This is what a feminist looks like


Feminism/s

October 4th, 2012: Joshua Conkel

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Joshua Conkel is a playwright, activist, blogger and Navy brat from rural Washington State. He is the author of MilkMilkLemonade (Best Off Off Broadway Show of 2009-NY Press, published by Playscripts), The Chalk Boy (published by Original Works Publishing), Lonesome Winter (co-written with Megan Hill), The Sluts of Sutton Drive (Ensemble Studio Theatre and London's Finborough Theatre this June, published by Oberon Books), I Wanna Destroy You and Sprawl as well as countless short plays. Conkel’s work has been seen all over the country as well as internationally. His play MilkMilkLemonade has been produced nearly 30 times since its premiere in 2009 and is currently being taught in many universities’ theater and gender studies departments. He was recently featured in Next Magazine's "Who's Next" and just won Studio 42's Unproducible Smackdown, making him, officially, the most "unproducible" playwright in New York. In addition to writing and producing plays, Conkel is an outspoken opponent of income disparity and an advocate for working class and minority playwrights. His open letter to theater producers, entitled “Look Harder,” was covered in The Guardian and TimeOut New York. Conkel's work has been developed by The Management, Soho Rep, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Old Vic/New Voices, TOSOS, Studio 42, San Francisco Playhouse, The Finborough Theatre, Dixon Place, The Flea and more. He is a member of The Management, where he served as Artistic Director for six years, as well as a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, TOSOS, Sons of Tennessee (a top secret salon for gay playwrights), and The Dramatists Guild. He is currently finishing a graphic novel adaptation of The Chalk Boy for First Second Books, an imprint of Macmillan, and editing his first short film, Power Lunch. Alumnist of Youngblood, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and the TS Eliot Old Vic US/UK Exchange. BFA in theater, Cornish College of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

April 24, 2012: Sister Spit

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

It’s official: when Sister Spit visited on a Tuesday night in the Spring of 2012, they named the Writers House “the cutest place [they’ve] ever performed.” An acclaimed group of “queer-centric” performers, writers, and multimedia artists, Sister Spit was also recognized at the event for the distinctions of being kicked out of Towson Town Mall and magically converting an 8-year-old into a spreader of “gay.” FAG SCHOOL creator, Brontez Purnell, started the night off with an improvised musical intro about girl germs, then had the audience alternating between raucous laughter and mild discomfort at shameless accounts of his sexual exploits. Slam poet, Kit Yan, balanced the mood with a sincere and smiling story of break up as it relates to a Tibetan restaurant, while solo-musical writer, Erin Markey’s “fundraiser,” “Timmy,” had the crowd in bewildered fits as “he” whined a song about his doll Secret’s crotch impediment. After a short film, host, Michelle Tea, read a fast-paced comparison of her addiction to designer brands and her dealings in fertility; then Cassie J. Snyder (creator of the Sister Spit coloring book) recounted her rivalry with a ponytailed geezer at Barnes and Noble. The night concluded with the lyrical and literary stylings of Justin Vivian Bond who bookended his tales of trans-child adventures with soulful musical numbers.

March 29, 2012: Masha Tupitsyn

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Masha Tupitsyn is the author of LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009), which was voted one of the best film books of 2009 by Dennis Cooper, January Magazine, Shelf Awareness, and Chicago's New City. She is currently working on a new book of essays on film, Screen to Screen, as well as a book about John Cusack called Star Notes: John Cusack and The Politics of Acting. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century (2008) and the Encyclopedia Project Volume II, F-K (2010), as well as Broome Street Review, Keyframe, Specter Magazine, BOMB, Indiewire's Press Play, Venus Magazine, Bookforum, Fence, The Rumpus, 2nd Floor Projects, Animal Shelter, The Fanzine, Make/Shift, NYFA, Vertebrae, and San Francisco's KQED's The Writer's Block. She regularly contributes video essays on film and culture to Ryeberg Curated Video, which features writers like Mary Gaitskill and Sheila Heti. In 2011, she wrote a radio play for Performa 11, Time for Nothing, the New Visual Art Performance Biennial in conjunction with Frieze Magazine. You can read her blog Love Dog, a new book project, at: http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com/.


January 25, 2012: Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Melissa Gira Grant enjoys blogs and bloggers. She's written about sex and the Internet for Slate, The Frisky, $pread magazine, and Valleywag, and has contributed to the anthologies Dirty Girls, Best Sex Writing, and Girl Crush. She has an apartment in Brooklyn; her typewriter is in San Francisco.

Meaghan O'Connell moved to New York four years ago to be a live-in nanny. Since then she has interned at 826NYC, learned the Internet as Jonathan Coulton's assistant, written in coffee shops all over Brooklyn, and started a blog on Tumblr, where she now works as the director of outreach. This is her first publication.

Coming & Crying is an anthology of true stories about sex, edited by Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell, published by their press, Glass Houses.


November 17, 2011: "The Gurlesque" with Joyelle McSweeney and Kim Rosenfield

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

On a cold November night in the midst of Occupy Philly, Writers House regulars gathered to experience Kim Rosenfield and Joyelle McSweeny's rhythmic collage-style poetry. Rosenfield, whose work was introduced as “a meat-coma of saucy idioms,” read first: her latest work, featured in the forthcoming USO (I’ll Be Seeing You), is an amalgamation of appropriated dialogue from comedy greats interspersed a soldier serving in Afghanistan's recollections. Her sociopolitical reading included everything from tomato sandwiches to feeling bad for Lindsay Lohan, all colored by the solemnity of retrospective historical context. McSweeny, in a sailor-style collar, followed with a slew of exuberant wordplay, acting out her own brand of socially-aware “goofiness” with a variety of hand gestures. Her short poems about a cop shooting a giant piñata, her Prius as a superior being, a civil war Paris Hilton zombie movie, and an insane Indian peacock preceded a singsongy, voodoo-driven performance of her series “King Prion.” The reading concluded with a Q&A moderated by Trisha Low and an Indian reception prepared by Erin Gautsche.


March 24, 2011: A Reading and Discussion with Vanessa Place

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Trisha Low, wearing her best power boots, introduced Vanessa Place’s work this March evening as “clinical, but … never clean,” an assessment that proved eerily resonant throughout Place’s soft, deliberate reading. Whether she was reciting slang terms for “vagina” nursery-rhyme-style or relating transcriptions of sex offense trials, Place’s machinic tonelessness paired with a methodical swaying produced a consistently chilling effect. Her manipulation of feminist texts to exclude the female was equally compelling, the formality of the language resulting in strangely detached social commentary. The audience was allowed to ask questions in a short session after the reading, during which Place dispersed the solemnity with a surprisingly wide smile.

March 3, 2011: Whenever We Feel Like It Presents Rachel Blau DuPlessis

8:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

On this “great day for poetry” (credit Michelle Taransky) Rachel Blau DuPlessis read with careful articulation and poignancy in a collaboration between the Feminsim/s and Whenever We Feel Like It series. Though she drew primarily from her recent series of collage poems, Drafts, DuPlessis also delivered some of her older work and made nods to Elizabeth Robinson and George Oppen. Perhaps the highlight of the night was DuPlessis’s oral interpretation of deletions in a segment from The Collage Poems of Drafts: breathy exhalations framed lines like “pollen stuck in the throat” and “the dead are coming” for a macabre and captivating effect. For her final poem, DuPlessis was even joined by a surprise guest.

March 2, 2011: Karen Finley

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

No other contemporary performing artist has captured the psychological complexity of this decade's political and social milestones as Karen Finley has in the past ten years. In her inimitable style, Finley has embodied some of the most troubling figures to cast a long shadow on the public imagination, and has envisioned a kind of catharsis within each drama: Liza Minnelli responds to the September 11 attacks; Terri Schaivo explains why Americans love a woman in a coma; Martha Stewart dumps George W. Bush during their tryst on the eve of the Republican National Convention; Silda Spitzer tells the former governor why "I'm sorry" just isn't enough; Jackie O cries, "Please stop looking at me!"

Finley's new book and transcripts of her performances The Reality Shows blazes through a dark and vivid era. These seething performance pieces are fully contextualized with introductions by the author and a time-line of cultural and political milestones since the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Karen Finley's raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. She has presented her visual art, performances and plays internationally. The author of many books including A Different Kind of Intimacy, George & Martha, and Shock Treatment, she is a professor at the Tisch School of Art and Public Policy at New York University. Visit The Feminist Press to find out more about Finley's book The Reality Shows.

February 28, 2011: Live at the Writers House Presents the Leeway Foundation

7:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

This edition of Live at the Kelly Writers House featured the Leeway Foundation’s 2010 Arts and Change Grantees. Catzie Villayphonh arrived at the program straight from teaching 5th-7th graders poetry; though she claimed to be underprepared, Villayphonh delivered a confident, high-speed performance of “You Bring Out the Laos in the House,” a poem that covered everything from fertilized duck eggs to elephant tattoos. Dr Tanji Gilliam, whose Leeway project was designed to empower women impacted by domestic violence, encouraged those afraid to speak up to “speak in”; as she delivered a troubling and frank family history her voice trembled only twice. Musical guest Emily Ana Zeitlyn – who, host Michaela Majoun explained, was born on a kitchen table in Fairmount Park – sung two of her “lyrically spare…and emotionally volcanic” songs in clear, soft tones. The first of these songs, “Take Me Back,” was followed by several poems from Monique E. Hankerson: Hankerson’s mild-mannered voice grew righteous and strong as she recounted injustices both universal and personal. Filipino-American Lorelai Narvaja followed with excerpts from family interviews, exploring the conflicting attitudes with which her family regards the past. Finally, Benita Cooper revealed how her grandmother’s amazing stories brought her the ability to trust her own voice and ultimately start a large-scale intergenerational storytelling project.

Catzie Vilayphonh

Dr. Tanji Gilliam

Monique E.
Hankerson

Lorelei Narvaja

Benita Cooper

February 8, 2011: Revolution Girl Style Again

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

This panel discussion on feminism and the Riot Grrrl movement, organized by 2011 Kerri Prize winner, Grace Ambrose, was one of the most well-attended Writers House events in recent history: in addition to a packed Arts Café, over 150 wait-listed viewers watched from a live stream at the Rotunda. Writer and punk rocker Sara Marcus moderated the discussion after reading an excerpt from her new book about the Riot Grrrl revolution describing her teenage enthusiasm at being part of an underground network. Panelists Katy Otto (drummer and founder of Exotic Fever Records), Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill singer and Riot Grrrl pioneer), and Beth Warshaw-Duncan (producer and director of Girls Rock! Philly) covered a range of topics, including identity politics, consent, the Internet, and why girls rock camps are better than chess camps. Dynamic engagement with the audience was central to the event as questions were texted in from the Rotunda, and many expressed reluctance for the discussion to end. The panel was followed by a performance at the Rotunda to benefit Girls Rock! Philly featuring all-female bands Trophy Wife, Whore Paint, Cat Vet, and Slutever.

November 9, 2010 - December 7, 2010: Susan Bee, a Retrospective

Feminism/s partnered with the Brodsky Gallery in this retrospective of the work of Susan Bee, whose whimsical-political color is accentuated by her handmade attention to detail. Throughout her explorations of feminist and secular-Jewish themes, Bee has worked with collage, oils, gauche, and watercolor, creating everything from narrative paintings to artists' books. She attests to the influences of surrealism, Judaic folk art, advertisements, and the medieval in her work, and is particularly drawn to film noir. Bee discussed her departure from the male-nude canon of early womens' art, noting in a question-and-answer session that living with poets helped her “be eccentric and difficult too.” She also detailed the influence of her multicultural immigrant heritage on her work, revealing the true complexity of her seemingly playful imagery.

October 21, 2010: an evening with Make/Shift Magazine featuring Jessica Hoffman, Hilary Goldberg, and local guests

6:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

Make/shift’s desire to represent diverse perspectives in feminism was certainly evident in this night of collaboration between the magazine and filmmaker, Hilary Goldberg. Make/shift editor, Jessica Hoffman hosted the event, and read an earnest appeal to fellow activists based on her experiences at the 2010 Pachamama skillshare retreat. She was preceded by an audio piece by “queer-black troublemaker,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, during which audience members were asked to close their eyes, and a mock-talk-show interview of Che Gossett conducted by Philly local, Tyrone Boucher. Next was a reading from poet Tara Betts, whose Midwestern tones charmed the audience even as she described a violent metaphorical nightmare. The evening was concluded with a short screening of Goldberg’s “hybrid experimental feature,” Reclamation, in which meandering images of L.A. were accompanied by live historical narration about the construction of aqueducts and police violence.

October 13, 2010: A Lunch Program with Eileen Myles on "Inferno"

Eileen Myles has had a complex relationship with genre distinctions: in this first Feminism/s event, she explained her growing attraction to the density of the novel, though she credits poetry as the “currency through which [she] became human.” Myles’s novel Inferno is a reflection of this inter-genre exchange: a female/queer narrative “draped” over Dante, the work blends nonfiction and epic through poetic sensibilities. Myles managed to make her lengthy introduction of the work feel like spirited conversation, and her likeability and charm permeated the program. During her reading (about a poet made temporary prostitute) her Boston accent was occasionally evident, while in the Q&A that followed she jokingly defined poets as “failed sex workers.” Myles concluded the event by equating her writing process to changing her dog’s food brand.

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