The Séance in Experimental Writing gathers new and established writers to speculate on the boundaries of structural and linguistic experiments today. Participants include novelists, short-story writers, poets and hypertextualists from Canada, the U.S., and Europe, including Dodie Bellamy, Charles Bernstein, Jaap Blonk, Christian Bök, Dennis Cooper, Madeline Gins, Robert Glück, Kenneth Goldsmith, Shelley Jackson, Kevin Killian, Ben Marcus, Eileen Myles, Joan Retallack, Cristina Rivera Garza, Steven Shaviro, Janet Sternburg, and Lidia Yuknavitch.

Friday

12:30-1:00 p.m.
Introduction

1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
Pataphysics: Science, Fiction and Imaginary Solutions.
Panelists: Ben Marcus, Kenneth Goldsmith, Shelley Jackson

Fiction often proposes imaginary solutions to problems that vex both the social and the scientific world. For every rule there seems to be an exception, and to every episteme an extreme. Imagine the impossible. Can the world be re-written? If science is metaphysical is poetry a form of math?

3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Egoplasm: The Ghost of the Author Returns.
Panelists: Dodie Bellamy, Jaap Blonk, Cristina Rivera-Garza

Even though the author is dead, anyone can tell the difference between a poem by Jackson Mac Low and Steve McCaffery. Is the writing machine always haunted by its author? Need it bear repeating that just when women and non-white writers establish their literary self, straight white men declare to them that the subject is dead. Can the author really be made to disappear? Should he or she disappear? Are new subjectivities being created?

8:30 - 11:00
First Séance: Performance Readings
Charles Bernstein, Jaap Blonk, Christian Bök, Madeline Gins, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kevin Killian, Joan Retallack, Janet Sternburg

Saturday

9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
What's Love Got To Do With It? Sex &a,p; Desire in Narrative
Panelists: Dennis Cooper, Robert Glück, Lidia Yuknavitch

What's Love Got To Do With It? Sex & Desire in Narrative. For more than a generation, sex and sexual desire have been the sine qua non of experimental writing. Is desire still relevant? Is sex obsolete? Can lust create identity? Do readers want to be aroused and can writers still arouse them? Why has the urgency of the human body been so fertile for writers, and where will this excitement lead us next?

11:30 a.m.--1:00 p.m.
Ethernity--To Infinity and Beyond: Form & Structure
Panelists: Christian Bök, Madeline Gins, Christine Wertheim

From the chemistry of letters to the double-helix and the periodic table of elements. Is there structure beyond structuralism? Are structures of language and narrative more real than 'reality'? Do extreme patterns lead away from or toward paranoia? Intricate lattices of poetry: the inter-, meta-, pata-, and the trans-.

2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Absolutely Ordinary -- Writing the Everyday
Panelists: Charles Bernstein , Eileen Myles, Janet Sternburg

To the ontological question 'what is there?' the usual answer is: the desk, my chair, the air, the past. everything. Writers have a dual relation to the everyday. It is everywhere, in their work and in its making, yet is also always evades them. From Flaubert's housewife's fantasies to Kenneth Goldsmith's transcription of every movement in his day, the everyday never goes away. What is quotidian today? Is there a secret life of objects? How do/ can/ will writers represent the ordinary?

4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Summary Panel: Three Mediums Converge
Panelists: Kevin Killian, Joan Retallack, Steven Shaviro

8:30 - 11:00 p.m.
Second Séance: Performance Reading
Dodie Bellamy, Jaap Blonk, Dennis Cooper, Robert Glück, Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Eileen Myles, Cristina Rivera-Garza, Steven Shaviro

$30 all events
$6 for each series of daytime panels
$12 per evening
Students with current I.D. get 1/2 off

Please note that for the $30 ticket to all the Séance readings, tickets must be purchased by calling the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.

Funded in part by The Annenberg Foundation.

Read the press release


For student and CalArts alumni, faculty and staff discounts,
please call the REDCAT box office at 213-237-2800.