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Wendy's Subway at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive
Thursday, March 31 - Saturday, April 2, 2016
AWP Offsite ProgramLos Angeles Contemporary Archive
2245 E Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90021Wendy’s Subway is pleased to partner with Los Angeles Contemporary Archive for three days of writing workshops and readings. The program will coincide with the Association for Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP). Full schedule below.
All workshops are FREE and limited to 15 participants.
It is possible to register on site or in advance by emailing info@wendyssubway.com with the title of the workshop in your subject line. -
THURSDAY, MARCH 31
Make a Salad: Workshop in Post-Studio Writing
Led by Janet Sarbanes
2-3PM
When art exits the studio, how can it enter the writing process? This workshop invites participants to explore new ways of writing and thinking about writing by engaging with a series of prompts fashioned by contemporary artists, including John Baldessari, Alison Knowles, Paul Thek and Jackie Brookner. The session will begin with a brief discussion of Baldessari’s legendary Post-Studio Art class and Alison Knowles's Fluxus crit class at CalArts in the early seventies, and the radically interdisciplinary arts context from which they emerged.
Janet Sarbanes is a writer and scholar living in Los Angeles. She is the author of the short story collection Army of One, and has published additional fiction and criticism in anthologies, artist monographs and numerous journals, including Black Clock, P-Queue, Entropy, Afterall, Popular Music and Society, Utopian Studies, Los Angeles Review of Books and East of Borneo. Her most recent essay, "Lessons From Older Artists," appears in the forthcoming Made in LA 2016 catalogue. Her most recent short story, "Rosie the Ruminant," appears in the spring issue of North Dakota Quarterly. She teaches in the MFA Creative Writing and the MA Aesthetics and Politics programs at CalArts.
We’re Calling It Speedback
Led by Wendy’s Subway
4-5PM
For this hour, we’ll do some thinking about our interests and obsessions as writers, and about how we talk to others about those identifications. Then we’ll invite participants to share some of this thinking, along with their own work, in a series of structured, one-on-one conferences. Participants should bring around two pages of work-in-progress to share (a printer will be available if you arrive without a hard copy). Our goal will be to get everyone in the group a variety of feedback, then culminate with some notes towards future revision.
Concessions / Light Dinner
5-7PM
READING: New Herring Press, DoubleCross Press, Litmus Press, Projective Industries, Elis Press
AWP Offsite Reading
7-9PM
With readings by:
Lisa Ciccarello
Aja Couchois Duncan
Leora Fridman
Katie Fuller
E. Tracy Grinnell
Angela Hume
Matt Longabucco
Jamie Townsend
Maya Weeks
and readings by Friends of New Herring: Amanda Davison, Amy Scholder, Lanka Tatersall, Dylan Mira, and more!
More here: http://wendyssubway.com/events/ -
FRIDAY, APRIL 1
Embodied Writing Workshop
Led by Noura Wedell
2-3PM
In this workshop, we will consider systems of notation and writing in regards to physical movements and the sensation of those movements. Questions we will investigate are: Can writing function as a way to bring to perception something that was not perceptible? How does writing move between bodies? Can writing describe a state of dynamic equilibrium, or how can we create cartographies of inner experience?
Please wear comfortable clothes that you can move in, and bring writing material (computer, notebook, etc.)
Noura Wedell does teaching, scholarship, and translation and editorial work for Semiotext(e).
Odes to the Missing: Missives, Errants, Emissaries
Led by Litia Perta
3-4PM
This workshop aims to orient a writing practice around loss, the missing, what is not there. What language best describes absence, voids, lacunae? How are sentences best constructed when what is at their center is something missing? How does the page play a role in this construction, or not? More than a technical inquiry, this hour will be devoted to getting near the "missing" inside each writer's emotional body, the heartmind. What are the ways that language itself is always doing this dance with the missing? What are the ways that missives organize around this empty center, a thing which is not there?
Litia Perta is a writer and thinker exploring alternative forms of kinship and the communications, creations, forms made possible within them. She lives in Los Angeles and is the Professor of Art Writing in the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine.
The Disembodied and the Planetary: A Ghost Workshop
Led by Dorothea Lasky
4-5PM
In this workshop, we will explore the idea of the unseen, the imperceptible, and the ghostly in poetry. We will look at poems by Bhanu Kapil and Wallace Stevens that investigate the scope of spiritual entities that can exist in the space of a poem. Using the archives at LACA as material, we will also work together on exercises that help us consider how the world of occult can emerge in our poetry.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of four books of poetry, most recently ROME (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2014), as well as Thunderbird, Black Life, AWE, all out from Wave Books. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013) and several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, co-directs Columbia Artist/Teachers, and lives in New York City.
Friends" Series 2
With Erin Christovale and Henoch Moore
Organized by Kelman Duran
5-7PMErin Christovale is a curator and film programmer based in Los Angeles. She has lectured at Princeton University, California Institute of the Arts, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Syracuse, New York. Her curatorial projects have been mentioned in ARTFORUM, Hyperallergic, Artsy and Artnet. Her ongoing film program, Black Radical Imagination, is currently in its third iteration and has been featured in over 25 institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, ART BASEL, and MOCA.Henoch Moore is the owner of Gene's Liquor a South Central Label, that has releases from LA Club Resource as well as other obscure but amazing titles.
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SATURDAY, APRIL 2
Scott Benzel Book Launch
and Art Writers Open Mic
1-1:30PM (Book Signing); 1:30-3PM (Open Mic)
The Los Angeles Contemporary Archive is pleased to announce the release of Scott Benzel’s untitled collection of poems. This event will include a book signing by Benzel from 1-1:30pm.
From 1:30-3pm, the even will open up an ‘open mic’ reading of art writers’ work, featuring Benzel, Andrew Berardini, Suzy Halajian, Carol Cheh, Martha Kirzsenbaum, Steve Kado, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Travis Diehl, Catherine Wagley, and many more! Art writers and critics are invited to sign up ahead of time or on the day of to read up for up to 7 minutes.
To sign up, email: info@wendyssubway.com
About the book
Art dealer Seth Siegelaub's campaign throughout the late '60's to have the new conceptual work of his stable of artists understood and accepted, through the creation of catalogs, exhibitions, and entreaties to leading art writers and magazines to review the work, resulted in the still-operatal thesis that the content of much contemporary work is interpretable only through written material created by critics and other writers. This untitled collection of poems was composed by rearranging reviews and publicity materials into mostly metrical, unrhymed lines of blank verse and by removing any form of attribution, systematically 'blanking' the subject as well as the author(s) of the works and poems. The poems are credited as being 'after' a number of well-known critics and art writers, presumably the writers of the originary texts
Disentangling Poetics
Led by Allison Conner (in collaboration with the Women's Center for Creative Work)
3-4PM
How do you deal with creative blocks, anxieties or funks? How do you sustain a habitual creative practice while also remaining open to serendipities, detours, and bottomless depths? In this workshop, we will attempt to venture away from our usual ways of making and doing. Together we will move through a series of writing exercises and experiments with an intention of channeling hidden imaginative reserves.
Our prompts are inspired by and/or will reference: How to Write (more) by Libros Antena, Grapefruit by Yoko Ono, Tarot imagery, Bhanu Kapil, CA Conrad, Oulipo, Bernadette Meyer, and others.
Allison Conner is a writer, editor, and zine maker. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in ATTN, Jacket2, The Volta Blog, Art Book Review, and elsewhere. She enjoys exploring ways in which publishing can realign our notions of community, activation, resistance, and healing. She is an assistant fiction editor for The Offing and the print lab manager at the Women's Center for Creative Work.
LACA Reader/Speaker Series
Led by Declan Bond Schweitzer
4-5PM
Thematically orbiting contemporary approaches to institutional critique, the LACA speaker series couples each essay with a speaker from among the curious who exist outside the academic setting. Here, we ask individuals to take up the task of interpretation and re-presentation of these essays in short and speculative talks that illuminate the essential aspects of these theories all the while leaving room for conversation, discussion, disagreement and unity within the broader arts community.
To launch the LACA Reader/Speaker Series, Declan Bond Schweitzer presents and expands upon his essay "On the mood of the collector in the Digital Age." This essay attempts to gauge the meaning of some of the structural developments of the modern world by analyzing the concept of collection as it applies to the pre- and post-digital era.
The Making of the American Essay
An Evening with John D'Agata and Michael Silverblatt
Presented by Graywolf Press
6-8PM
An evening with John D'Agata and Michael Silverblatt in celebration of THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN ESSAY, the concluding volume in D'Agata's A NEW HISTORY OF THE ESSAY series. With readings by three special guests. Reception and book signing to follow.
Semiotext(e) and Friends
8-10PM
A reading of Dicey LifeWriting, New Essaying, and Prose on the Edge by authors whose disinhibited independence is the kind that has characterized Semiotext(e) since the 1970s.
Featuring Dodie Bellamy, Garth Greenwell, Ed Pavlić, Kevin Killian, Jarett Kobek, Brian Blanchfield, and Feliz Lucia Molina.
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