, reading is making. As I meditate on the origins, impulses, qualities, varieties, and outcomes of my creative reading practice, I sketch out presently what and how I’m reading while accidentally taking up writing both compressed and expansive, and of course I’m considering my grief and the many ticking clocks within-beyond me. Artists and their works mentioned include (at the moment): Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz), Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, Jayne Cortez’s Coagulations: New & Selected Poems, Sharita Towne’s and garima shakur’s installation we’re out of control, Lia Purpura’s On Looking, Ragnar Kjartannson’s The Visitors, and June Jordan’s poem “On a New Year’s Eve.”

Swallow the Fish: Creative Writing as Performance Art Alison C Rollins Taking Gabrielle Civil’s Swallow the Fish—a memoir in performance art—as its locus, this lecture will explore the implications of viewing acts of creative writing as performance art. As a practice of revision, or rather reimagining, we will play with the possibilities of creatively translating our own works of literary art into performance art pieces. As writers thinking about the use of voice, and the presence of speakers and characters in our work, what might it mean to step into the position of performance artist where the body itself is often imagined as a material? As authors, how might our view of our readers’ experience shift if we view readers as active agents rather than passive receivers? By viewing all reading as performance, how might we place greater value on improvisation, collaboration, instability, and changeability? Ultimately, following Civil’s lead, we will investigate performance art as a means of confronting our fears and desires.

Two day workshop with Guest Artist, June 30-July 1 Writing as Transformation K-Ming Chang In this class, we will reconsider plot and epiphany as the traditional mode of driving a piece of writing “forward.” Inspired by Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, we will dismantle the rigid ways we are often taught to think about craft and consider the potentials of fragmentation, circularity, shape, and transformation. Using examples from queer literature, flash fiction, myth and folklore, oral forms, and non-Western storytelling traditions, we will read examples of short prose in class and experiment with playful and low-stakes writing exercises that make room for new possibilities and new languages.