The Writer's Edge

Challenge language without apology. Take workshops from Lidia Yuknavitch, co-founder of the original Two Girls Review (pictured left), and Lance Olsen, whose work we have been fortunate enough to publish and present at readings. FC2 and Portland State University bring you The Writer's Edge conference July 28-30 in Portland. Keep reading for deets and applications.

Fiction Collective Two in partnership with Portland State University Present:

THE WRITER’S EDGE
The only innovative writing conference of its kind.

July 28, 29, 30 2006
Portland State University

Workshops on Innovative Writing Practices
One-on-one conferences
Independent Press Panel
Readings and multi-media exhibits
Books and DVD’s available

Faculty:
R.M. Berry
Michael Martone
Lance Olsen
Susan Steinberg
Lidia Yuknavitch

Deadline for Applications: March 1st, 2006

Information:  writersedge@cafezeitgeist.com or lidiamiles@yahoo.com

Applications and more information: http://fc2.org

FC2 is among the few alternative presses in America devoted to publishing fiction considered by America's largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu.
FC2 was originally founded in 1974 as the Fiction Collective, a group of avant-garde writers, among whom were Jonathan Baumbach, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Ronald Sukenick. In his New York Times Book Review "Guest Word" of Sept 15, 1974, Sukenick described the group's aim to "make serious novels and story collections available" and "keep them in print permanently." The Collective's subsequent history has been shaped by this commitment to preserve cultural resources that might otherwise be silenced or lost.

Finally an opportunity to CHALLENGE language without apology.

The Workshops:

What is Writing?.
Ralph Berry is R. M. Berry is author of the novel Leonardo's Horse, a New York Times "notable book" of 1998, and story collections Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, and Dictionary of Modern Anguish. His short fiction has been widely published and anthologized and his critical essays have appeared in such journals as Philosophy and Literature and Narrative. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He is currently professor of English at Florida State University where he teaches courses in 20th century literature and critical theory. He is also publisher of FC2.

R.M. Berry
This workshop grows out of the idea that the principal mark of radically innovative writing is its somehow posing the question of its own nature and existence. This means that innovative writing is always in some sense about itself, but this does not mean that it is “metafiction.” On the contrary, radically innovative writing takes the question of itself into its form and medium, making the achievement of the text a continuous discovery of what writing is. We will look at three examples of formally innovative fiction and determine how each manages to foreground the question of itself, and then we’ll try some short exercises with disclosed frames, fake texts, narrative displacements, self-consuming sentences, literalizations, and other formally convoluting devices. In particular, we’ll be interested in how the meaning of words becomes both dizzyingly equivocal and unprecedentedly palpable whenever what the characters do begins to look like what the writer and reader are doing.

Nixon Remix

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there. He is the author of six other books of fiction including Alive And Dead In Indiana, Penseés: 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.

Michael Martone
Phillip Roth, in his essay on American fiction, suggested that the writers of American fiction are often outdone by the reality of American fact. He concluded that the sheer invention found in the news and in history engenders in the writer a professional envy. Who wouldn’t have wanted to invent Richard Nixon, let alone a character called Richard Nixon? Roth himself uses the president in his novel Our Gang only to see his fiction trumped by the even more outrageously creative script of Watergate. This will be a course on appropriation. We will be considering ways to use free-floating shared narratives and characters from the collective cultural consciousness of history, of fact in completely new (semi-fictional?) fictions. In a sense, we will be covering standards, sampling hits, importing the goings-on of the public domain into our own private precincts. You might think of this as a class on rewriting, on revision and it will very much be interested in satire, ventriloquism, counterfeiting, camouflage, parody, and outright plagiarism. What, in fact, is fact? This is a workshop about making mythologies, fake essays and mock memoirs, and monologues of the rich and famous about which the rich and famous can only dream.

Fiction as Possibility Space

Lance Olsen is author of six novels, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and Rebel Yell: A Guide to Fiction Writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about literary innovation. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. A Pushcart Prize recipient and NEA winner 2006, Olsen serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at FC2. He lives corporeally with his wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, in the mountains of central Idaho, and digitally at www.lanceolsen.com.

Lance Olsen
This workshop will revolve around three generative exercises designed to explore how one can and should open up writing in unexpected and energizing ways. For instance, in one concerning Narratological Amphibiousness, we shall investigate how fiction may become richer by living commensally alongside, in, and/or among several forms and genres at once. What might happen, we shall ask ourselves, at the intersection(s) of fiction and photography, music, video, literary theory, poetry, hypertext, drama, sculpture, painting? In other words, we shall think of fiction as a possibility space, and, while doing so, raise questions about the creative process, story-telling techniques, the ideas of “the workshop” and “the critique,” and current trends in the literary marketplace, mainstream and otherwise—finally, I hope, bringing into greater relief why and how we do what we do, and giving rise to three nascent narraticules a piece.

Writing Obsession, Writing As If Obsessed

Susan Steinberg's stories have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, Conjunctions, Boulevard, New Letters, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and other literary journals. She has a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1990) and an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2000). She has been awarded fellowships and/or residencies by the University of Massachusetts, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and was the Alan Collins Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2001). She is currently Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco and Fiction Editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

Susan Steinberg
If one believes that stories (and poems) must be inspired, in part, by obsession, by those very things we can’t keep from spinning around in our heads, then shouldn’t the writing itself reflect the narrator’s/main character’s focus? Could Ginsberg’s “Howl” have been written in rhyming couplets? Could Duras’ The Lover have been written as an un-fragmented text? Perhaps, perhaps not. In this workshop we will explore the ways in which various modern and contemporary authors effectively writing obsession/obsessively consider the inextricable relationship of form and content, paying particular attention to (often unconsciously chosen) rhetorical and experimental devices: repetition, recursion, ranting, listing, among many others. We will also try for ourselves to extract the stories we find ourselves repeatedly writing, telling, and thinking in order to match our content, in a scene, to a form (or vice versa), exploring the multitude of options available to us in terms of narrative voice and storytelling.

Five Easy Pieces: How to Form, Deform, and Reform Narrative

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of two previous collections of short fictions--Her Other Mouths (House of Bones Press, 1997) and Liberty's Excess (FC2, 2000)-- and a book of criticism, Allegories of Violence (Routledge, 2000). Her writing has appeared in Postmodern Culture, Fiction International, Another Chicago Magazine, Zyzzyva, Critical Matrix, Other Voices, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies Representing Bisexualities (NYU Press) and Third Wave Agenda (University of Minnesota Press). She has been the co-editor of Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions and the editor of two girls review. She teaches fiction writing and literature in Oregon.

Lidia Yuknavitch
What happens if we turn away from the idea that narrative form must be unified in traditional ways, and must appeal to an audience who feels better when the story’s shape holds still? Might other models of narrative form emerge which better articulate the present, challenge the reader, and bring us to a new territory between writer, text, and reader? Drawing from notions of models of narrative as a dynamic, chaotic, and in-flux system such as Nathalie Sauraute’s “micro-movements,” Marcel Proust’s kaleidoscopic shifts, and Marguerite Duras’ sensory fragmentations and layers, this workshop will provide participants with strategies for understanding and practicing fiction writing let loose from mainstream meaning-making and market-driven forms. Similarly, drawing from contemporary experiments in narrative distortion characteristic of both texts and film, we will explore the gains and losses of using the fictional fragment to tell a story and produce a text. Five “pieces” of fiction will emerge for future projects.

APPLICATIONS AVAILABLE AT:
http://fc2.org

MORE INFORMATION: 
lidiamiles@yahoo.com / writersedge@cafezeitgeist.com