Janice Lee's Blog, page 9
April 1, 2019
Corporeal Writing Workshop: Memory Space: On Inherited Trauma & the Failure of Language / April 13-14
More info at Corporeal Writing website
Workshop Leader: Janice Lee
When:
4/13/19 1:00 – 4:00PM
4/14/19 1:00 – 4:00PM
Where: The Corporeal Center; 510 SW 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97210
Cost: $225
“What really exists is not things made but things in the making.” – William James
How are the frames of reference and relationships between and of living beings activated? That is, how do different bodies and worlds articulate each other, or, how do we learn to be affected?
How do we reconcile personal experience with historical fact? How do we reconcile history with memory? How do we reconcile truths with other truths? How does writing open up space while processing trauma or grief?
We will explore the articulation of personal experience, identity, and trauma (both lived & inherited) and look at the relationship of personal history & identity with aesthetics & narrative. We will explore how the presence of unresolved corporeal history and the impossibility of articulation or expression leads to new encounters in language and narrative via various aesthetic writing practices. We will also explore notions of personhood and interspecies communication through exercises in seeing, writing, breathing, and sensing.
Questions will include how history and accuracy intersect in individual creative work, how emotional and real violence intersect with aesthetic contradiction, how the limits and failures of language allow for reaching beyond traditional narrative structures, how lived experience intersects with individual identity, how memories of trauma are constructed and reconstructed, how trauma and memory might be disruptive to identity and narrative, and aesthetic relationships and ethical questions related to writing trauma and personal experience.
March 1, 2019
Richard Chiem in Conversation with Janice Lee @ Powell’s / March 7
7:30PM Thursday, March 7
Powell’s Books on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne, Portland, OR 97214
Richard Chiem reads from his second book, King of Joy, about woman named Corvus (which not only sounds pretentious, but is, in fact, latin for “crow”) who buries her deep mournful sorrow by moving to the woods, and engaging in artful pornography. Chiem will be joined in conversation by Janice Lee, author of The Sky Isn’t Blue.
November 24, 2018
In Common Writers Series @ Alley Cat Books / Dec 1
4PM – 6PM
Saturday, December 1, 2018
Alley Cat Books
3036 24th Street
San Francisco, CA
In Common Writers Series: Janice Lee and Brenda Iijima, reading from their works
The Poetry Center’s In Common Writers Series, supported by a generous grant from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, continues with the second event in our premier program. Prolific essayist, fiction writer, and editor Janice Lee, visiting from Portland, Oregon, will be joined by poet, editor, and publisher Brenda Iijima, visiting from Brooklyn, New York, each reading from their own works. This event also marks The Poetry Center’s first-time collaboration with local landmark Alley Cat Books, currently one of the very best bookstores and cultural centers — featuring its remarkable, community-currated gallery and among the best-selected shelves of books — in the Bay Area. This event is free and open to the public. Please note our afternoon start-time!
Janice Lee is a Korean-American writer, artist, and editor. She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She writes about the filmic long take, slowness, interspecies communication, the apocalypse, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Portland State University.
Brenda Iijima’s involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of poetry, research movement, animal studies, ecological sociology and submerged histories. She is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks and artist’s books. Her most recent book, Remembering Animals was published by Nightboat Books in 2016. She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books and PP@YYL). She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, located in Brooklyn, NY. Currently she is working on the collected works of Charley Shively that include his luminous and radical Fag Rag essays, poems, ephemera, photos and letters. She is also researching the phenomena of extinction.
Event contact:
The Poetry Center
Event email:
poetry@sfsu.edu
Event phone:
415-824-1761
Event sponsor:
The Poetry Center and Alley Cat Books
September 21, 2018
In Common Writers Series @ The Poetry Center / Nov 29
More details TBD
November 29 and tba: Janice Lee is author of ten books and chapbooks — recently The Sky Isn’t Blue: A Poetics of Spaces (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) — an intensely querying book of essays taking off from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Lee is a prolific writer and reviewer, founder/executive editor of Entropy online magazine. Formerly of Los Angeles, she now lives in Portland, OR, teaching writing at Portland State. She’ll be reading from her work and will join poet Brenda Iijima (here from Brooklyn, NY, for this occasion) in conversation, at The Poetry Center, and they will both present their own work at a bookstore location to be announced.
EPALF Workshop / Oct 20
Details TBD
Workshop:
Plant Perspectives: On Healing, Remembering, Breathing & Writing Trauma
What can we learn about healing and remembering from plants and trees? How might our vision of the future change when we can learn to receive more in the present? How do different bodies and worlds articulate each other, or, how do we learn to be affected? And, how does writing open up space while processing trauma or grief? This workshop will explore the articulation of personal experience, identity, memory and trauma, and through exercises in seeing, writing, breathing, and sensing, look at the relationships between personal trauma & healing, aesthetics & narrative, and plant perspectives and wisdom.
&NOW 2018 @ University of Notre Dame / Oct 5 – 7
&NOW 2018, & Whenever It’s Needed
A Festival of New Writing
October 5-7, 2018
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN
Saturday, October 6 • 10:35am – 12:00pm
Co-Dependencies: Affected Bodies & the Languages of Personhood
Kimberly Alidio
Michelle Detorie
Brenda Iijima
Janice Lee
Soham Patel
How are the frames of reference and relationships between and of living being: plants, animal, (including human animals) activated, and how do these activations create new conditions for increased sensitivities among others(ness)? That is, how do bodies and worlds articulate each other, how does a human body allow an animal’s world to affect her, and in turn, how does a human’s world affect an animal’s body? Or, how do we learn to be affected? By disbanding normative and normalizing positionality vis-à-vis bodily and psychic interrelationality with other animal and plant presences, how does personhood expand and gain complexity manifoldly. Exploring how various systems of language, knowledge and sensing create relations between different bodies, this panel will explore notions of personhood, co-dependency, interspecies communication, insurgency, queerness, and polyphony.
Saturday, October 6 • 2:35pm – 3:50pm
Making a Language We Can Learn: Poetics as Collaborative Praxis
Harold Abramowitz
Janice Lee
Andrea Quaid
Dennis James Sweeney
In our creative-critical presentation, we reimagine the temporal and spatial boundaries of the conference panel – extending our poetic making as collaborative praxis before and after the realtime &NOW Notre Dame event. Invoking Paulo Freire’s definition of praxis as “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed,” we ask: what becomes possible when we begin our panel before the panel? What new conceptions of sense-making and text-making happen if we bring this work to the actual panel and invite attendees to join a making that will extend beyond our gathering together in a room? How might new considerations of collaboration spark innovative, process-oriented approaches to poetry, narrative and performance? What emergent communities are put into motion in this praxis?
In the spirit of alternative structures that embody constitutive, living energies – rhizomatic, mycorrhizal, vibrational, and prismatic – we seek new ways of making creative work. We begin with a public call for submissions around an initial question: What do we do together? Next, we will curate the texts into a print publication launched at the panel, where we will read and perform from the publication and discuss our process. Simultaneously, we will launch an online version, inviting attendees to live annotate and co-create during and after the panel. In this way, the text moves into new iterations of itself, absorbing &NOW energies, carrying and transmuting them into the ongoing publication. Where will this take us and who will this us be when the panel beyond the panel continues…
Nicole Chung in Conversation With Janice Lee @ Powell’s / Oct 3
Wednesday, October 3 @ 7:30 PM
Powell’s City of Books
1005 w. burnside st.
portland, or 97209
In her much-anticipated debut, Nicole Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption. Told with the same startling insight that has made Chung a beloved critical voice, All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir (Catapult) is a profound and moving chronicle of unexpected family. Chung will be joined in conversation by Janice Lee, author of The Sky Isn’t Blue.
Whitenoise Project 15: Rhee/ Aitken/ Lee/ Kazemi/ Johnson/ Lee @ IPRC / August 6
7PM Monday, August 6
Independent Publishing Resource Center
318 SE Main St. Suite 155
Portland, Oregon
Join us for a special Whitenoise Project event at the Independent Publishing Resource Center to celebrate the release of Margaret Rhee’s new full-length collection Love, Robot!
With:
Margaret Rhee
Neil Aitken
Darius Kazemi
Janice Lee
Juleen Johnson
Jung Hu Lee
ADA Accessible and All Ages!
$5-10 suggested donation to help support the IPRC
No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
The Whitenoise Project is a reading and discussion series aiming to center voices from underrepresented communities (PoC, Queer, Femme, WoC and people with disabilities), and is supported by a Jade-Midway Placemaking Grant from APANO.
