Conjurations: A Lab For New Writing
TISA BRYANT
March 29, 20234pm PT / 5pm MT / 6pm CT / 7pm ET
About this Workshop
In an appropriation of the science lab, this workshop is a space for conjuring radical new types of writing too nascent for intense critique sessions, but ripe enough for generative explorations of process, breaking new ground in an existing project, or waking up writing muscles through fresh forms of play. Our resources flow through vast channels and are recombinant, spanning a wide variety of eras, cultures, tongues, lands, intuition, and influential works from across the arts and our own archives. In our 90 minutes together, maybe some old habits will change shape, boundaries get redrawn, or repertoires will expand, but definitely some good thinking, scribbling and sharing will get done. Of course, some of these experiments may fail beautifully, but that is part of the point.
About Tisa Bryant
Tisa Bryant (MFA, Brown 2004) makes work that often traverses the boundaries of genre, culture and history. Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), her first full-length book, is a collection of original, hybrid essays that remix narratives from film, literature, and visual arts and zoom in on the black presences operating within them. An excerpt from her novella, [the curator], was published by Belladonna Books in 2009, in a companion volume with writer Chris Kraus. She is also the author of the chapbook, Tzimmes (A+Bend Press, 2000), a prose poem collage of narratives including a Barbados genealogy, a Passover seder, and a film by Yvonne Rainer. She is interested in archives, hybrid forms, mythologies, ethnicity and innovation, the interdependence of experimental and conventional fiction, cinematic novels, and ekphrastic writing.
Bryant’s writing has appeared in Evening Will Come, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, in the ‘zine, Universal Remote: Meditations on the Absence of Michael Jackson, and in the catalogues and solo shows of visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Cauleen Smith. She is co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology of black gay male desire and survival, from AIDS Project Los Angeles, which was nominated Best LGBTQ anthology by the LAMBDA Literary Awards. She is also co-editor/publisher of the hardcover cross-referenced literary/arts series, The Encyclopedia Project, which recently released Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K