Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at PNCA

January  2-12, 2022/ Everything can be accessed via PNCA's Youtube Channel

Conversations (Room 413)

Sunday, January 2, 9am PST 

Minor Detail: A Conversation

Sara Jaffe and Poupeh Missaghi 

In her novel Minor Detail, Palestinian author Adania Shibli uses the concept of the “minor detail” to address grand atrocities through a historical multiperspective framework. We will have a conversation about/around the book, discussing narrative style, language justice, memory practices, and addressing violence in literature. We encourage everyone to read the (short!) novel beforehand.

Monday, January 3, 9am PST

Work-in-Progress, Progress-in-Work

Alison C Rollins and Brandon Shimoda 

Work-in-Progress, Progress-in-Work. We are going to interview each other/have a conversation about our respective works-in-progress–Alison’s The Red Curator and Brandon’s untitled book on Japanese American incarceration–towards an illumination/understanding of the process of conceiving/reconceiving, researching, drafting, thinking and living with and through (etc.) a creative work, as, itself, an autonomous work within the larger evolution/experience. We will also discuss, more broadly, the nature, status, potentialities, and phenomena, of work-in-progress, including work that remains, forever, in-progress (i.e. Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família), what happens when a work-in-progress becomes a finished work, and the idea that finished work acts as a memorial to the creative process.

Tuesday, January 4, 9am PST

Why am I here now and what is my next move?*

Kristin P Bradshaw and Jay Ponteri 

 What is the work of being an artist? And why do we make what we make? Why do we do the work we do? How and when does the work we do intersect with or become advocacy for social justice, for equity, and for non-violence? When does the work begin and when does the work end? I mean, does the work of being a writer stop if we can fall asleep and dream? What does it mean to be branded an “enemy of the state,” as George and Mary Oppen were during the Red Scare of the 1950s? What does it mean to ask the question why versus the question how? How,  when, and why does the private self-talk that writing seems to be, amid composition, begin to enter into the public discourse? The title of our conversation comes from the narrator of Dionne Brand’s novel Theory and echoes the impulses that gave way to the human development of language---to locate ourselves, to tell the story of how we arrived in this place and who we’re becoming. This improvised conversation will explore these questions and adjacent questions that might arise, considering the thinking from artists and writers such as Isaac Babel, Dionne Brand, Alma Thomas, June Jordan, Etel Adnan, Horace, Boethius, and Joy Harjo.

Readings

Sunday, January 2, 7pm PST

Alejandro de Acosta & Alison C Rollins, Room 601

Monday, January 3, 7pm PST

7pm: Sara Jaffe & Brandon Shimoda, Room 601

Tuesday, January 4, 7pm PST

Kristin Bradshaw, Poupeh Missaghi, & Jay Ponteri, Room 601

Tuesday, Jan 11, 7pm PST

An Evening with Venita Blackburn at The Alberta Abbey