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The FPP Interview: eteam

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Multi-media artists eteam talk to us about being both removed and immersed in the creation of new work, about the non-existent singular and committing to an expansive sense of “we.”

Collaboration goes deep for eteam.  Not only do you generate projects through your partnership and work with other artists, but you enlist lay people– farmers, barbers, small town residents– to either execute or substantiate the project.  When you collaborate, how do you relate to the idea of control?  Is it difficult to cede control? How do you satisfy your need for an imaginatively and intellectually rigorous project while leaving it open enough to be determined by unvetted participants?  When we work together with other people, especially people whom we have never met before, we control the situation by paying attention or not, shape things rather non-verbally by pointing a recording device towards a situation or not. That’s all. The recording device approves and it energizes. Where nothing has been happening before something is happening as soon as we press the ON button. ON means attention and it implies control, because the situation is automatically framed. Either something fits into the frame or not. Everything outside the frame is irrelevant.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

 

The FPP Interview: Rachel Sherman

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Novelist and short story writer Rachel Sherman talks to us about literary failures, humor, and multi-generational lullabies.

Your first book, The First Hurt, was a story collection and your second, Living Room, a novel. What were the challenges of moving from short form to the novel? Do you feel the process unearthed any hard-won insights regarding form or craft?  I do. Forever I thought of the novel as a mountain I would never climb. Or like the prospect of becoming a runner: there are some things that only other people do. Or perhaps like owning a dog. To write a novel felt as impossible as running on a mountain trail, leash in my hand, plastic dog poop bag in my pocket, panting. The difference between being a writer and being talented is doing the work.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

 

The FPP Interview: Khadijah Queen

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Khadijah Queen talks with us about endurance and discipline, the multiple lives of women, and the dynamic between equity and violence.

Since the publication of your award winning collection Black Peculiar, how have you come to understand the word “peculiar”?  I think my understanding is the same as it was when I began writing the book, which is twofold. irstly, it’s personal, related to how I felt (and heard from other people) that I was being seen in the world in terms of gender, race, religion, marital status and physical (dis)ability, as a person existing outside of and not really aspiring toward typical norms. And in a wider historical context, it’s related to the “peculiar institution” of slavery, the legacy of which informs the present treatment of African-American people in this country.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

The FPP Interview: Jericho Brown

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We spoke with poet Jericho Brown, author of Please, about his relationship with the “we”, about sitting on beds in street clothes, and the poems he’d read to all of Shreveport, Louisiana if he could. Brown will read with Khadijah Queen, Rachel Sherman, eteam, and DJ Lady DM at the 2012-2013 First Person Plural Reading Series season finale on April 1 at Shrine.

When do you feel most “we”? When Al Green gets played in a public place.

How comfortable is “we” to you?  I’m either a team player or a man with too big an ego because I actually think “we” whenever I make a decision that is actually “I.”  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

Spellbound at AWP 2013

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AWP is a massive writers’ conference that is held annually in an urban convention center.  Official readings and panels take place in sterile, look-alike rooms, with florescent lights above rows of stackable seats.  As we anticipated our reading at AWP 2013 in Boston, the desire was blare our music, spraypaint the walls, do something, anything, to strangify our rectangle of space.

However, there is something to the sameness of each conference room: the environments are equalized.  It is up to each reader to do the transporting, the transforming–each reader must bring her own magic, and it must come from her pages, from her voice.

And at our AWP reading, we were spellbound.

We had a kickass lineup, and that’s the truth. First, bam, Margo Jefferson–who made her way from NYC in a snowstorm to be with us–she took us into the “we” of her youth when she read Twain and Baldwin as not just a young scholar, but as a young girl of the Negro elite.  She shared the resultant epiphanies, kept us rapt by her mind’s journeying.

Keya Mitra followed, beguiling us with the story of Anita and her two wombs, each the home of a baby created by another man: one, who is her Indian-American husband; the other, her great Anglo Austin lover.  We laughed, we grimaced, we laughed some more.  She finished and we knew why she had been declared a best new American voice.

And then our last reader was Justin Torres. For those of us who have read We the Animals, there was no reason to expect, or wish, that his reading of the work would add anything more to his stunning novel.  Wrong.  His voice was hypnotic, full of desire, elegy, and light. If Torres would have dropped to a bare whisper we would have fallen out of our chairs trying to listen.  Before starting, he said he had stopped reading that opening chapter, that he felt it all read-out, but decided that on this occasion to share. We hate to break it to him, but his declaration may be like the Stones declaring they were dropping “Satisfaction” from the set list…  nice try, but no one is going to let him get with that. Classic work resists retirement. away

All we know is that by reading’s end, we were all very satisfied.

The FPP Interview: Margo Jefferson

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Renowned critic and nonfiction writer Margo Jefferson will take the FPP Harlem stage at AWP in Boston this Friday, March 8, 2013 with Justin Torres and Keya Mitra.  We talk to her about her about separating the personal from “bigger things” and pursuing another kind of authority.  Come hear her @ 3:00 pm. Room 110, Plaza Level. F229.

What emotional concerns are you pursuing in your current project?  What emotional concerns appear to be pursuing you?  How does a self worth selfdom emerge from family, history, biology? What were, what are its needs, its demands its punishments and rewards? How do selves get revised & remapped?

How have you navigated the challenge of writing a personal history that reveals your own misperceptions about access to privilege?  Make that present tense, i.e. still navigating.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

Announcing Our Lineup for April 1st at Shrine, Harlem!

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Our last event of the season will be a big one!  Poet Jericho Brown, multi-disciplinary art duo eteam, poet and artist Khadijah Queen, and fiction writer Rachel Sherman will take the FPP stage at 7pm.  The phenomenal DJ LadyDM will be spinning from 6:30-7:00 and again from 8:30-9:00. We can’t wait to see what they have in store!

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans and is a recent recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.  Brown is now an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies including, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, jubilat, The New Yorker, Oxford American, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry.  His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award.

Since 2001 eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) traffic in transience. At the intersection of relational aesthetics, the Internet and land art, eteam coordinates collective happenings and conceptual transactions between the earthly plane and the realms of the interweb, often reconstructed in hypnotic video work, radio plays, or more recently novellas. Their projects have been featured at PS1 NY, MUMOK Vienna, Centre Pompidou Paris, Transmediale Berlin, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, New York Video Festival, and the 11thBiennale of Moving Images in Geneva. They have received grants from Art in General, NYSCA, Rhizome, Creative Capital and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and were residents at the CLUI, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and the Mac Dowell Colony.

Born near Detroit and raised in Los Angeles, Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit (Black Goat / Akashic Books 2008) and Black Peculiar, winner of the 2010 Noemi Press award for poetry. Individual poems appear widely in journals and anthologies including Best American Nonrequired Reading (Houghton Mifflin 2010), Villanelles (Random House 2012), jubilat and Eleven Eleven. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and curates the multicultural/multi-genre reading series Courting Risk.

Rachel Sherman holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Fence, Open City, Conjunctions, and n+1, among other publications. Her first book, The First Hurt, was short-listed for the Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was named one of the 25 Books to Remember in 2006 by the New York Public Library.  Her first novel, Living Room, was released in 2009, also to broad critical acclaim.  She teaches writing at Rutgers and Columbia Universities, and in Ditmas Park. She blogs for the Parenting Section of The Huffington Post.

 

Venue:  Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 6:45pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/

The FPP Interview: Keya Mitra

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FPP spoke with Mitra about the risks and rewards of the first person plural voice, tensions with the “we” while in India on her Fulbright, and the freedom of fiction.  Mitra will read with Margo Jefferson and Justin Torres at the First Person Plural Reading at AWP on Friday, March 8 in Boston.

What are the rewards of writing in the first person plural voice?  The risks? The rewards of the first person plural voice are that the author and readers, however momentarily, feel a sense of community and can experience both the beauty and immense pain of being part of that whole.  To read the rest of this interview, go here.

Come Check Out FPP at Our AWP Reading in Boston!

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We are thrilled to announce our line up for our reading at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) in Boston to be held Friday, March 8 @ 3:00 pm. Room 110, Plaza Level, F229. We have an incredible line up in Margo Jefferson,  Keya Mitra, and Justin Torres–with our own Amy Benson leading the discussion about the origins of the series and why we find so much possibility in the first person plural.  Here is a little more information about our readers:

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson. She was a staff writer for Newsweek and The New York Times and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, Her essays have been widely published, and anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death Best African American Essays, 2010; The Mrs. Dalloway Reader; and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. She’s also written and performed a theater, “Sixty Minutes in Negroland.” She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Keya Mitra is currently an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Gonzaga University and graduated in 2010 with a doctorate from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she also earned her MFA.  In 2008, she spent a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing.  Her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Best New American Voices, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation, and her nonfiction has been published in Gulf Coast and American Literary Review.  Her story received special mention in the Pushcart Prize XXXVII Anthology, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes.  She has completed a short story collection, a novel, and a memoir.

Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller; he is now a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Amy Benson‘s prose has recently appeared in Triquarterly, BOMB Magazine, PANK, Boston Review, The New England Review, Seneca Review, Black Warrior Review, diagram, and Hotel Amerika, among other journals. Her book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, was chosen by Ted Conover as the 2003 winner of the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

 

January 28, 2013: What a Great Night!

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The sleet deterred neither our artists nor our big, warm FPP audience!  We had a fabulous time listening to work by Stacey D’Erasmo, Monica Ong, and Michael Thomas, and to DJ Lady DM‘s groovy opening and closing sets.

Stacey D’Erasmo‘s forthcoming novel tells the comically bittersweet story of a singer trying to make a comeback years after her youthful success.  The excerpt D’Erasmo read led us into fascinating first person plural territory, as the main character recalls the making of her second album, a spectacular failure: seven musicians and producers hole up in a chateau and become a “we,” bonding over drugs and isolation and the mating calls of deer in the woods around them. But the artistic transcendence they feel never manifests in the music.  Monica Ong combined projected images and poems to stunning effect.  Her first image was a childhood photograph of her mother gathered with her mother and six siblings.  The accompanying poem revealed that her mother was one of the three “boys,” dressed and staged so that the family would not lose face from a surfeit of girls.  Her next images and poems brought us into human physiology, giving voice to the silent mechanisms of the body– to the body’s frightening failures and the way we fail our bodies through cultural mores and silence.  She closed with a moving poem written for the FPP reading in response to the Sandy Hook shootings.  Michael Thomas read an electrifying essay from his forthcoming collection.  He recounts a roadtrip he took with his brother who was recently arrested and floundering; as he departs, he fears the trip is ill-advised, that two black men on the highway at night are an easy target for police, and that his unrestrained, undiscriminating brother might threaten Thomas’s hard-won equilibrium and the privacy of mind he fiercely protects.  The essay was a challenge to the comfort and validity of the “we.”  Thank you to our readers for a compelling array of work and for their responses to the FPP theme.  Special thanks, again, to DJ Lady DM who closed out the night with more great music (that very nearly got us dancing– okay, maybe we danced a little)!