October 2001 -- Fall Foward with Small Press Traffic!

Friday, October 19, 2001 at 7:30 p.m.
Paula Gunn Allen & Stephanie Williams

One of the foremost scholars of Native American literature, Paula Gunn Allen's many books include the novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, the landmark critical work The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, and a new collection of essays, Off the Reservation. This year she has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writer’s Association for her groundbreaking work. Her latest book is Hozho: Walking in Beauty, an anthology of historical and contemporary stories by Native authors which she coedited. Originally from New Mexico, Allen has lived in California for many years and is Professor Emerita of English at UCLA. Poet and prose writer Stephanie Williams lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana; her first collection is due out this year. Her writing is one of constantly mobile portraiture which illuminates and reanimates familiar narratives by inventing new versions. From "Drunkard’s Promise": "Won’t you tell me your name?/The resolution happens every verse/and it’s not/sun setting down/on western newborn town/there’s nothing going on/to choose." Williams has done critical work on Zydeco music as an American poesy; she studied at Naropa and was the featured author in Mungo vs. Ranger #1.

Friday, October 26, 2001 at 7:30 p.m.
Lily James & Lynne Tillman

LILY JAMES WILL READ SOLO AS LYNNE TILLMAN PREFERS TO STAY IN NYC AT THIS TIME.

Tonight we present two bold fiction writers -- Young upstart Lily James edited the early, smart, and wild online phenom, Postfeminist Playground; her first novel, High Drama in Fabulous Toledo, is out this year from Fiction Collective 2. A Detroit native, born 1972, James sprang onto the literary landscape in the FC2 anthology Chick-Lit, followed quickly by her first collection of stories, The Great Taste of Straight People (Black Ice Books, 1997). She joins us from her new home in Columbia, South Carolina, to read from High Drama, a novel Cris Mazza calls "hilarious and tragic...reverberat[ing] with questions about the nature and place of fiction and fantasy in human experience in a parody and exaggeration of that ultimate oxymoron: realistic fiction." Lynne Tillman is a grandmistress of spare, elegant, outrageously compelling prose. She’s the author of Haunted Houses, No Lease on Life , Love Sentence, and The Madame Realism Complex, as well as a collection of essays, The Broad Picture (Serpent’s Tail, 1997), among many others. A frequent contributor to both Artforum and Bookforum as well as other shiny key reads, Tillman is a New Yorker extraordinaire: she contributed an appreciation of Edith Wharton to the big Conjunctions writers on writers issue and wrote the text for The Velvet Years: Andy Warhol’s Factory 1965-67. She’s done some of the most amazing postwar written investigations into what it means to be a girl, and an American, among many many other things, and we love her for it. As Andrew Ross says, "A private eye in the public sphere, she refuses no assignment and distills the finest wit, intelligence and hard evidence from some of the world’s most transient artifacts and allegories."

Sunday, October 28, 2001 at 2 p.m.
Crosstown Traffic
EVENT CANCELLED

Our multimedia series continues as poet/critic Susan Gevirtz & writer/musician Andrew Klobucar present a collaboration in which they approach writing and sound with an emphasis on contemporary DJ culture as part of the major arcana of today's culture industries. As Gevirtz & Klobucar say, "where sound comes in the emphasis is free to shift. We no longer ask what the poem means, but how it works. In this world, we have only sensation not meaning, fascination rather than comprehension." Susan Gevirtz’s books include Black Box Cutaway, Taken Place, and the critical work Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson; her latest, The Hourglass Transcripts, is new from Burning Deck. Andrew Klobucar is the co-writer and co-producer of Global Telelanguage Resources, a performance piece offering experimental infomercials on language, poetry and music. His essay on ‘90s activism will appear in GenXegesis: Essays on 'Alternative' Youth (Sub)Culture (Popular Press). Hosted by Taylor Brady.

All events are $5-10, sliding scale, and begin at 7:30, unless otherwise noted. Our events are free to SPT members, and CCAC faculty, staff, and students.
Unless otherwise noted, our events are presented in
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of Arts and Crafts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco (just off the intersection of 16th & Wisconsin)