&Now 2019 Conference

How can exploring grief and trauma through interdisciplinary forms of writing and art initiate healing? Four panelists discuss how they’ve created hybrid, cross-genre works to encounter pain and distress.  

Reinetta Vaneendenburg and Quintan Ana Wikswo will explore how interdisciplinary, hybrid form, collaborative, and other modalities of innovative writing surrounding the aftermath of conflict or endangerment impact literary process, practice, professional relationships, healing, reparations, and interrupt and trouble hegemonies of reality and narrative at conflict sites. In "Hybrid Writing by Front-line Responders: Invoking and Evoking Complex Experiences," Vaneendenburg and Wikswo will discuss how they’ve used innovative writing, cross genre and structure to document their physical/emotional trauma and experiences in military, geo-political, eco-contested, disaster sites, territories, and locations. They will lead a conversation on multiple modalities of experiential and experimental response possibilities for participants seeking practical as well as ethics, trauma informed, and healing centered strategy around writing within conflict and conscience sites will ensure an interactive session strong on unlikely allies and generative differences.

Death, both grand and small, is constant, filling our days with unspoken bereavement: over the shift in energy around us, a sudden absence of light, a misinterpretation of identity, a trigger of past trauma, a best friend’s overdose. As our nation scrambles in division, our losses multiply and we continuously focus on remediation and the prevention of further suffering. But, do we ever allow ourselves to be present with our grief, to love and understand it as an aspect of ourselves that will move with us into the future? Tracy Jane Gregory and Corbin Louis discuss their survival of addiction, mental illness, and trauma in "A Re(image)ing of Grief." They will examine the potential of hybrid art to clarify, redefine, and heal such cultural grief. In presenting a conversational lecture and highlighting their works, Suburban Kid Eulogy by Louis and Bondage by Gregory, they will investigate the ability of cross-genre art to engage and resolve manifestations of grief.