QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place, Tuesday, March 30th

2010-03-15T08:12:00.000-07:00

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

presents

Clifford Chase

and

Liz Brown

curated by Nicholas Boggs

Tuesday, March 30th

at Dixon Place: 161A Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington

doors at 7/reading at 7:30

tickets $6 (available at the door or online at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/77672)

CLIFFORD CHASE is the author of a novel, WINKIE (2006) and a memoir, THE HURRY-UP SONG (1995). He edited the anthology, QUEER 13: LESBIAN AND GAY WRITERS RECALL SEVENTH GRADE (1998), and his writing has appeared in publications ranging from McSWEENEY's to NEWSWEEK.COM.

LIZ BROWN's writing has appeared in BOOKFORUM, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, and other publications.

2010-02-03T12:03:00.001-08:00

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

presents

Sarah Schulman and Charles Rice-González

curated by Nicholas Boggs

Tuesday, February 23rd

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington

doors at 7/reading at 7:30

tickets $6 (available at the door or online at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/77672)

Sarah Schulman is the author of 14 books, most recently the novel THE MERE FUTURE, the nonfiction book TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences and the forthcoming THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: Witness to a Lost Imagination. She and Jim Hubbard co-direct the ACT UP Oral History Project www.actuporalhistory.org, which will show at White Columns gallery in September.

Charles Rice-González is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. His debut novel, Chulito, about a tough, young Latino man, coming out in the South Bronx will be published by Alyson Books in May 2010.

QT: Hilton Als and Quince Mountain, Tuesday October 13th

2009-09-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

present:

HILTON ALS

QUINCE MOUNTAIN

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington

doors at 7/reading at 7:30

tickets $6 (available at the door or online at https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/77672)

HILTON ALS is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He also writes for The New York Review of Books.

QUINCE MOUNTAIN, whose writing has been featured in Killing the Buddha and DoubleX, is currently working on a line of greeting cards for transgendered folks and their loved ones. Happy Manniversary!

QT Tonight! Mike Albo + Ryan Berg

2009-07-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

(Unfortunately, Suzanne Snider, who was supposed to read tonight, can't make it. But fortunately, the utterly fantastic memoirist Ryan Berg will be joining Mike Albo for a stupendous reading! Don't miss it!)

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place
and the HOT! Festival
present:

MIKE ALBO
+
RYAN BERG

Tuesday, July 14

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington
doors at 7 / reading at 7:30

MIKE ALBO is a writer and performer who lives and loves in Brooklyn. His second novel (written with his longtime friend Virginia Heffernan) is the cult humor classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. His performances of the character can be found on YouTube, like everything else in the world. His first novel, the critically acclaimed Hornito, came out in 2000. Albo is also known as The Critical Shopper columnist for the New York Times. He has performed numerous solo shows, including Spray, Please Everything Burst, and My Price Point, as well as with the comedy trio Unitard. He is also a founding member of the legendary downtown NYC naked glittery dance troupe The Dazzle Dancers.

RYAN BERG, a graduate of The New School, received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Hunter College in 2008. There, he was a Hertog and Nita Koblin Fellow. Ryan is the recipient of residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He is currently working on a memoir about the two years he spent as a caseworker for GLBT youth living in a group home in New York City. The first chapter of this book appeared in Ploughshares.

Tuesday, July 14: MIKE ALBO + SUZANNE SNIDER

2009-07-06T12:29:00.000-07:00

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place

and the HOT! Festival

present:

MIKE ALBO

SUZANNE SNIDER

Tuesday, July 14

at Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street, between Delancey and Rivington
doors at 7 / reading at 7:30

MIKE ALBO is a writer and performer who lives and loves in Brooklyn. His second novel (written with his longtime friend Virginia Heffernan) is the cult humor classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. His performances of the character can be found on YouTube, like everything else in the world. His first novel, the critically acclaimed Hornito, came out in 2000. Albo is also known as The Critical Shopper columnist for the New York Times. He has performed numerous solo shows, including Spray, Please Everything Burst, and My Price Point, as well as with the comedy trio Unitard. He is also a founding member of the legendary downtown NYC naked glittery dance troupe The Dazzle Dancers.

SUZANNE SNIDER’s writing appears in many issues of The Believer and as part of several artists’ catalogs—with the work of Danica Phelps, Clare Rojas, Aaron Wexler, and Eve Sussman. She podcasts for The Guardian, and has worked as an oral historian/interviewer for HBO Productions, the New York Academy of Medicine, Columbia University, and the Judd Foundation. She teaches in the Media/Film Department at the New School University and co-curates KGB’s Nonfiction Night. Her work has been supported through fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the UCross Foundation Center. She is currently completing a book about two rival communes on adjacent land.

Tisa Bryant and Silas Howard read, but you're not supposed to know that.

2008-11-24T13:12:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to all who braved the bitter cold, the roping wind, the stacks of sawdust, the "There is no show tonight" sign on the door last week (I'd tell you which night it was, but then I'd have to shoot you). Our first night in the new Dixon Place paradoxically furnished a return to the old Lower East Side arts scene: underground, unpermissioned, embracing danger, shattering rules. Art on the edge! Risky words!

Tisa Bryant's warm readings from her wonderful work on films and Silas Howard's idealistic odes to Mr. Hollywood and the jilted love found there heated things right up. Here are the intros from the event.

But first, please don't forget to come to the FINAL QT READING OF 2008:

Tuesday, December 9
doors at 7 PM / reading at 7:30
TRIPLE BOOK PARTY!
Douglas A. Martin (Your Body Figured)
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (So Many Ways to Sleep Badly)
Magdalena Zurawski (The Bruise)

I scarce can breathe, I am so excited. See you then!

The intro of Silas:

The first time I saw Silas Howard was in 1995, and I totaled a car on the way there. It was a big Buick Century, a station wagon my mother had driven to work for roughly a decade before consigning it to me for my senior year of high school. I was taking a poetry class at the Bethesda Writers Center that met on Monday nights, but when word came down that dyke punk troupe Tribe 8 was on tour and had a Monday night gig at the 9:30 Club, it seemed that the universe was asking me to choose between being a poet and being a punk. I chose punk, and ditched the class. So at 7:30 that Monday, while my suburbanite classmates chawed at their sestinas, my cinnamon-scented Buick wagon lost its brakes, skidded 180 degrees around on a slicked Seven Locks Road, and finally came to a halt an inch or two shy of a low stone wall that separated the road’s grassy shoulder from a steep, wooded ravine.

My whole body trembling with adrenaline and averted demise, I turned the car around, drove on to my friend’s house, and went with him to the show, where Silas, whom I’d never met, was playing guitar.

Given this history, was I a little nervous about having Silas read tonight? Yes. I told him: “No guitars.”

But really, I want to embrace these places Silas’s work leads us—pointing a different direction than the one we meant to go, hanging between road and ravine, contemplating walls and precipices, hearing our hearts march irregularly in our temples. In his video and film work as well as his prose, creatures shapeshift, kids fall into a hole and become kid-monster hybrids, phantom genitalia consort with the periodically expelled organs of the sea cucumber. These malleable bodies suggest malleable selves and an unsteady relation between self and embodiment, making for an art easily as liberatory, if perhaps not quite as cathartic, as the ritual castration that took place onstage at the 9:30 Club, the night in 1995 that I totaled my car.

and of Tisa:

At Dia:Beacon, I recently spent a long time hanging out with a set of Fred Sandback works. Each of these works consists of lengths of colored yarn stretched taut, defining shapes and thus marking out the planes of space within them, making that empty space seem tangible and charged. The most moving of these works, to me, is a set of yarns that extend vertically, floor to ceiling, while appearing actually to thread through floor and ceiling into the world beyond, engaging a space more expansive than the gallery, perhaps infinitely so.

I thought of this work while I was reading Tisa Bryant’s elegant and far-reaching book Unexplained Presence, which takes up European cinema, literature, and visual art in a series of linked prose pieces that defy easy categorization or facile reading. Zooming in on the African presences in these works, Bryant fills the screen with the perhaps blown-out result of that zooming. We wander through these narratives as if half-lost, traversing the inverse tale that blooms when a silenced or marginal element becomes the centering or constitutive one.

As often as not, forces and processes outside the enclosed space of a given work of art set it in motion: an active and resistant pair of viewers, a filmmaker Bryant shows us in the process of shaping light and sound, Zola writing to Manet about Olympia. As these forces penetrate the work itself, conversely the reach of the art, and the sphere of its relevance, extends out of frame as well, perhaps infinitely, drawing all of history into its spectral embrace.

On last night's marvelous reading of Corrine Fitzpatrick and Andrea Lawlor

2008-09-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much to the many people who came out last night, filling the room (and, afterward, the bar) with keen intelligence and conviviality. Intros below. But first, we interrupt this recap to bring you this breaking news story.

JUST ANNOUNCED! The remainder of the QT season--which will take place in Dixon Place's brand new swanky space on Chrystie Street--is as follows:

Wednesday, November 19:
SILAS HOWARD [By Hook or by Crook (and other films)]
+
TISA BRYANT [Unexplained Presence (Leon Works)]

Tuesday, December 9:
Triple book party!!! with
DOUGLAS A. MARTIN
[Your Body, Figured (Nightboat)]
+
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
[So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights)]
+
MAGDALENA "NO MIDDLE NAME OR INITIAL" ZURAWSKI
[The Bruise, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize (FC2)]

Now, the intros:

ON ANDREA LAWLOR

Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, “What gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future.” Andrea Lawlor’s smart and engrossing Pocket Myths series, which invites artists across disciplines to provide new takes on major themes and characters from Greek myth, has for the past several years been putting that assertion to the test, yielding work that has been beautiful, meaningful, engaging, humorous, and provocative.

Lawlor’s own stories set myths in societies more familiar (to me, at least) than ancient Greece: long-closed dyke bars in Park Slope, grad-student parties in small towns. Often her characters behave disconnectedly, as if compelled, driven along by the force of ancient plotlines, structures, fantasies, and drives, but dressed here in language that glistens with energy and intelligence and heart.

Lévi-Strauss also writes of myths as language that exists above the linguistic level, inoculated by its enduringness against the effects of any particular translation. But Lawlor’s language is highly relevant here: If her writing uses the myth as a kind of eternal engine, the myth in turn luxuriates in the enchanting chassis of her wicked humor, the sharp social commentary she laces through the myths’ retellings—in short, her impeccable craft. Lawlor’s stories propel me through them in a way that few works of fiction do: with an inexorable thrust.

ON CORRINE FITZPATRICK

There’s a rigorous aesthetics of subtraction at work in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s stripped-down poetics. This is most overtly visible in Zamboangueña, a chapbook that came out this year and consists of taut, sly stanzas culled verbatim from her grandmother’s storytelling, built as much from what Corrine leaves out as what she includes.

This principle also animates her recent poems, one of which begins with a sentence that, read quickly on the page, seems at first to say “in this world there are problems,” and then you realize, a bit late, that you’d read it wrong; it says not world but word. And herein lies one of the chief problematics—or, as it appears in the line, post-subtraction, “problems”—in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s poetry: that to travel from experience to poetry, from world to word, can seem a function of diminution, of winnowing. Her work explores the aesthetic, intellectual, and moral challenges this leaves us with.

The vehicle, the medium of this movement, is perception, a process whose conditional and unstable character plays a key role in these poems (“throw specifics into doubt”). A siren, which could be a sound or a woman or both, dopplers itself out of form; a changing angle of light alters a landscape, as does a simple bodily movement: “turn conducts my view.” What can be counted on?

These poems’ caution, and their considered and erudite skepticism, exists to challenge the same tendencies in ourselves, their readers. Too, the poems seek ways to challenge this outlook. “I speak to you,” one poem begins, courageously setting aside momentarily all the ways that assertion could be undone. Another poem’s title, “emptiness has something to shout,” evinces a similar determination to escape paralysis or muteness without relinquishing theoretical and critical rigor.

The urge to subtract, as gracefully rendered in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s thoughtful, critical poems, leads us to explore by what terms we might attempt, through all our changing perceptual and intellectual frames, to build.

Tuesday, Sept. 23: Corrine Fitzpatrick + Andrea Lawlor

2008-09-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place presents:
(the first reading of the new season!)

CORRINE FITZPATRICK + ANDREA LAWLOR

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

Corrine Fitzpatrick is the author of a transcription project, Zamboangueña (sona books, 2007) and a chapbook of poems, On Melody Dispatch (Goodbye Better, 2007). Poems are about to be out in The Denver Quarterly and Tight Journal. She is in the MFA program for writing at Bard College, and is the Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. Born and raised in California, she now resides in Brooklyn.

Andrea Lawlor, a fiction writer and the editor of Pocket Myths (www.pocketmyths.com), has had stories published in Persiflage, the Brooklyn Rail, and Encyclopedia. Lawlor is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at UMass Amherst.

EXCERPTS:

[from Andrea Lawlor:]

He stroked his throat til the bump smoothed down and then he checked his look in the mirror on the back of his closet door. How could he look so pretty? He was a slutty superstar. His black motorcycle boots and close-fitting Levi’s jacket, big fur-lined Lenny Kravitz coat, every detail he approved. Who was he? He was the girl he wanted to fuck.

[from Corrine Fitzpatrick:]

sunlight is incident

sunlit incendent

my mathematical

moment

E. Tracy Grinnell and Martha Oatis read, and it was lovely.

2008-05-22T11:30:00.001-07:00

It was wonderful: a gently rigorous and rigorously gentle season finale, followed by an unprecedented profusion of mussels. Thanks to all who came.

Here are the intros.

On E. Tracy Grinnell:

Because this is a queer reading series, I want to start off talking about inversion. Arnold Schoenberg’s late-romantic, pre-serialist Verklärte Nacht (1899) was controversial for including a chord he called an inverted ninth, because the note in that chord known as the ninth was on the bottom, in the bass, where everybody knew it didn’t belong: a chord that had previously been forbidden and thus, Schoenberg joked bitterly, did not exist.

In E. Tracy Grinnell’s long poem “Humoresque” we get a couple of lines in which the idea of inversion mobilizes every word or group of words, without ever being said directly:

. . . succumb to deviants’ dreams underway
Night that transfigures.

“Night that transfigures” is itself an inversion of the Schoenberg work’s title in English, “Transfigured night.” This is typical of the tremendously exciting and mobile way Grinnell’s poetry operates—the way concepts and words are circled, unmistakable even in their sometime absence. I go through her poems in every direction. I stack and layer, I imagine her pages as transparencies I shuffle and lay over and under one another, I think of the students who, piercing several pages of Talmud with a pin, could recite the word pierced on each page, that manic polydirectionality: the pan-historical sweep, the perpetual-motion prolepses.

I read in “Humoresque” a condensed, elliptical late-empire Homerian epic, in which “[o]ne loves best a warrior’s coma”—so the idea of the war hero is itself lying suspended, moribund—while muses and sirens work to dash warlords on seaside rocks.

There’s so much more I want to say. I could very happily spend the next few years of my life giving lectures on E. Tracy Grinnell’s poems [Unknown audience member: “You should!”], following each thread in her rich allusive web to its source and laterally through its complex macramé. But for now I should just welcome her here, to the music stand. Perhaps a string player, premiering Schoenberg’s forbidden inversion a century ago, used a similar stand.

and on Martha Oatis:

I’m really pleased to be introducing Martha Oatis, who is a very dear friend. Most of the time when we talk on the phone she’s driving between Boston and Providence, so motion suffuses and carries our relationship more than it does perhaps any other relationship in my life. So it’s fitting that in her work, attention to motion—and to position and to relationality—are so crucial.

In her long poem “Forest Trace,” consciousness moves through via prepositions; in “Metaphysics Continued,” her newer work, that relationality becomes, almost literally, concrete:

“From here, I look down upon the sidewalk. Which later I will find at my feet. I will need it to step on. . . . That the ground provides perpetual connection between places.”

The play on ground is deliberate, I believe: She addresses not just the dialectical figure/ground relation but what the actual point of contact consists of—the pause within the preposition: how that can be shadowy, insubstantial—

“An object in the hand. Where hand and surface meet, there also hovers the shadow between two things making contact.”

—and how that can be substantial, and a ground for inscription, as in the line, later in the poem:

“I place my hand on the sheet of paper resting on a wooden surface.”

A sheet of paper: just enough substance to write on, and what is written on the paper records the surface, and embodies the relation.

This essayistic, open-hearted, evolving voice brings us in on the poetry’s important inquiries. We are the fortunate guests of a compassionately, attentively, ever-changing mind. Alan Davies, writing in Boog City, praised her “soft, quite simply beautiful” stanzas. I’m additionally grateful for her flexible, thoughtful working out of interrelatedness, whether it’s the pavement of I-95 or the sidewalk that provides the connection.

Tuesday, May 20: E. Tracy Grinnell + Martha Oatis

2008-05-01T11:17:00.001-07:00

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Some Clear Souvenir (O Books 2006) and Music or Forgetting (O Books 2001), as well as the limited edition chapbooks: Leukadia (Trafficker Press forthcoming 2008), Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson (gong chapbooks 2006), Of the Frame (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs 2004), and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems 2000). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches writing and edits Litmus Press and Aufgabe, an annual journal of poetry and translations.

Martha Oatis is the author of from Two Percept (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and two unpublished manuscripts, Forest Trace and Metaphysics Continued. Other poems have appeared in Aufgabe and EOAGH. She recently began studying Traditional Chinese Medicine at The New England School of Acupuncture. She lives in Providence.

Dale Peck + Mark Edmund Doten: Tuesday, January 8

2008-01-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

Dale Peck is the author of the novels Martin and John, The Law of Enclosures, and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye; the memoir-cum-novel What We Lost; a book of literary criticism, Hatchet Jobs; and two children's books, Drift House and The Lost Cities. In 2008 and 2009 he will publish Body Surfing, a metaphysical thriller; Sprout, a young adult novel; The Garden of Lost and Found, a novel for adults; and, if he finishes it on time, Twelve Caesars, his first collection of short stories. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Observer, Out, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, BOMB, Tin House, Granta, and the Threepenny Review. The winner of two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he currently teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of The New School.

Mark Edmund Doten is enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA writing program, and is a former associate editor of Huffington Post. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot; Mudlark; Web Del Sol site The Potomac, where he is a contributing editor; and novelist Dennis Cooper’s "Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground” (Akashic Books). His interviews with Edmund White and Rick Moody have appeared in Bookslut and Huffington Post, respectively. In June 2007 New York Magazine ran an excerpt from his fiction, naming him a "future star" of New York area writing programs.

Akilah Oliver + Stacy Szymaszek: Tuesday, December 18

2007-12-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

Akilah Oliver's chapbooks include a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), The Putterer's Notebook (Belladonna, 2006), and An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla Press, 2004). She is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999), a book of experimental prose poetry. Currently on faculty at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University's Summer Writing Program, she has also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and she is currently the Monday Readings Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. She lives in Brooklyn.

Some online Akilah Oliver: http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/oliver.html

Stacy Szymaszek was born in Milwaukee, WI, in 1969. She is currently the Artistic Director at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. Her chapbooks include Mutual Aid (gong, 2004), Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005) and There Were Hostilities (release, 2005). She is the author of Emptied of All Ships and the forthcoming Hyperglossia (both with Litmus Press). She is the editor of Gam, is a contributing editor for Fascicle, coeditor of Instance Press, and was one of the editors of the "Queering Language" issue of EOAGH. A new work, Stacy S: Autoportraits, featuring her self-portraits with accompanying texts by Trane Devore, Renee Gladman, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, Tim Peterson, or Trace, Elizabeth Robinson, and David Gatten, will be out soon on OMG Press.

Some online Stacy Szymaszek: http://www.mipoesias.com/Poetry/szymaszek_stacey.html

Wayne Koestenbaum + Gary Lutz: Tuesday, November 27

2007-11-19T19:44:00.000-08:00

at Dixon Place, 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks, + drinks) at 7 / words at 7:30

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry, most recently Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, was published by Soft Skull Press in summer 2007. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

Gary Lutz is the author of Stories in the Worst Way , I Looked Alive, and Partial List of People to Bleach. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

And here are the intros from last weekend's QT-affiliated not-entirely-queer-if-you-mean-queer-THAT-way reading not at Dixon Place.

Jess Arndt’s astonishing sentences teem with life and rot, with endlessly new language and images. In her novel-in-progress, Shanghaied, a fierce lawless erotics of abjection plays out in a pre-regulatory-system Californian frontier, thus exemplifying the Georges Bataille claim that “eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns . . . of the regulated social order . . . .”

A barroom brawl, a misshapen face, a hurried fuck, and the decaying carcass of a murdered bandit here all coinhabit a joint plane of tenderness, desire, and disgust. Arndt’s language is, in Julia Kristeva’s words, “a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges.” Burning at the core of this gruff profanity, there’s a slurrily romantic heart of drunk longing for cohesion, seen mostly as through a heavily clouded pane, like the compromised vision of the sentimental, longing One-Eyed Jack. Quoting, to close, Arndt herself: “Overhead in that fevered wan-ness one weak star rolled and leaked its light as if blind.”

If music be the food of love, Kathe Burkhart’s provocative interventions with language are dessert. The bittersweet haiku hanging on the wall in her fantastic show at PS1 right now in five-inch-high chocolate letters; the words on her Liz Taylor paintings, where amid a textural collage of fake fur, fake jewels, rope, dildo, brash words— “fuck face,” “slit,” “up your ass,” and my favorite, “mercy fuck turd”—are poetic in their compression and force.

Equally forceful, though less public, is Burkhart’s writing on the page, which works with intimate forms—letter-writing, journaling—to create private or semiprivate interactions for us to stumble across. Her unflinching texts variously ask readers to confront our own voyeurism, the repetition of desire and emotional disclosure, and the intense discomfort of closeness.

In reading Frances Richard’s first book, 2003’s lovely See Through, I thought a lot about shapeshifting. Through her language in those poems, films between matter and nonmatter are crossed and recrossed, things gaining and relinquishing solidity like one might catch and recover from a cold. A few lines, from a few different poems:

Lit signage clings to the air
Rain hangs its partition
as incense / would alter from thingness to smoke

In her gracefully exploratory work of the past few years it’s becoming even clearer that Richard is, in a way, an alchemical poet, that is, a poet of morphings, of—her word—topology, a word that summons the geographic as well as the geometric. These poems’ zeal for shapeshifting affects the very matter of meaning itself—as when Richard deftly, while invoking both Ali G and the cost of a war, collapses an astronomical sum into its topologically equivalent black hole:

Approximately one
zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero dollars

Similarly, in her use of extralinguistic material—sounds, symbols, phonemes—she both invokes the future-seeking explorations of twentieth-century avant-gardes and rolls back creation—since, if in the beginning was the word, pre-words place us in the realm of pre-beginnings, the unified primordial soup.

November 18 at 3 PM in Brooklyn: Jess Arndt, Kathe Burkhart, Frances Richard

2007-10-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendars! Next regular QT reading at Dixon Place:
Tues, Nov. 27: Wayne Koestenbaum + Gary Lutz! But first...

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place
and the Dumbo Arts Center
present
Text and the City:
A not-entirely-queer reading entirely not at Dixon Place
Sunday, November 18, 2007
3:00 PM
Dumbo Arts Center: 30 Washington Street, Brooklyn

Featuring:
Jess Arndt
Kathe Burkhart
Frances Richard

Right after that (Nov. 18, 5 PM onward), please come hear QT curator Sara Marcus and many other poets read at the EOAGH Release Party @ Unnameable Books, 456 Bergen Street (near Flatbush), Brooklyn, NY.

An avid student of old fashioned mixologies, vast piracy, and assorted buggery, Jess Arndt is attempting to combine the three in her yet to be finished first novel, Shanghaied. Set in Gold Rush San Francisco, the story weaves and staggers through the opium dens, brothels and sailor holes of the Barbary Coast, continuously distracted by the gold-lust and tarts. Having just finished her MFA at Bard College, she trades her time between Brooklyn and a small island off the northwest coast of Washington State. She has most recently been published in Velvet Mafia: Dangerous Queer Fiction, Instant City Journal, Encyclopedia Literary Journal, Bottoms Up! Writing About Sex from Soft Skull Press, and Baby Remember My Name, a new anthology edited by Michelle Tea. She has a short story coming out from Inconvenient Press later this fall, in collaboration with visual artist Xylor Jane.

Kathe Burkhart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of three books of fiction: Between the Lines (Hachette Litteratures, 2006), Deux Poids, Deux Mesures/The Double Standard (Hachette Litteratures, 2002/Participant Press, 2005), and From Under the 8 Ball (LINE, 1985). Her visual art has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, including the 1993 Venice Biennale, SMAK Museum (Gent, Belgium), Museum of Modern Art, Weatherspoon Museum, and P.S.1. She teaches art and feminist theory at New York University, and divides her time between New York and Amsterdam.

Frances Richard's book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003. In 2005 she co-curated, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, "Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates," an exhibition mounted jointly at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns Gallery, with a catalogue published by Cabinet Books. Recently awarded a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital, Ms. Richard writes frequently about contemporary art, teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn.

Report back from Billy Merrell + Justin Torres

2007-10-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all who packed the room for last night's reading. Here, by request, are the intros again:

Justin Torres:

I didn't intend this exactly, or maybe just not consciously, but this evening's two writers have in common a concern with the complexity of love that lives in captivity, exploring the resonances of being bound or trapped in love. With Billy Merrell, it's romantic exclusivity and marriage, while in the stories of Justin Torres it's childhood, the dizzy encloisterment of living in the child's world, whose terms, rarely explicit but always devastatingly absolute, are set by others--in this case, parents who, while palpably loving, are also by turns childlike themselves and menacing in either their power or their half-absence.

The antics and actions and vignettes of the small boys making sense of the world are entrancing, memorable, plump pie-slices of action and omen. But where I really get lost is in his sentences, these lush furly things in which the breathless, exuberant, overflowed voice of childhood is turned upon the knowledgeable lathe of a writer in command of his craft.

Billy Merrell:

Anyone who is familiar with Billy Merrell in his recent incarnation as mad sonneteer may have wondered whether there's anything he won't put into iambic pentameter. Here, by way of an answer, is a line from his invisible play in verse in progress:

Hey, fuck you. God. I hate this. Drop it. Damn.

This speaks to his interest in the impact of the line and the stress on the stuff of ordinary life and extraordinary love--and in how enormous human events can be boiled down to just a word or two. I think Billy is a didactic poet, which I don't mean in a bad way but notwithstanding his denails there is instruction here, gracefully, sweetly. To a surprising extent for somebody who so overtly pulls from his own experience, his work looks outward. His poems offer morsels to their readers, over and over, like a gardener holding out a bloom or a fruit.

Billy Merrell + Justin Torres: Tuesday, October 23

2007-10-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

at Dixon Place, 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors at 7 / readings at 7:30

Billy Merrell is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir, and was a co-editor for The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About LGBTQ and Other Identities, which received a 2006 Lambda Literary Award. His work has also appeared in the anthology This is Now: The Best Young Artists and Writers in America. He received his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and is currently Web Coordinator for Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Justin Torres has published stories in Tin House, The Greensboro Review, and Sleeping Fish. He has a story in the forthcoming issue of Gulf Coast. He is finishing work on his first book.

And later this fall...

Tuesday, November 27
Wayne Koestenbaum + Gary Lutz

Tuesday, December 18
Akilah Oliver + Stacy Szymaszek

Plus:
Sunday, November 18
3 PM
Jess Arndt, Kathe Burkhart, and Frances Richard
in a special edition of
QT: Not-necessarily-queer readings
not anywhere near Dixon Place
at Dumbo Arts Center
in Dumbo, Brooklyn,
in conjunction with the "Sex in the City" exhibition.

Please join the series email list! if you are not already on it
by emailing qt.readings {at} gmail {dot} com.

Announcing the Fall 2007 QT Season

2007-09-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, October 23
Billy Merrell + Justin Torres

Tuesday, November 27
Wayne Koestenbaum + Gary Lutz

Tuesday, December 18
Akilah Oliver + Stacy Szymaszek

Also, this is a queer reading although it's not at Dixon Place:
On Monday, October 15,
your humble QT curator, Sara Marcus,
will be reading and playing music, maybe
at the Poetry Project
with Bethany Spiers and Sabrina Calle.

Plus:
Sunday, November 18
in the afternoon (exact hour TBA)
Jess Arndt, Kathe Burkhart, and Frances Richard
in a special edition of
QT: Not-necessarily-queer readings
not anywhere near Dixon Place
at Dumbo Arts Center
in Dumbo, Brooklyn,
in conjunction with the "Sex in the City" exhibition.

Please join the series email list! if you are not already on it
by emailing qt.readings {at} gmail {dot} com.

It was a full night.

2007-07-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

Report on the Robert Glück/Laurie Weeks reading, July 17, 2007

Dixon Place's cozy living room was stuffed last night; not everyone could sit down, even. Bob Glück read a poem compiled of his misreadings, 50 pages of skinny lines—he held it up and swiveled it, like a preschool teacher with a picture book, so we could all see just how skinny it was—where amid lots of incongruous "sperm"s, the bumps on the road of assembling legible meaning became the road itself, asking us either to attempt to misread them back into their original form (I kept wonder which words look like sperm) or to succumb to the force of the assembled errors and the alternate language they outlined. Then he read a long, knowing excerpt from his novel-in-progress, About Ed, which he sheepishly called his take on the AIDS memoir. “It’s like bringing coals to Newcastle,” he said, but as he read, it quickly became clear that it’s more like bringing an unforeseen alternative energy source there. The excerpt he read, about washing a deceased ex-lover’s body, is simultaneously tender and resisting sentimentality, tainted by neither the maudlin nor the vaudeville, a thoughtful encounter with how death takes its place in life.

Then, after an effusive and social break, there was Laurie Weeks’s set—a wryly hilarious Zipper Mouth excerpt that takes the form of a sullen teen’s letters to Sylvia Plath alternating with wretched, vortex-strewn adolescent poetry ("the
snapping bones of Madness? // Snapping Madness / Of bones? // Madness of snapping / Bones? // This poetry thing is hard!”) I haven’t heard a funnier reading in ages, maybe ever. After another novel excerpt, she treated us to her freshly written catalogue essay on Nicole Eisenman (who had her seat of honor, front and center) in which an ironic fantasy scenario of rare-vintage wines and genteel seaside terrace aperitifs provides the ground for a revolutionary celebration of Eisenman’s work plus all-encompassing critique of late capitalism done up as Socratic dialogue between Laurie Weeks and a helium-voiced—outgrowth?—protruding from her hip. A lovable five-toed pet frog chimes in from time to time. And this only gets you halfway there.

Enough people commented on the introductions that I’ve decided to post them and to continue doing this for future readings. Photos, too, perhaps: any volunteers for the post of official QT photographer? I don’t even have a digital camera. God, I can be so twentieth century sometimes.

Here’s the intro for Laurie Weeks:

People who chew betel leaves talk about the over-the-top salivation, the feeling of spit gushing out of the insides of your cheeks and your tongue’s underbelly, and Weeks’s work—you know, I’m going to say Laurie, maybe she’ll feel less afflicted by this intro that way—Laurie’s work has some of that profligacy about it. Which is not to say it’s untended. Listen to this bit:

Roland said something like, “photography, a new form of hallucination,” and that got me worked up. It wasn’t the meaning or anything—just that certain words were green and lavender beads released from a cold capsule, pinging off my neurons to spark sensation. “Roland Barthes is beautiful,” I thought. “I love this song.”

How viscerally but still economically the mind, perception and alterations of perception, the body and alterations of the body, are thrown into heavy rotation here. There’s a go-for-broke courage in Laurie’s work, in the ways her characters vie with their discipline-resistant appetites and pursue whatever they need, the conversations they have with their drives. These sentences perform the sensation of the blind leap with utter abandon. I feel my brain start to loosen when I read Laurie Weeks, it’s like how other people describe being in bikram yoga classes. The spigots are twisted all the way open, they’re almost falling out of the wall, the impression of freedom is infectious.

And here’s Bob’s:

I want to talk about Bob Glück’s practice of, and his talking about his practice of, seeking to elaborate a nest of fictions, cognizant of theory and of avant garde poetry, explicit and exploratory about politics in narration, the work he’s done to open up arenas for people to live out these considerations—through the journal Narrativity, the fabulous anthology Biting the Error, his work at Small Press Traffic and San Francisco State.

But I also want to talk about his range, his deliciously all-embracing work. The unpolished sexual, the deceptively domestic, the erotics of unlove or half-love, the mindstorms of longing and of distance—these narratives we may have thought we knew get rearranged, slyly flicked, to live acutely, newly, on his pages. And a loving awareness of the apparatus is never far off; he enacts, and comments on the enactments, in consecutive breaths, affably:

Isn’t plotless beauty rankling?
My experience may be allegorical, but of what?

He’s an inveterate communitarian; the sociality of how these concerns and processes live in the world is essential to him, and the way this plays out in his work is affecting and endearing, how he checks in with us like the party host who brings the most fantastic group of people together and then shows up at your elbow every so often wanting to make sure you’re having a good time. And we are.

ROBERT GLUCK + LAURIE WEEKS : TUESDAY, JULY 17

2007-07-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

Doors at 7 PM / Reading at 7:30
Part of Dixon Place's HOT!: The NYC Celebration of Queer Culture
at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd Fl, b/w Houston & Prince

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist. His new book of stories, Denny Smith, appeared in 2004. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic, director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. Glück’s poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction 1988 and 1996,The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. His critical articles appeared in artforum international, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, and he prefaced, Between Life and Death, a book of paintings by Frank Moore.Last year he and Dean Smith completed the film Aliengnosis. In 2005, Coach House Press published Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative, a juicy anthology edited by Glück, Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott. Gluck lives high on a hill in San Francisco with Anthony Russell, his opera-singer boyfriend (he's a bass).

"The casual perversity of Robert Glück's Denny Smith stories has something of Genet's seemingly effortless grace about it. Glück makes disgusting things beautiful, or better still, makes them delectable in the same way one would, say, a garden hydrangea."—Gary Indiana, Artforum.

The work of New York writer and performer Laurie Weeks explores a world of girls snared in a matrix of cultural sociopathology and their own self-loathing. Emphasizing imagery and deadpan humor, her stories have a surreal overcast and combine gothic elements with science fiction. She is currently completing a book of short stories, Debbie's Barium Swallow or I Know I Am a Flower, and a novel, Zipper Mouth. A contributor to the screenplay for Boys Don't Cry, Weeks toured the country in 1999 with Sister Spit, a group of punk girl writers. Her fiction and essays have appeared in publications including The Baffler, Index, Nest, Art on Paper, Out, XXX Fruit, The LA Weekly, and Mirage/period[ical]. Her stories have been included in many anthologies, among them The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading and Fetish. Weeks writes regularly about art, including catalogue essays on the work of Nicole Eisenman and the videos of Cecilia Dougherty. She has appeared in many videos, most recently playing the role of Lance Loud in Cecilia Dougherty's feature Gone. Since 1993, Weeks has produced, written, directed, and performed in the collaborative one-act play series Summer of Bad Plays. Her play Young Skulls II, based on the true story of teenage lesbian thrill-killers in Indiana, was produced at the WOW Cafe in NYC and in San Francisco at The Lab. Weeks has taught at The New School, the University of California at San Diego, and Cal Arts in Valencia, CA. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, as well as a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She was a panelist and presenter at various conferences on marginalized writing and girl bodies at Columbia, Brown, Brandeis, and Kent State Universities.

Save the date

2007-05-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

July 17: Robert Gluck + Laurie Weeks

As part of Dixon Place's annual
HOT Festival, the NYC Celebration of Queer Culture.
This is going to be so awesome.

Read an excerpt from Laurie Weeks's novel-in-progress Zipper Mouth here.

Read some of Robert Gluck's writing at Tarpaulin Sky and then go get some of his books. (Except please don't actually buy them from Amazon. Use abebooks or go to St. Mark's or something. Amazon just gave me the best-looking link.)

Thursday, May 3: Renee Gladman + Anna Joy Springer

2007-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

RENEE GLADMAN + ANNA JOY SPRINGER
Thursday, May 3

Renee Gladman is the author of three works of prose: Juice, The Activist, and most recently, Newcomer Can't Swim, as well as a book of poems, A Picture-Feeling. She is the publisher of Leon Works, a press for experimental prose and the "thinking text," and teaches fiction in the program for Literary Arts at Brown University.

Read "First Sleep" by Renee Gladman here.

Anna Joy Springer is a writer, visual artist, and writing instructor who lives in San Diego, California, with her poet wife, Ali Liebegott, and bad dogs Ruby and Rorschach. Formerly a lead singer and lyricist in punk bands Blatz, The Gr'ups, and Cypher in the Snow, she has toured the United States and Europe in these bands and with the all-girl spoken word road show, Sister Spit. She's an Assistant Professor of Writing at UC San Diego. Her first novel, The Vicious Red Relic, Love, is forthcoming.

Read an excerpt from Anna Joy Springer's upcoming novel at Suspect Thoughts.

Wednesday, April 11: Julia Bloch + Julian Brolaski

2007-04-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

Julia Bloch, from Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Dear Kelly,

Inauguration Day and it’s like, I want to cash in the next season now, please. Race past it. Like your sophomore album, late and yet too soon. And in a distancing gesture she creates space around the memory. I am in Pac Heights, in a black chair at Tully’s. You’ll still recognize me through the darkening window by the glittering at my breast. Listen, everyone wants music that transports them, Give me this moment, like an arpeggio, I admit! I love Gershwin! The world, stinking blonde in its ordinariness, will take your face and make it simply your own.

Dear Kelly,

At the piano recital, I heard the Yamaha sing out its cheap thick notes, the cheap trick of wide keys to make the piano seem more grand. I want to think you’re grander than that, not coated in black gloss so shiny I can see my pores. A flat tone, too, not muted but — gagged. No. No like that. I couldn’t think where I was supposed to put my hands to make it better.

Julian Brolaski, Call Me Cunt Sonnet

Call me cunt, I am my own big brother,
Like Hesiod, had he had his druthers
I’m spitting on the nail I out to clip
To make my heart thump harder on the lam.
That rhyming hazard that you thought you writ
That fucks folks harder than a free verse can
Is lisping with its colored consonants
Is buggering the fuck out of abstinence
While my bitch sits high atop the firmament
Tugging at the garter of the god of gods
& with such look of am’rous compliment
I blushed to voice, flushed to blow her wad
My rhymes though sometimes given to be shallow
Will not their horns unspill, nor pose themselves as fallow

HOLY MACKEREL INCREDIBLE SPRING SEASON OF QT PEOPLE!!!

2007-03-12T17:56:00.000-07:00

JULIA BLOCH + JULIAN BROLASKI
Wednesday, April 11

Julia Bloch's poetry has appeared recently in The Big Ugly Review, Shampoo, Five Fingers Review, and Orpheus, and Faux Press's Bay Poetics anthology. She is the winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and is also the co-founder of Bigfan Press. Julia currently spends her time in San Francisco and Philadelphia, where she recently returned to graduate school and colder weather.

Julian T. Brolaski is a love poet, and dedicates all her verses to Love. Sie co-curated the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004-2006 and the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003-2005. S/he is the author of Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press, 2003), The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), Madame Bovary's Diary (Cy Press 2005) and the defunct blog Swimming for Dummies (under the pseudonym Tanya Brolaski). She is writing hir dissertation on rhyme in medieval, Renaissance and Apache poetry.

RENEE GLADMAN + ANNA JOY SPRINGER
Thursday, May 3

Renee Gladman is the author of three works of prose, Juice, The Activist, and most recently, Newcomer Can't Swim, as well as a book of poems, A Picture-Feeling. She is the publisher of Leon Works, a press for experimental prose and the "thinking text," and teaches fiction in the program for Literary Arts at Brown University.

Anna Joy Springer is a writer, visual artist, and writing instructor who lives in San Diego, California with her brilliant poet wife, Ali Liebegott and bad dogs Ruby and Rorschach. Formerly a lead singer and lyricist in punk bands Blatz, The Gr'ups, and Cypher in the Snow, she has toured the United States and Europe in these bands and with the all-girl spoken word road show, Sister Spit. She's an Assistant Professor of Writing at UC San Diego. Her first novel, The Vicious Red Relic, Love, is forthcoming.

Sara Jaffe + Jess Arndt, Wednesday 1/24

2007-01-11T15:19:00.000-08:00

Sara Jaffe + Jess Arndt
Wednesday, January 24 at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors at 6:30/reading at 7

Sara Jaffe is a writer and musician currently living in Western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Encyclopedia, Tantalum, Fort Necessity, and Instant City. She is former guitarist for dance-damaged band Erase Errata, and is proprietor of Inconvenient Press and Recordings, a DIY purveyor of words and sounds.

Jess Arndt finished her MFA in Fiction from Bard College and currently resides in Brooklyn. She has most recently been published in On Our Backs magazine, Velvet Mafia: Dangerous Queer Fiction, Instant City, Encyclopedia, and Bottoms Up!: Writing About Sex from Soft Skull Press.

Erica Kaufman + Filip Marinovich, December 11

2006-11-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

ANNOUNCING!!!
A New Reading!!!

Erica Kaufman and Filip Marinovich
Monday, December 11
at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors at 6:30/reading at 7

Erica Kaufman is the co-curator of the belladonna* small press and reading series. She is the author of two chapbooks (A Familiar Album, The Kickboxer Suite) and two new ones are coming soon. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in: CARVE, LIT, Jacket, Jubilat, 26, The Tiny, Puppy Flowers, Bombay Gin, Good Foot, and other places. She lives in Brooklyn and loves her puggle.

Filip Marinovich is a poet, performer, and playwright living in New York City. As a member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective he has worked at editing and contributing to 6x6, a poetry periodical, and New York Nights, an anti-war newspaper, and performing various roles in "paperless book" performances. From 2002 through 2003 he formed Comet Party, a motley theatrical band, and wrote/directed a trilogy of plays: Skin Around The Earth, Throne Room Snow, and Karma Bookshop. Poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Greetings, Moon City Review and are forthcoming in the "Queering Language" issue of EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts. Filip times his divides between New York and The Balkans on a cruise for booze, boys, and Voyelles, preferably in the evening, when the night is Lung.

Eileen Myles + Nate Lippens: Wed, Oct 11

2006-09-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

QT is pleased to announce its inaugural reading:

Eileen Myles with Nate Lippens
Wednesday, October 11
at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors at 6:30/reading at 7

Eileen Myles divides her time between New York and San Diego, where she teaches writing and literature at the University of California-San Diego. Her opera, Hell, was performed at P.S. 122 in spring 2006. Her books of poetry and prose include Cool for You, Not Me, Chelsea Girls, School of Fish, and On My Way. She is the co-editor of the anthology The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading.

Nate Lippens is a Seattle-based writer and performer. His work has appeared in Mobius, Yeti, No Depression, High Performance, Face Review, The Stranger, and more. He is the recent recipient of the Hopgood Prize for Fiction and is completing his novel, You Know Who You Are. A companion performance titled Variable will premiere in September of 2006.