FULL SCHEDULE: PRESS, A CROSS-CULTURAL LITERARY CONFERENCE
(Download PDF Schedule here)
Public Readings/Performances/Parties:

Friday, May 23rd
8pm
Readings and Performance
Location: Sem II, C1105 (Evergreen Campus)

Readings:
Laura Elrick
Zhang Er
Steven Hendricks
Tung-Hui Hu
Tom Orange
Kaia Sand
David Michael Wolach


Saturday, May 24th
4pm
Location: Recital Hall (Evergreen Campus)

Performance:
“The Key: Re-Visioning Bluebeard,” a play by Drue Robinson, directed by Kate Arvin


Saturday, May 24th
8pm
Location: Ward building (Downtown Olympia, 4th Street, Next to Jake’s on 4th)
http://www.jakeson4th.com/

Readings, Performance, Afterparty:
Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater
Jules Boykoff
Roger Farr
Kristin Prevallet
Leonard Schwartz
Mark Wallace

Sunday, May 25th
7pm
Location: Recital Hall (Evergreen Campus)
Performance:
“The Once American Dream: An Anti-Anti War Musical,” by Jais Brohinksy and David Cohen, directed by Kate Arvin

Sunday, May 25th
9pm
Location: Ward’s (Downtown Olympia, 4th Street, Next to Jake’s on 4th)
http://www.jakeson4th.com/

Readings, Performance, Afterparty:  
Lindsey Boldt
Combinatorics Theater
Andrew Csank
K. Lorraine Graham
Holly Melgard
Grant Miller
Kate Robinson
Panels/Workshops: May 24-5th

Saturday 9:30am-10am: Registration and Breakfast
Location: C1107

Saturday 10-11: Opening Remarks and Welcome
Location: C1105

Small Press Panels for Editors and Designers
Location: C2107

Nicholas Hayes (of Ignavia)
Sarah Mangold (of Bird Dog)
Meghan McNealy (of Slightly West)
Jack Morgan (of Stormy Petral)
Rose O’Keefe (of Eraser Head)

Editors of small presses and journals will join in a roundtable discussion about the politics and economics of publishing in a world dominated by large publishing conglomerates. What does the future hold for small presses? What are the challenges? What is at stake? Discussion will focus on DIY and independent publishing interventions.

Olympia Activism: Immigration Rights, Unionism, and the Anti-War Movement after the Port Protests
Location: C2109

Gabriel Coeli
Ben Farr
Crista Kilduff
Steve Niva
Christopher Rotondo
Katie Waldeck

This panel will reflect in creative and constructive ways on the strategic decisions made by Olympia activists and discuss avenues for future collaboration across activist groups.

Mind Parasites
Location: C3107

Tyler Bennett
Daniel Brittain
Kenneth Fairfield
Nicholas Jackson

Conceptualizing mind parasites is a way of drawing attention to ideas which control people. Disincarnate spirits, energetic entities, ghosts, angels, and other non-corporeal beings influencing the behavior of humans exist as pervasive cross-cultural myths. Larger manifestations of the phenomenon take form as fundamentalism, fascism, consumerism; concentrations of meaning which resist the natural flux of thought. The panel will be exploring some contemporary and not so contemporary perspectives on mind parasites considering the works of Bataille, Nietzsche, Carl Jung, G.I. Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and the Nag Hammadi Library. 

Radical Storytelling/Radical Identities
Location: C3109

Alejandra Abreu
Khadija Anderson
Kylen Clayton
Erin Genia
Erika Marquez-Santillan

What power do stories hold over us? When underrepresented writers begin to tell their stories, how can they change the way we think about “storytelling” and its implications for social change as well as social continuity? 

Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space
Location: D2107

Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand

This interactive workshop will present several ideas about poetry and its impact on public space, as well as several models for public space projects before moving the conversation toward a discussion of future actions.


Saturday 1pm-3pm: Lunch
Location: Longhouse

Saturday 3pm-5pm: Second Session

Libraries: Bridging Activist and Writing Communities
Location: C2107

Karl Eckler
Sara Medlicott
Holly Maxim
Randy Stilson

As funding for public libraries continues to decline and all libraries face federal intervention in the wake of the Patriot Act, this panel considers what roles librarians, writers and readers play in defending the rights of library patrons. How do libraries weigh cost vs. need? How does the onset of new media impact the role of the library?   

Independent Media
Location: C2109

Rafael Dwan, Free Radio Olympia
Christopher Hord, KAOS FM, christopherhord.com
Rick McKinnon

The same technological advances that spur global media conglomerates to merge and devour each other also lower the bar to entry for independent practitioners driven by a personal passion for their subject areas.  Audio and video “narrowcasters” challenge traditional broadcasting, while independent journalists establish themselves through websites, blogs, and multimedia.  This panel will use participants’ own experiences as the springboard for a discussion of how independent media outlets can continue to contribute to their local communities and why they are needed now more than ever. 
 
The Unwritten Body
Location: C3107

Jessica Baron
Jennifer Bartlett
Jessica Tourtellotte
Larina Warnock

Panelists will discuss the various ways we can employ physical and biological bodies in written work, through multiple media and forms, in order to give balance to our physical, emotional, and mental lives on the page.

Anarchism, Poetics, Dissent
Location: C3109

Roger Farr
Jenny Paris-Cossu
Victoria Larkin
Nicky Tiso

This panel will explore hierarchies within the culture industry as embedded linguistic practices. Through a critique of normative power structures within educational and artistic institutions from the perspectives of anarchism and left socialism, we hope to move towards a future poetics of collaboration, praxis, and imminent critique.

Sunday 10am-11am: Registration and Breakfast
Location: C1107

Sunday 11am-1pm: Third Session

Feminist Poetics/Feminist Literature
Location: C2107

K. Lorraine Graham
Sarah Tavis
Alice Templeton
Amory Ballantine

American avant-garde poets and text artists will give their perspectives on feminism  in literature today. Coming from varying perspectives and schools of thought, the panelists will critically and creatively explore topics such as poetry's complicity in the violence it seeks to resist, contemporary women's writing, and postmodern femininity.

The Rupture of Form: Everything You Can Do With Text And Haven't Yet Thought Of
Location: C2109

Jennifer Burris
Robert Gibbons
Myrna Keliher
Lionel Lints
Meghan McNealy
Kate Robinson

This panel will explore textual interventions that defy normative description, categorization, and, potentially, commodification. Panelists will read from their work and discuss the politics of breaking accepted notions of form.

Globalism In Literature and Globalization: Postcolonialism and Emergent Languages
Location: C3107

Marie Alcaron
Michael Palmer
Laura Sández
Mark Wallace

Neoliberalism in both the arts and in the wider western cultural landscape has, in many ways, re-appropriated “the language of postcolonialism.” Some have argued that this re-appropriation is itself a re-colonization of non-Western cultural modalities, including the text arts.  And yet globalization has led to the opening of conversation between poets and writers across borders, as evidenced by the enormous range of translation work being done today. Participants in this panel will discuss the effects of neoliberalism and postcolonialism from widely varying perspectives.

Literary Prototypes: Negotiating Human and Machine
Location: C3109

Nicholas Hayes
Tung-Hui Hu
Christopher Hord

This panel will explore how emergent technologies have provoked evolution in the form and sociopolitics of text-based arts over the past decade. Discussion will be centered around the presentation of literary work that ranges from the combinatoric, algorithmic, and constructivist to more free-form work influenced by web-based technologies.

The Art of the Book
Location: D2107

Steven Hendricks
Danny Kalen
Alicia Minkel
Jenny Paris
Rebecca Taplin

This workshop will involve a discussion and some demonstration of book arts by resident faculty and student artists. Evergreen has a long history of book-making and design work, with a print studio that houses the largest number of letterpresses of any college in the state. This interactive workshop will also involve a tour of the print studio.

Sunday 1pm-3pm: Lunch
Location: Longhouse

Sunday 3pm-5pm: Fourth Session


Writing from the other side
Location: C2107

Bill Barr
Barry Graham
Jeff Konen

An activist, an inner-city-raised Amish person and a stand-up comedian walk into a bar …er, into a cross cultural reading. And the panel says, “What's it like to write from the other side?”

Plagiarism: Re-Appropriation of Language within Educational Systems
Location: C2109

Andrew Fox
Reg Johnson
 
This panel will explore textual interventions that defy normative description, categorization, and, potentially, commodification. Panelists will read from their work and discuss the politics of breaking accepted notions of form.

Liminal Poetics: From Darragh to Toscano, Writing at the Edge of Performance
Location: C3107

Jason Conger
Holly Melgard
Tom Orange
David Michael Wolach

What are the political implications and efficacies of experimental poets moving into writing for theatrical performance? This panel will discuss the Collapsible Poetics Theater of Rodrigo Toscano on the heels of his featured performance from the previous night. Bringing a performer's, poet's and scholar's perspective to bear, Tom Orange describes the trajectory of Toscano's work from his early poetry into his CPT, including analysis of audio and video recordings. The panel will then consider the work of Tina Darragh, an older Language Poet who has also moved into theater writing, including a staged reading of one of Darragh's recent theater pieces for comparison and enjoyment.

Ecopoetics
Location: C3109

Andrew Csank
Laura Elrick
Nick Smith

This panels seeks to build bridges between scientific and poetic discourses through the emerging techne of ecopoetics.  It asks, can poetry intervene in the public sphere on behalf of the environment, and what would that intervention look like? 

Mad Libs from the Underground: Writing from _____ (adj) words
Location: D2107

Sandra Yannone
Victoria Larkin

Inspired by a collection of snippets, we will create our own snippets, which we will then dissect and re-weave into larger collaborative works.