Low Residency Creative Writing Summer Residency includes new faculty LaTanya McQueen and Guest Artist K-Ming Chang
June 08, 2022
PNCA’s Low Residency Creative Writing Summer Residency begins on June 22 and goes till July 2nd. We welcome new faculty LaTanya McQueen and Guest Artists K-Ming Chang and Melanie Stevens.
HFSGS students can attend via streaming through PNCA’s Youtube Channel or in-person, Room 413. 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 413
Friday, June 24
9-10am: Talk: Alejandro de Acosta 413
7pm: Reading: Alejandro de Acosta, Jay Ponteri, Joanna Kaufman 413
Saturday, June 25
9-10am: Talk: Alison C Rollins 413
7pm: Reading: Alison C Rollins, Brandon Shimoda, Jess Arndt 413
Sunday, June 26
9am-10am: Talk: Vi Khi Nao 413
Monday, June 27
9am-10am: Talk: LaTanya McQueen 413
Friday, July 1
10am-11am: Talk: Jay Ponteri 413
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:
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.
Faculty and Guest Artist Bios
Alejandro de Acosta is a teacher, writer, and translator, in no particular order. He has translated philosophy and poetry from Spanish and French; he has also published two books of critical and experimental essays. His [ mufa :: poema ] publishing project freely distributes poetry and prose, most recently focusing on works in translation, with five new titles published last year. This year, he has published POEM SUMMARIES, composed with Joshua Beckman, and contributed a translation of Osvaldo Lamborghini to the volume ULTIMAS POBLACIONES published by Ediciones Chinatown in Argentina. He has completed the fourth of six novels in translation by Ariel Luppino, and is currently working on a collaborative translation of CAPERUXITA by Agustina Pérez, as well as a book presenting multiple writing experiments in a new form. Alejandro currently lives in Gainesville, Florida.
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2021, her chapbook BONE HOUSE was published by Bull City Press. Her short story collection, GODS OF WANT, is forthcoming from One World, as well as a novel titled ORGAN MEATS. She lives in California.
LaTanya McQueen is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (2022 Fellowship in Prose) and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is the author of two books—the essay collection And It Begins Like This (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and the novel When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial, 2021). Her stories and essays have been published in West Branch, TriQuarterly, Pleaides, New Ohio Review, The Arkansas International, The Florida Review, Bennington Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, Fourteen Hills, The North American Review, Ninth Letter, New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, and other journals, as well as having won the Disquiet Prize (for nonfiction), the Walker Percy Prize (for fiction), and the Best of the Net (for nonfiction). She received her MFA from Emerson College, her PhD from the University of Missouri, was the 2017-2018 Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College, and currently is an Assistant Professor of English-Creative Writing and African American Studies at Coe College. She is also the CNF Editor for Gigantic Sequins, the Associate Editor for Story Magazine, and is on the board for Iowa City’s UNESCO City of Literature.
Vi Khi Nao’s work includes poetry, fiction, film, play, and cross-genre collaboration. Nomadic and prolific by nature, she is the author of the novel, Fish in Exil, the story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize) and of four poetry collections: Human Tetris, Sheep Machine, Umbilical Hospital, and The Old Philosopher (winner of the 2014 Nightboat Prize). Her poetry collection, A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line, and her short stories collection, The Vegas Dilemma, were published from 11:11 Press Summer and Fall 2021 respectively. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University & she was the fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
Jay Ponteri directed the creative writing program at Marylhurst University from 2008-2018 and is now the program head of PNCA’s Low-Residency Creative Writing program. His book of creative nonfiction Someone Told Me has just been published by Widow+Orphan House. He’s also the author of Darkmouth Inside Me (Future Tense Books, 2014) and Wedlocked (Hawthorne Books, 2013), which received an Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Two of Ponteri’s essays, “Listen to this” and “On Navel Gazing” have earned “Notable Mentions” in Best American Essay Anthologies. His work has also appeared in many literary journals: Gaze, Ghost Proposal, Eye-Rhyme, Seattle Review, Forklift, Ohio, Knee-Jerk, Cimarron Review, Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, While teaching at Marylhurst, Ponteri was twice awarded the Excellence in Teaching & Service Award. In 2007, Ponteri founded Show:Tell, The Workshop for Teen Artist and Writers, now part of summer programming at Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC.org) on whose Resource Council he serves. He teaches memoir classes at Literary Arts. He lives with his son Oscar and Oscar's pug MO. Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018, she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award; and in 2020, the winner of a Pushcart Prize. She holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado College. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee.