S233.
Your Life as a Mechanical Centipede: Writing Past the Documentary Impulse
Saturday, March 26, 2022
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
A wide variety of events—from the social to the political—spark our writerly imaginations. Closest at hand, often, are the latest injustices and/or cultural outrages. We feel we must write about the "thing itself." This panel will offer a series of disruptions suggesting alternatives to the writer's sometimes essayistic, editorial impulses. Perhaps there is more opportunity in the unexpected. Perhaps we can find more ways to reach the reader when they have their guard down.
Participants
Adam McOmber is the author of three novels as well as two collections of short fiction. He teaches in the MFA writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts where he is also the editor in chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.
Daschielle Louis is a Haitian American poet, writer, and graphic artist from South Florida; her work uses fluid folkloric horror to examine blackness, womanhood, Haitian culture, and migration. She has received fellowships from Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Watering Hole, and the Hues Foundation.
Ann Dávila Cardinal is a novelist and recruiter for VCFA where she earned her MFA. Her young adult novels Five Midnights and Category Five are from Tor Teen, and her adult debut, a Puerto Rican magical realist novel entitled The Storyteller’s Death, is forthcoming.
Brian Leung is the author of the novels All I Should Not Tell, Ivy vs. Dogg: With a Cast of Thousands!, Lost Men, and Take Me Home. The recipient of a number of awards including a Lambda Literary Award for a Mid-Career Novelist, he is a professor at Purdue University.
