Fall Convergence 2018: Alternating Facts

University of Washington Bothell
North Creek Events Center

Please RSVP here>> 

OVERVIEW

What is the role of creative thinking and writing in an age of alternating facts?

The twenty-first century is increasingly taking shape as a time of human conceit, environmental disaster and political hostility, governed by the concerted effort to undermine the status of facts and truth as consensual markers of social reality. In some ways, it might seem that social and political life have begun to deploy artistic strategies: policy grounded in fiction—with deep irreverence for social, cultural, and environmental consequences.

But art has, in some ways, always been post-truth—allowing creative freedom to invent and interpret facts, sometimes writing fictions, other times rewriting reality proper. As such, it may also be possible that art might have strategies for productive engagement with reality after the death of the fact. Against the neoliberal tendency to evacuate artistic thought from social and political life, perhaps it is in the language of creative writing and poetics that the new codes of social living ought to be written?

Convergence 2018 provides a forum to celebrate the ways that creative thinking and writing can be used to create pressure points on truth and its manipulation—grounded in fiction, poetry, art, and performances that can be such powerful companions to an age of alternating facts because they are situated on nodes of autobiographical intensity, personal speculation, and socially-minded intervention. Differently put, art comes from life—in ways sometimes direct, sometimes ephemeral, but always with a supposition of personal stakes that understands creative practice as a social gesture. This is poetics for the twenty-first century.

Please click here to read the presenters' bios.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

9:00 Welcome
Jeanne Heuving, Professor and founding Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics

9:15 Featured Reading by Steven Dunn
Introduction by Rebecca Brown

10:45 Panel: Writing Art
Kristina Podesva, Colleen Barry & Thea Quiray Tagle

12:15 Lunch & book sales

1:00 Panel Technologies of the Real
Lytle Shaw, Abraham Avnisan & Katherine Behar

2:30 Featured Reading by Srikanth Reddy 
Introduction: Sarah Dowling

Break

4:00 Panel: Person & Place
Dao Strom, Terri Witek & Dylan Hogan

5:30 Featured reading by Danielle Dutton 
Introduction by Rebecca Brown

Book Sales