WHEN: Wednesday, Feburary 20, 2019 7:00 PM
WHERE: Coolidge Museum, Forbes Library, 20 West St, Northampton MA
The series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is interested in exploring how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. The series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.
Featuring:
Kelly Link is the author of Get in Trouble, Magic for Beginners, and Stranger Things Happen. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press, and has taught at several colleges and universities. She received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2018. Link currently lives in Northampton.
Abbey Mei Otis is the author of the story collection Alien Virus Love Disaster, nominated for the 2019 Philip K. Dick Award. This will the first reading from the book in the Northeast!
Jordy Rosenberg is the author of the novel Confessions of the Fox, named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and recognized by The New Yorker, the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Electric Literature and the Feminist Press as one of the Best Books of 2018. Jordy is a professor of 18th-century Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory at UMass Amherst.
Art Middleton, the Forbes Library Writer in Residence, has been calling this reading In The Offing, an attempt to name a theme he feels captures the character these writers share. While diverse in formally adventurous ways, each carves a unique path toward futures portended in the murk and bright of the present or dredge different possibilities for histories buried in the past. They contain, in the richness of their visions and the lyricism of their articulations, a spirit that echoes Ernst Bloch in his demand for utopia: “that is why we go, why we cut new metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears…”
WHAT: Writer in Residence Reading Series #4
WHEN: Wednesday, March 20, 2018 7:00 PM
WHERE: Coolidge Museum Forbes Library, 20 West St, Northampton MA
Our Work and Why We Do It is the Forbes Library’s new Writer in Residence reading series, which debuted October 2018. This series is interested in exploring the ways in which the written word may create and sustain social worlds through inquiry, practice, experimentation, story and lyric. The dynamic of the public library, open and variegated in its uses, is the ideal space for these questions, as it can so directly reflect the desires of a community that contributes to it’s thriving, operating as an archive of those needs. Regardless of genre, this series believes in the potential for deliberation that writing may produce, a space within the information saturated world we share where we might consider possibilities and deeper questions just beyond what we know.
The series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is motivated by an interest in understanding how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. Against dithering, the series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.
Art Middleton is a writer, educator, and parent interested in exploring the experience of work, time, care, and community, themes that have shown up in his zines, fiction, prose, performance, and curation. His work has been published and performed in many independent presses and spaces, most recently a collaboration with poet Nicole Trigg in the zine Macaroni Necklace out of Oakland, CA. In 2011, he organized the Magic Child Repository, a gallery exhibit celebrating small press and handmade book culture in Providence, RI. Informed by his experience as a nursing/personal assistant, adjunct professor, and food service employee (a wide but not entirely tangential resume), his fiction draws from the mundane and the everyday to ask questions about how individuals orient themselves in history and place. He currently works as a writing instructor and English lecturer with a focus on utopian longing in politics and literature.
You can read a June 2018 Daily Hampshire Gazette article, “Forbes Library’s new Writer in Residence took a winding path back home,” about Art here.
