&NOW is a biennial traveling festival/conference that celebrates writing as a contemporary art form: literary art as it is practiced today by authors who consciously treat their work as a process that is aware of its own literary and extra-literary history, that is as much about its form and materials, language, communities, and practice as it is about its subject matter.
&NOW brings together a wide range of writers who are interested in exploring the possibilities of form and the limits of language and other literary modes and who are interested in literature that emphasizes text as a medium, that investigates the essential emptiness of language, and that articulates an assumption that literary form both reflects and emerges from its location in time, forming multiple associations within competing matrices of power and value.
The &NOW Festival of New Writing remains invested in the idea that aesthetics are political, cultural, and interpersonal, articulating convictions about how the world works, including the literary world. Unlike much literature sold for mass appeal, this is a type of literature that by its nature tends to keep generic and even disciplinary definitions unresolved.
Sometimes called experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, freaky, hybrid, surfiction, inaccessible, radical, slip-stream, neo-baroque, hyperfeminine, afro-futurist, postmodern, self-conscious, paradiscursive, gimmicky, and most especially at this moment in history "innovative," literary art is writing (most often made of words), whose aesthetic often shares an ethos with contemporary concerns and modes of both resistance and exhaustion. This is a literature that often takes its own medium as part of its subject matter and sometimes works against the dominant/dominating assumptions about what literature is and does by employing a variety of linguistic games, slippages, puzzles, parodies, annihilations, needs, historical disjunctions, discursive juxtapositions, visuals, appropriations, spatial play, extra-diagetic codes, and other rhetorical strategies and constraints. Literary art may draw attention to modes of performance, distribution, and reception—from the visual coding of the book and page—to other aspects of literary staging, including the author's identity matrices, as this influences how (and if) a text is perceived and received. Contemporary literary art is as invested in its own medium, materials, practices, and engagement with others as it is engaged with the rest of the world.
By bringing together all kinds of writers who are interested in literature as a contemporary art form, &NOW fosters friendships, love affairs, arguments, new writing projects, collaborations, fabulousness, (sometimes all of these at once), the polar opposite of these previous terms, and of course, the means of its own undoing.
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History of &Now
The &Now Conference of Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts was founded in 2004 at the University of Notre Dame by Steve Tomasula. Since then, it's been hosted by Lake Forest College (2006), Chapman University (2008), the University at Buffalo [SUNY] (2009), and the University of California at San Diego .
The work of the conference has been to examine what role the innovative plays: how it functions with respect to more traditional expressions of writing; how it explores the limits of language and form; how meaningful its political expressions may be. In short, &Now participants tend to consider what, at base, the innovative can do—and whether it should do anything at all. As such, &Now writers tend to think across traditional rifts that suggest issues of theory and praxis are autonomous concepts. Instead, &Now participants are interested in collapsing that divide, in thinking through how praxis and theory are inherently related constructs, how creative thinking is nothing short of a critical practice, and how critical practices arise and rely on creative alignments. It might be said that &Now writers—in their differing modes—are self-consciously aware of their own production: the language that gives their work shape, the history that gives context to their work's form. &Now therefore strives to bring together a wide range of writers whose chief mode of inquiry is focused on the possibilities of form, the limits of language, and the future of artistic expression in its manifold representations.
Keynote speakers at past conferences have included some of the most respected writers in the field, including Lydia Davis, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, Debra Di Blasi, Percival Everett, Rikki Ducornet, Ishmael Reed, and William Gass, to mention a very few. The main population in attendance is made up of writers, performers and intermedia artists who could easily qualify as keynote speakers, alongside adventuresome undergraduate and graduate student writers and scholars doing research on contemporary literatures. So far, most participants visit from the US, Mexico, and Northern Europe.
Members of the Executive Board are currently Dimitri Anastasopoulos, Robert Archambeau Co-Director: &Now Books, Amina Cain, Rebecca Goodman, Christina Milletti, Martin Nakell, Davis Schneiderman Co-Director: &Now Books, Anna Joy Springer, and Steve Tomasula, Conference Founder.