Urbana Burning Literary Arts Festival
An evening of literature, music, media, and movement will be held Saturday, September 1st, from 7 p.m.-10 p.m., at the Channing-Murray Foundation, at the corner of Oregon and Mathews (1209 West Oregon, Urbana). A radio show dedicated to the performers will be broadcast at noon on Saturday the first on WEFT 90.1 FM.
FEATURING TEN LOCAL WRITERS AND PERFORMERS
Travis Alber (thisistravis.com)
Danielle Dutton (www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/Dutton/)
Indigo Frank
Eckard Gerdes (experimentalfiction.com)
William Gillespie (spinelessbooks.com)
Jeff Glassman & Lisa Fay
Paul Kotheimer (handmaderecords.com)
Aaron Miller (bookglutton.com)
Marty Riker (dalkeyarchive.com)
INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTISTS
INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Travis Alber has been conjuring creative projects out of the ether for 11 years. She has a masters degree in interactive multimedia, and has shown work in association with Flash Forward, Rhizome, the Electronic Literature Organization, One Club Interactive, the Contagious Media Showdown, and Communication Arts, among others. When not working on her creative projects (or rambling on about the ones she hasn't yet created but can't stop thinking about), Travis focuses on her personal quest for new reading experiences, embodied by her latest effort, http://www.BookGlutton.com, an ebook reader and website focused on collaborative reading environments.
Travis's interactive work focuses on finding a sense of place, narrative form, motion and interface experimentation. Many of her projects are built around interactive narratives. Time is a central theme throughout her work.
Thirty Days of Rain is a story about leaving San Francisco, told through 30 animated haiku. The haiku all follow the traditional 5 - 7 - 5 syllablic structure, and their order shows a progression of thinking about change, beginning with a series of happy memories and cycling through serious events: the pain of loss, the melancholia of environment, and the final act of leaving. Major themes? There are a few -- personal attachment to a place, memories of gain or loss associated with a place, and reflections on changes over time in a city.
Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) and SPRAWL (Clear Cut Press, forthcoming 2008). She recently received her PhD at the University of Denver and has taught writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Denver, and Naropa University in Boulder. She lives in Urbana and works for Dalkey Archive Press.
Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman have been collaborating since 1992. They create short, dense and troublesome compositions. Each one, in some way, pries apart a relation in theatre between movement and text, sound and gesture, rhythm and character, and inserts a new technique. Eulogy is one such composition. Lisa and Jeff travel as a performance duo with a program of ten works, teach workshops in residencies at colleges and the School for Designing a Society, and create works for other ensembles. They received two Choreography Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. They are members of the Network of Ensemble Theatres.
Indigo Frank is an aspiring worker and student. She dreams of travelling, however she relies on reading to take her places she can't afford to visit. She forgets her sorrows through dance, and is trying to lose her cynicism for the sake of her baby sister Veronica Love Lee.
Eckhard Gerdes (born 1959) is an American novelist and editor. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of six published novels: Projections [1986, Depth Charge Press] Ring in a River [1989, Depth Charge Press] Truly Fine Citizen [1992, Highlander Press] Cistern Tawdry [2002, Fugue State Press] Przewalski's Horse [2006, Red Hen Press] The Million-Year Centipede [2007, Raw Dog Screaming Press] Two more novels, Nin & Nan and The Unwelcome Guest, are due later this year from Six Gallery Press. Eckhard Gerdes is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, a series of books often consisting of ambitious Festschrifts on a single writer (e.g. John Barth, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe). He lives in Chicago; he has three children.
William Gillespie is the author of five books of fiction and poetry. He is host of the radio show Eclectic Seizure (spinelessbooks.com/eclecticseizure), and founder of the independent publishing house Spineless Books (spinelessbooks.com).
Local songwriter Paul Kotheimer will present a short alap in raga Puriya Kalyan, in his debut public performance on fretless acoustic guitar. Kotheimer will also perform his jazz piano and vocal composition, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," a setting of the poem by Craig Raine.
Aaron Miller recently completed his first novel, The Chad. He has written numerous short works of fiction, as well as stories and features for The News-Gazette, The Daily Illini, The Onion and the local zine Livrepool. He holds an MA in Multimedia from Southern Illinois University and an MFA in English from The University of California-Irvine, where he was an Arlene Cheng fellow and a recipient of the Glen Schaeffer prize for fiction. Nowadays, he spends his time building a new way to read and share books online. He lives in a questionably rural corner of Urbana, between I-74 and the Saline ditch.
the widening.
What is shame? A linen dissolved before it can be touched.
Trust? A vase of silk around some wet flowers.
Being entrusted to shame is worse than lotus feet-
rather than silk binding yards upon yards, numbness lacked.
Glass shard sidewalks upon washed feet.-Indigo Frank
Snark Hey, Duke! Ya haŋry? Nice h'yar!¡ Hya understand, my dye-wreckt glaß bead ladder-b'lower؟ Why: dunch ya luck at me‽ Đis is what I'm þinkiŋ: đat is Þoþ's whizbaŋ, ne dom in iOns or paternal co-Valens, oh Ingrate the Youŋer, đat chair beholden onto. I'm rightright‽ Et hastate cella hain't a jabot's snark, đe jaboticaba's taxysnatch? Beach a gabbro undo watch oþ talismen. Son, rađer đan half-mercy nary a doll or belle take a bed if y'ne wanton bespent on the morrowned or borrowned. Fucus o'đe beast ne the breast, chew rađer olive to recredit‽ So Þoþ eye will avenge. Đe glaß perils zwieback, et urine one. Wonton tuft blanching axe? iOn a sphere blear-eyed in þinkiŋ rađer Youŋer et Ingrate đan Gratian the Elder, spatially fjord ex-haŋry los(t) duces؟ Suckill đe grandiloquence ex đe mombster. Gruntl was leeky with Hanse et stufft her mombster wiþin the beet oven by the cliff. Hya can do ne verst, willlynilly!¡ Shad(owl) beower sewn؟ Þoþ will rover as đe dodder turnsheds.
-Eckhard Gerdes
Can you see us in your big blue car, driving backwards over mountains dressed up in our superhero pyjamas? What I'm proposing's just that kind of adventure, in which the two of us'll fold out some lawn chairs, first off, in the scrub grass out by Highway 12 and watch the orange sherbet sun melt down into the lake, which is quicksilver.
And we'll sit. And we'll think. And we'll know that we're small and it's gone in a blink. And when we've caught our breath we'll remember that we're writing a song. A song about everything. Not just a ditty the kids can sing when they hear it on the radio. It doesn't have to be long to be a song about everything, like when you showed me your grandma's ring and said, "Why not put that in a song?" And we're singing along.
And this is absolutely ordinary: The two of us, homeless, jobless, rich beyond our wildest fantasies--and we've got some fantasies, let me tell you--'Fact, nobody we know hasn't been paralyzed by their dreams, and their addictions, at one time or another in their lives. Still, none of us is a grown-up. "To hell with the Grown-Ups," you say, "and their atom-bashing, soul-smashing machines!"
And so we close our eyes, and we visualize that we're carving Utopia down to the size of a song. A song about everything. The only song that I wanna sing. That's why I'm writing this song. It's just a few minutes long. Still it's a song about everything. Remind yourself with a piece of string 'round your finger: Every thing is a song about everything.
And we're singing along to a wordless piece of jazz that we found, on a cassette, in the upholstery of the passenger's seat, and we like it that way. We've got intentions, insane interventions. We've got synergy, energy, chemistry, and serendipity now. Throwing twentydollarbills out the window to prove we're invincible, careless, fearless, irresponsibly free, and we're reckless and wild. There's a turtle in the middle of the road. There's, like, ten million shooting stars. We're spinning spinning spinning spinning spinning spinning. We're a dot on your screen. We're enfolded in green on the highest horizon, laughing loudest of all. People are staring. It's the Summer of Love. It's the End of the Century.
Look up. The moon is a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Are we here? Are we real? Is this only a dream in which we're writing a song--The Song About Everything? Or is this only a summer fling we'll remember in a Polaroid someday? But still, it couldn't be wrong, should either one of us even care. Your daughter sleeping so soundly, there--Sing here a lullaby song for me now, about Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything...
-Paul Kotheimer
Sponsored by Spineless Books.
spinelessbooks.com/urbanaburning
william's birthday party!