Monday, April 5:
FC2 Panel Discussion:
What Forms Now A discussion by Fiction Collective authors
Lance Olsen, Lucy Corin, Michael Martone
Juan Gutierrez : “Literatronic: Fiction for Digital Media.”
mIEKAL aND, Camile Bacos: “MotionText Ferment”—a series of video poems interspersed with live text.
Jessica Chalmers, with Kymberly Taylor and Robert Haywood : reading from Avanti: A Postindustrial Ghost Story
Paul Toth : reading the first chapter of Fizz, and then screening the film that was based upon it.
Eduardo Kac : “From Holopoetry to Biopoetry”
Peter Balestrieri : reading from a narrative assembled from a collection of quotations.
Mark Marino: “Labyrinth: The Rulebook Without Game”—a set of game manuals for a game you will never play.
Mike Barrett: “Language Arts: Poetry in Four Dimensions”—a program composed of propositions, narratives, and enactments.
Mike Smith: reading from his poetry collection, “Anagrams of America”
Sheila Murphy: reading from her poetry collections Concentricity
and Letters to Unfinished J.
Joe Amato: Reading e- and other poetry
FC2 Reading: A reading by authors from the Fiction Collective:
R.M. Berry and Lucy Corin
Audrey Niffenegger: reading from her text-image narratives.
Alex Shakar: reading original short fiction.
Forrest Aguirre: reading from his work “The Bones of Ndundi”
Julian Semilian : reading from his novel A Spy in America
Stephanie Strickland : reading from her digital poem “V: Vniverse”
Noam Mor : reading from his book Arc: Cleavage of Ghosts
Jayne Marek: reading from John Matthias’s poem Working Progress,
Working Title: Automystifstical Plaice
Myrlin Hermes : reading from her poem “Index of First Lines”
Jeanne Marie Kusina : reading “Hyper(un)real(ity)”—a presentation of
poems wherein plays on words reflect plays on reality.
Laura Yahya : reading excerpts from her book Me, A Black Woman
Daniel Borzutzky : “Literature in Response to Literature”
Catherine Kaspar & Amy England : reading from their collaborated novel
with Rikki Ducornet, The Books of Ubar
Colleen Moran : reading from her biography of Lydia Davis, written
in conscious mimicry of Davis’s style.
Debra Di Blasi: Reading from her word-image fiction
Tuesday, April 6:
FC2 Panel Discussion: The Word Now—a discussion by Fiction Collective authors R.M. Berry and Brian Evenson the relation of language to formally experimental fiction in the 21st century.
Davis Schneiderman & Tom Denlinger : “Memorials to Future Catastrophes”
Kass Fleisher : reading from her creative non-fiction “The Bear River Massacre”
and a creative piece entitled “Advice to New Faculty Members.”
Shannon Doyne : reading from her fiction.
John Erickson : “An Elocution”—a performance text
Noni Ramos : reading from “Coyote’s Fire”
Trudy Lewis : reading and performance of “Window Gems”—a
fiction reflection on the situation of 19th century female mill
workers in Lowell, MA.
Mary Jo Bang : reading from her fourth book of poems, The Eye
Like a Strange Balloon
Jacque Brogan : reading an excerpt from an experimental and
visual long poem entitled “ta(l)king eyes”
Jenny Boully : reading from her work The Book of Beginnings and Endings
Shyamal Bagchee : will display “On Flatness: A Photo-Word Collage”,
which is part of a larger project entitled “Surfaces”
Scott Helmes : visual/experimental/sound (fusion) poetry—work that can be
viewed and performed, engaging performer and viewer alike
Michael Joyce with Alexandra Grant : “Wordlessness of the miteneinander”—about
image text
Stacey Levine: Reading from her fiction
FC2 Reading II: A reading by authors from the Fiction Collective: Lance Olsen, Brian Evenson and Michael Martone
Marcus Boon : discusses the relationship between Gysin’s
cut up, and sampling culture, and explores links between
Gysin’s ideas and magical practice in Morocco.
Brian Edwards: presenting “Tangerian Lit: Burroughs, Jane Bowles,
Mrabet, and al-barzakh”
David Banash : presenting a retrospective of Brion Gysin and his
relationship to contemporary conceptual literature and poetics.
Martin Nakell : Reading from his fiction
The Jimmy Wynn Ensemble: a collaborative reading by Garin Cycholl,
Dale Barrigar, and Michael Antonucci
Sarah Jane Rushforth : reading from “Indisposition”—a four part
piece that deals with writing, art, medicine, and psychology.
William Gillespie : presentation on Harry Stephen Keeler and
the Mechanics and Kinematics of Webwork Fiction
Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, William Gillespie : reading from
their hypertext novel The Unknown
Rob Wittig: “Gotta Blog This Right Away”—readings and reflections
from the Blog-O-Sphere
Tim Feeney : “Alternative Publishing in the Midst of the
Glut, or An Introduction to this Photocopied Zine that
Some of Us Put Together at Illinois State U.”
Larry McCaffrey : presents “Notes on Exploring a Labyrinth
of New Options for the Book as Object”
David Matlin: reading from his fiction
Lydia Davis
Also: Lydia Davis will be discussing her work as a French translator on 4/6/04 from 5:00-6:00 pm in 119 O’Shaughnessy Hall.
Forrest Aguirre recently received the World Fantasy Award for editing the Leviathan 3 anthology at the Ministry of Whimsy Press. His fiction and poetry have appeared in, among others, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Yellow Bat Review, Neotrope, 3rd bed, and Exquisite Corpse.
Joe Amato is the author of Symptoms of a Finer Age (Viet Nam Generation, 1994), Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self (SUNY Press, 1997), and Under Virga (Chax Press, forthcoming 2004). His poetry, essays, reviews and digital art have been published here and abroad in such journals as Nineteenth Century Studies, Computers and Composition, Postmodern Culture, New American Writing, Jacket, Chain, electronic book review, Crayon, Writing on the Edge, Denver Quarterly, and Voices in Italian Americana.
mIEKAL aND is a poet, intermedia artist and editor of Xexoxial Endarchy, a non-profit experimenta arts publisher and umbrella arts organization. His work over the past 20 years has investigated the border blur, which lies between media and is focused on the semantic abstractions inherent in text-based media works. His performance at &NOW is with Camille Bacos; he currently lives in Wisconsin.
Camille Bacos is a Romanian filmmaker. In the last several years, she produced and directed several TV shows, many of them entertainment shows for a national private Romanian television station, Antena1. She has also researched and published several studies about role and image in collective mentalities. Her performance at &NOW is with mIEKAL aND; she currently lives in Wisconsin.
Shyamal Bagchee teaches literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and is a widely published poet and photo-word artist.
Peter Balestrieri lives in Iowa City with his wife and sons. His work has appeared in Mandoraluxe Rubber Chicken, Can We have our Ball Back?, and 5-Trope, among others. He also has work forthcoming in Poetics and Cultural Studies: A Reader published by Wesleyan.
David Banash is an assistant professor of English at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses in contemporary American literature and popular culture. He recently co-edited a special issue of The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies entitled “Suburbia,” and he is a co-founder of the annual Craft, Critique, Culture conference. He is currently at work on a book investigating the role of collage in twentieth-century culture.
Mary Jo Bang is the author of three books of poems: Apology for Want, Louise in Love, and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans. She is poetry co-editor of the Boston Review, and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Mike Barrett received a BA in Economics from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is artistic director of Anvil/lyre studio, a poetics production lab. His most recent work is “Din & Sit: Cuts of Phi on Sin und Zeit,” a verse translation/ transformation of Heidegger’s Being and Time arranged according to the ratios of the Golden Section.
R.M. Berry is a professor of English at Florida State University and publisher of FC/2. His first collection of stories, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs, was chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize. His novel, Leonardo’s Horse, was selected as a New York Times notable book of 1998. His most recent collection of short fiction is Dictionary of Modern Anguish.
Marcus Boon is an assistant professor of English at York University in Toronto, and author of The Road of Excess: A history of Writers on Drugs (Harvard 2002). He also writes about contemporary music for The Wire.
Daniel Borzutzky teaches courses in Creative Writing, European Literature, and Comparative Literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Antennae, Bridge, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Golden Handcuffs Review, LIT, and Pom Pom. His first book will be published at the end of the year by Ravenna Press.
Jenny Boully is the author of The Body, which was published in April 2002. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2002, The Next American Essay, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. She is a graduate of the Notre Dame creative writing program and is currently working towards her Ph.D in English at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Jacque Vaught Brogan is a poet and professor of American and English Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She has published widely on 20th century American writers, most recently The Violence Within/ The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals, including The Formalist and HOW(ever); her collection of poetry entitled Damage appeared in print last summer.
Jessica Chalmers is assistant professor of performance studies in the University of Notre Dame's Department of Film, Television, and Theatre. She performed with The V-Girls between 1985 and 1995. Currently she collaborates as a writer and dramaturge with The Builders Association, a multimedia performance group based in New York City.
Lucy Corin holds a BA from Duke University and an MFA from Brown. She’s an assistant professor in the English Department at James Madison University.
Garin Cycholl teaches writing and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also works as co-editor with New South, a journal of experimental poetry, fiction; His recent work has appeared with Mudlark, blue sky review, the Muse Apprentice Guild, and the Chicago Review.
Lydia Davis is the author of the story collections Break it Down, Almost No Memory, and Samuel Johnson is Indignant, as well as a novel, The End of the Story. A graduate of Barnard College, she has been a recipient of a MacArthur grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Litway Prize. She has been named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. Her stories have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Persian, and Japanese, and she has been widely published in literary magazines including Harper’s, Bomb, Granta, The New Yorker, Shiny, Tin House, Grand Street, and Hambone. Her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way was recently published by Penguin Classics. She lives in upstate New York with her family.
Tom Denlinger is an artist and an assistant professor of art at Lake Forest College. He will be presenting a project in collaboration with Davis Schneiderman.
Debra Di Blasi is the author of the novellas Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), winner of the 1998 Thorpe Menn Book Award, and the short story collection Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press). Her fiction, essays, art reviews and articles have appeared in many publications, and her short fiction has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad. Recent collaborations with visual and audio artists have been featured museum installations. Screenwriting credits include The Walking Wounded, finalist in the 1996 Austin Screenwriters Competition, and Drought, for which she won the 1999 Cinovation Screenwriting Award.
Shannon Doyne’s poetry and fiction have appeared recently in Pleiades and The Mississippi Review, where her poem “Asking Price” was a finalist for the Mississippi prize. She has founded the literary magazine Our Time is Now, which has just published its third issue. She lives in Dayton, OH.
Brian Edwards is assistant professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Amy England’s first book, The Flute Ship Castricum, was published by Tupelo Press in 2001, as is her second poetry collection Victory and her Opposites. She is currently working on a book of Japanese translations and teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago.
John Erickson is a poet, performance artist, and associate professor in the Ohio State University English Department. He teaches drama, critical theory, and performance theory. He is also an adjunct in the Art Department, where he works with students who do installation, video, and performance work. His origins and love are deeply rooted in poetry; he is presently working with a young poet who is doing an honors thesis on the phenomenology of the poetry performance.
Brian Evenson is the author of six books of fiction, and the recipient of an O. Henry Award and an NEA fellowship. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Brown University.
Tim Feeney has been working on his MA at Illinois State University since before you were born. Since 2001 he’s been an editor at Dalkey Archive Press, working on both the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Context.
Kass Fleisher is the author of a work of creative non-fiction, including The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (SUNY 2004), Accidental Species: A Reproduction, as well as several screenplays and short works published in Bombay Gin, Iowa Review, Postmodern Culture, and Z magazine. She is on the creative writing faculty at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where she lives with her partner and collaborator, Joe Amato.
William Gillespie writes poetry, fiction, and beyond. He is an Electronic Writing Fellow in the Brown University Department of Literary Arts, and works for Spineless Books.
Alexandra Grant was educated at both Swarthmore College and the California College of Art in San Francisco. An upcoming solo exhibition at Gallery Sixteen:One in Santa Monica, called “Homecoming”, marks the culumation of a decade of work about text and art, identity, language, and location. Grant is currently collaborating with hypertext writer Michael Joyce. She lives in Los Angeles.
Juan Gutierrez He has been involved in the creation of fiction for digital media since 1994. He is currently enrolled in the Graduate School of Mathematics at Florida State University; he is researching mathematical modeling of dynamical networks of fiction.
Scott Helmes began writing experimental mathematical poetry in 1972 and concrete poetry in 1974. He has participated in the mail art network since 1975. His poetry has appeared worldwide, both in publications and exhibitions. He is represented in numerous museums and archives devoted to concrete and visual poetry.
Myrlin Hermes lived in India and Hawaii before graduating from Reed College with a double major in English and Theater. Her first novel, Careful What you Wish For, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1999. She is currently at work on her second novel, and plans to begin a Master’s degree in Creative Writing in 2004. She knows how to make over 100 different balloon animals and can sing “You are my Sunshine” in Latin.
Michael Joyce is the author of the classic hypertext novels afternoon, a story and Twilight, A Symphony. His most recent novel is Liam’s Going. He teaches at Vassar College.
Eduardo Kac’s works in electronic and photonic media belong to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Holography in Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janerio; samples can be seen at his website. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Leonardo and an assistant professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. His anthology, New Media Poetry, is reviewed in ebr5. His contributions to the electropoetics special issue is entitled Key Concepts of Holopoetry.
Catherine Kasper is an assistant professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Her poetry collection, A Gradual Disappearance of Insects, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press. Her work has been published in the Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, Timothy McSweeney’s, Quarter After Eight, and more.
Jeanne Marie Kusina is a writer and network artist who teaches philosophy at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her work has appeared in the Barcelona Review of Contemporary Fiction, Xtant3, Recursive Angel, the 5th International Meeting of Experimental, Sound, and Visual Poetry (Buenos Aires) as well as numerous other experimental and visual poetry publications and correspondence/networked art exhibitions.
Stacey Levine’s books include My Horse and Other Stories (which won the Pen/West 1994 fiction award) and Dra-- (a novel), both published by Sun & Moon Press. Her second novel, Frances Johnson, will be published by Clear Cut Press of Oregon in 2004. She recorded one of the first spoken word 45s for Olympia, Washington's Kill Rock Stars record label, and wrote the libretto for a puppet opera that has been performed in and around the Pacific Northwest.
Trudy Lewis is the author of a collection of short stories, The Bones of Garbo, for which she received the Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction, and a novel, Private Correspondences, for which she was awarded the William Goyen Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Chelsea, Fence, Five Points, New England Review, Meridian, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is an associate professor at the University of Missouri at Columbus.
Mark Marino is editor of Bunk magazine bunkmag.com and a Ph.D candidate at the University of California at Riverside. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s fiction program he earned an MA from Loyola Marymount University where he also teaches writing. His works have appeared in the Iowa Review Web as well as several old-school print publications.
Michael Martone was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is the author of six other books of fiction, including Alive and Dead in Indiana, Pensees: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, and Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler’s List. He lives due south of his birthplace, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he edits Story County Books and teaches at the university.
Jayne Marek has degrees in literature and is working on her MFA. She teaches courses in literature, writing, film, and women’s studies and writes poems, plays, and fiction. She is now in search of the perfect aioli recipe.
David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry and prose include the books China Beach, Dressed In Protective Fashion, Fontana's Mirror, and Vernooykill Creek: the Crisis of Prisons in America. His first novel How the Night is Divided, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. His newest novel is A HalfMan Dreaming.
John Matthias has published many volumes of poetry, criticism, essays, translations, and an anthology. His most recent publications are Working Progress, Working Title: Automystifstical Plaice (2002) and his translation with Lars Hakan-Svensson, of Jesper Svenbro’s Three Toed Gull: Selected Poems (2003). His New and Selected Poems: 1963-2003 is forthcoming from Salt Publications. He teaches modern literature and creative writing at the University of Notre Dame.
Larry McCaffrey has published numerous books and essays about postmodern fiction and culture, and is co-editor of Fiction International, American Book Review, and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
Noam Mor teaches philosophy in New York and has worked in video, fiction and poetry. He is currently at work on a libretto.
Colleen Moran is a 2003 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, where she majored in Biochemistry and English. She is particularly interested in the growing field of conceptual fiction. Currently, she is a first year medical student at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to her interest in medicine, she will continue to explore the literature of modern authors.
Sheila Murphy grew up in a Notre Dame Family, and has lived in Phoenix, AZ for the past 28 years. Her most recent publications include Concentricity, and Letters to Unfinished J. Forthcoming in April 2004 is a new collection, Proof of Silhouettes.
Martin Nakell is professor of literature at Chapman University in California. He is the author of books of poetry, and the novels The Library of Thomas Rivka and Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each other.
Audrey Niffenegger is a writer, the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage), and visual artist who lives in Chicago. She is a full time professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, where she teaches writing, letterpress printing, and fine-edition book production.
Lance Olsen is the author of fifteen books of and about innovative fiction, including Tonguing the Zeitgeist, which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award, and most recently the novels Freaknest and Girl Imagined by Chance. A Pushcart Prize recipient, he has published over 150 short stories, essays, and reviews in a wide variety of journals and anthologies including Fiction International, Iowa Review, and American Literary Review. He currently serves as the chair of the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two; he lives corporeally with his artist-wife Andi in central Idaho, and digitally at cafezeitgeist.com.
NoNieqa Ramos has an MFA in fiction and an M. Ed from the University of Notre Dame. She teaches middle school language arts and drama at St. Pius X in San Antonio, TX.
Scott Rettberg is an assistant professor of New Media Studies in the Literature program at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. He is the cofounder of the Electronic Literature Organization and has written or collaborated on electronic writing projects including The Unknown, The Meddlesome Passenger, Kind of Blue, and Implementation.
Sarah Jane Rushforth received an MFA in writing from California Institute of the arts, Valencia.
Leslie Scalapino is the author of approximately twenty-two books of fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. She teaches at Bard College in the summer MFA program.
Davis Schneiderman is Chair of the American Studies Program and an assistant professor at Lake Forest College. He will be presenting a project in collaboration with Tom Denlinger.
Julian Semilian is a poet, novelist, essayist, and filmmaker who teaches film editing at the North Carolina School of the Arts after a 24 year career as a film editor in Hollywood.
Alex Shakar is the author of the novel The Savage Girl (HarperCollins) and the short-story collection City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses (HarerCollins/FC2).
Mike Smith holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Hollins College, and the University of Notre Dame.
Dirk Stratton writes a little, teaches a little, gets paid for the latter. He is adamant in claiming that if he knew where The Unknown was headed when it got started, he probably still would have booked passage. He teaches writing at Cincinnati’s School for the Creative and Performing Arts.
Stephanie Strickland is the McEver chair in writing at Georgia Tech. She created and produced TechnoPoetry Festival there in 2002.
Paul Toth lives in Michigan. His novel Fizz is available from Bleak House Books. Toth’s short fiction has appeared in The Barcelona Review, Iowa Review Web, Mississippi Review Online, and many others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Mystery Stories.
Rob Wittig’s background includes a 1987 Fulbright Scholarship to Paris to study technical, artistic, and theoretical aspects of creating visual/ verbal literary works with online publishing technologies, on the invitation of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the Centre Pompidou. In the early 80s, Rob co-founded the IN.S.OMNIA literary electronic bulletin board. He teaches in the Graphic Design and Composition Departments of the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and can be found online at robwit.net/.
The Jimmy Wynn Ensemble is composed of Chicago writers Dale Barrigar, Garin Cycholl, and Michael Antonucci. Their recent work has appeared in Happy, blue sky review, Near South, New American Writing, City Primeval, Janus Head, Mudlark, and the Chicago Review.
Laura Yahya began her work in spoken word and poetry readings in 2000 when she facilitated the Poetry Jams at Indiana University at South Bend. Since then, she has organized, facilitated, hosted, and performed at various venues, including the South Bend Regional Museum of Art, Northern Indiana Center for History, St. Mary’s College, and the South Bend Century Center. She is self-publishing her book, Me, a Black Woman, and is planning to distribute it in spring 2004.