Loading…
We look forward to seeing you this September at &Now: Points of Convergence!
Registration is now open. Please visit Ticketspice to reserve your pass and order boxed lunches.
Complete conference details, including travel, accessibility, and technology information, can be found at the conference website: andnowfestival.com.
General Inquiries: andnowfestival2019@gmail.com.
Registration questions: iasinfo@uw.edu.


Back To Schedule
Saturday, September 21 • 9:00am - 10:15am
Difficult Women: Acceptance and Accessibility

Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Feedback form is now closed.
Now that more women are publishing on experimental presses — and starting their own presses — the craft of experimental writing is becoming more diverse. In a world where difficult women are seldom cherished in the style of difficult men, how do we understand accessibility in experimental writing, where the prose often challenges the reader to the point of difficulty? Are women sometimes punished for difficulty and lack of accessibility in ways that their male counterparts are not?  How do accessibility and convergence coincide? Does accessibility or content have more urgency in a world of potential or essential convergence?  And if it’s more essential now than ever for women to tell their stories, where is the work most needed, and how will those most often sidelined be central to literary survival?

Female experimental authors at different stages of their careers, including professors and PhD students as well as emerging writers and writers with multiple books, discuss the changing aesthetics of experimental prose, craft, and gender diversity in publishing by exploring provocative subject matter as they follow in the footsteps of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes at a time when nontraditional publishers attempt to bring high-risk female literary works into the spotlight.

Speakers
avatar for Carol Guess

Carol Guess

Professor of English, Western Washington University
Carol Guess is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including Tinderbox Lawn, Darling Endangered, and Doll Studies: Forensics. A frequent collaborator who delights in crossing genre boundaries, Guess teaches Creative Writing and Queer Studies at Western Washington University... Read More →
EH

Evelyn Hampton

Evelyn Hampton is the author of two full-length story collections and a novella. She has an MA in Rhetoric from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, an MFA from Brown University, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Denver.
avatar for Aimee Parkison

Aimee Parkison

Associate Professor of Fiction Writing, Oklahoma State University
Aimee Parkison is the author of Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, which won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Parkison teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University and has published five books of fiction.
BP

Bailey Pittenger

Bailey Pittenger lives in Denver. She has an MA in English from Wake Forest University and an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame. She is a co-editor for pulpmouth magazine. She is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
AS

Aurelie Sheehan

Aurelie Sheehan is the author of two novels and three story collections. Her short fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly, Conjunctions, Fence, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. She teaches fiction at the University of Arizona.


Saturday September 21, 2019 9:00am - 10:15am PDT
DISC-162