Fall Convergence
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Fall Convergence: Conversation and Connection
September 27-28, 2024
University of Washington, Bothell
Off-site reading in Seattle
Free and Open to the public
The Fall Convergence is a yearly gathering of local and international writers, artists, and thinkers dedicated to an interdisciplinary exploration of a vital contemporary theme. This free event marks the beginning of our academic year and draws students, alumni, and members of the artistic and literary communities in Seattle and beyond.
For this, our 12th convergence, we are featuring three pairings of our faculty with authors with whom they wish to be in “conversation and connection,” as well as an author pairing that showcases our longstanding collaboration and connection with Essay Press.
We will also showcase our collaboration with the MFA student-led Gamut reading series, which will host an offsite reading on Friday, September 27, 2024.
Current Schedule
Friday September 27, 2024
Off-Site Reading hosted by Gamut
Location: Vermillion Gallery, 1508 11th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
6–8:30pm Featuring Sarah Rose Nordgren, Juan Carlos Reyes, Eleni Stecopoulos, Quenton Baker, and Ching-In Chen
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Convergence Panels
Location: North Creek Event Center (NCEC), UW Bothell
9:30–10:30 am: Morning coffee and generative writing workshop: “Natural Kinship” with Lindsey Keefer and Parker Dean Smith
10:30–11:30 am: Morning coffee and generative writing workshop: “What I Could Never Be” with Amy Hirayama and Sky O’Brien
11:30 am–12:30 pm: Lunch provided
12:30–1:30 pm: Ching-In Chen & Juan Carlos Reyes
1:45–2:45 pm: Jeanne Heuving & Eleni Stecopoulos
2:45–3:15 pm: Catered coffee break
3:15–5 pm: Mita Mahato, Sarah Rose Nordgren & Ronaldo Wilson
Generative Writing Workshops:
Writing Workshop #1: “Natural Kinship”
with Lindsey Keefer and Parker Dean Smith
Nature is, naturally(!), queer. In every living thing, we can find echoes of the intersectional bodies we inhabit, as plants and animals break free of the binary, transcend gender and sex, and survive against systems that would destroy them. Following in the footsteps of other queer nature writers and researchers such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Eliot Schrefer, Sabrina Imbler, and Emily Tesh, our workshop asks writers to open themselves up to the nature around them and inside themselves. Using a series of short writing examples and generative writing prompts inspired by Gumbs’ Undrowned, we ask our participants to think of their evolutionary roots and places where their current states of being align with the animals, plants, and environment around them.
Writing Workshop #2: “What I Could Never Be”
with Amy Hirayama and Sky O’Brien
In the spirit of Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges, who often fabricated imaginary authors and “heteronyms” in their writing, this workshop asks participants to create an exchange of writing between two imaginary people.
There are two parts. In part one, participants will take on the identity of an imaginary writer and compose a piece of writing in that person’s voice, such as a poem, letter, review, or diary entry. In part two, participants will exchange their writing and respond to each other’s pieces in the voices of their imaginary writers. Rebukes! diatribes! fan fiction! love letters! scathing critiques! are all welcome.
“I’ve always belonged,” Pessoa once wrote, “to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be.” At the end of this workshop, we will have collaboratively created an ecosystem of imaginary writers and a web of literary connections between them. In this way, we will belong to what we could never be.
Keynote Presenters:
Mita Mahato
Mita Mahato is the author and artist of Arctic Play (The 3rd Thing, 2024) and the collection In Between (Pleiades, 2017). Her poetry comix have been published in PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, and her practice has been supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Short Run Seattle, Mineral School, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and The Arctic Circle. A career educator, she teaches comix and poetry at all levels and currently lives in Seattle.
Sarah Rose Nordgren
Sarah Rose Nordgren is an American poet, writer, teacher, and cultural organizer. She is the author of four books of poetry and prose, including, most recently, Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal (Essay Press, 2024), which earned the Essay Press Book Prize, as well as the poetry collections Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh, 2017) and Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; and the chapbook The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions, 2022). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Narrative, and have been featured by PBS Newshour, The Slowdown podcast, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Nordgren holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in poetry from University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from University of Cincinnati where she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Nordgren lives in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina where she teaches poetry, serves as Emerging Poet Feature editor for 32 Poems, and is the Founding Director of The School for Living Futures, an experimental, interdisciplinary organization dedicated to creating new knowledge and possibility for our climate-changed future.
Juan Carlos Reyes
Juan Carlos Reyes‘s debut fiction collection, Three Alarm Fire, is forthcoming with Hinton Publishing. His stories, poems and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Waccamaw Journal, and Hawai’i Review, among others. His novella A Summer’s Lynching won the Quarterly West prize in 2017. He has been the recipient of the Gar LaSalle Artist Trust Storyteller Award, a PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellowship, and a Jack Straw Writers Fellowship, among others. He received his MFA from The University of Alabama, is a former board member of Seattle City of Literature, and currently serves as an Associate Professor of creative writing at Seattle University.
Eleni Stecopoulos
Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet, essayist, and critic who frequently writes on literature and other arts in relation to history, medicine, (auto)ethnography, ecology, and social and cultural resistance. Her book of critical-lyric essays, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing, is out from Nightboat this fall. Her other books include Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir that Petra Kuppers called “a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves”; and Armies of Compassion (2010), a collection of poems that Anne Waldman called “riveting . . . rare beauties.” Stecopoulos’s writing has appeared in Pamenar Magazine, [φρμκ], Best American Experimental Writing, Open Space (SFMOMA), In Insomnia: An Anthology, Somatic Engagement: The Politics and Publics of Embodiment, ecopoetics, Viz. Inter-Arts, Second Stutter, The Capilano Review, and Harvard Review, among many other venues. In recent years she has given talks on poetry and psychotherapy at the University of Plymouth; on poetics and experimental ethnography at the University of Texas, Austin; on “outsider writing” at the University of Chicago; and on translation and healing at the Paros Symposium in Tinos, Greece. Stecopoulos received her MFA from the University of Virginia and PhD in English from the University at Buffalo. After years of teaching at the University of San Francisco and Bard College, she now works with writers as an independent editor, manuscript consultant, and mentor. Born in New York City, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ronaldo V. Wilson
Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Virgil Kills (Nightboat Books, 2022); Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose (Counterpath Press, 2014), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018); and Carmelina, Figures: An Artist’s Book (Wendy’s Subway, 2021). Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is, too, a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. He has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. The recipient of fellowships from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), and Yaddo, and is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies).
Workshop Leaders:
Amy Hirayama
Amy Hirayama is a writer and educator from Seattle. She teaches creative writing through the Seattle Arts and Lectures Writers in the Schools Program and in the English Department at South Seattle College. Amy also works as the Events and Residency Coordinator for Clarion West, a speculative fiction writing workshop. In her writing practice she is interested in the Japanese Gothic, surrealism, projective verse, various forms of decay, collaborative writing, and play as a vital writing tool. This devotion to play can be seen in many of her collaborative projects, including the co-founding of FFFAFFF Press with MFA classmate Sky O’Brien.
Lindsey Keefer
Lindsey Keefer is a 2024 MFA graduate from UW Bothell’s Poetics & Creative Writing program. She writes fiction and poetry with a focus on science and the natural world. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, she’s a big fan of the rain. In her fiction, Lindsey aims to interrogate the sociology of dystopia, the embodiment of grief, and the relationship between nature and machine. Her work has appeared in Clamor and Silly Goose. You can find her blog at lindseykwrites.com.
Sky O’Brien
Sky O’Brien is a writer interested in collaborative and constraint-based methods of composition. He teaches in the English Department at Principia College and is the deputy editor of Dispatches Magazine, a bi-annual arts and culture magazine based in Berkeley, California. After graduating from the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell, he co-founded FFFAFFF Press with Amy Hirayama. FFFAFFF, which stands for “Form Follows Function And Function Follows Form,” specializes in publishing authors who do not exist. Recent collaborative titles include Her Prophecies of Cake, a series of 10 chapbooks written with Amy Hirayama. On the Care and Feeding of Imaginary Beings by Ana Flores is forthcoming.
Parker Dean Smith
Parker Dean (he/him) is a Seattle-based queer and trans writer from the High Desert of California. His work explores identity, nature, and queerness, focusing on the ways that the natural world can inform us on how to live as our truest selves. He is a birder at heart, but he also loves his friends, erotica, happy endings, and mixing his metaphors to mush. In his spare time, he co-edits for Silly Goose Press, a whimsical online literary magazine he started with three of his dearest friends. He received a Bachelors in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Redlands and a Masters in Creative Writing and Poetics from UW Bothell. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Bullshit Lit!, Troublemaker Firestarter, and Clamor.
Previous Fall Convergences
To view previous Fall Convergences, please visit our Fall Convergence Archive.
Access and Accommodation
This event will take advantage of auto-generated live captioning in Zoom. CART and ASL interpretation are available by request at least ten days in advance.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206.543.6450/V, 206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at dso@uw.edu.