J. F. Clark conversation, Literary Festivals, prose, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text

From the Archive: Francine Prose

Writers Read looks back at hosting prolific author, Francine Prose, in March, 2014, in Concordia’s Henry F. Hall building. Attendees crowded into the Hall conference room for a reading of Prose’s novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (HarperTorch, 2014), and later, a Q&A session with the Brooklyn native. Lovers is a multivocal series of epistolaries that spotlight Parisian lives during the rise of German fascism, and the impacts fascism had on various Parisian cultures. The innermost thoughts of Prose’s complex characters entwine to give a voice and face to a separate, abstract character – the motley cityscape of pre-war Paris.

Francine Prose released a new novel this month, entitled, Mister Monkey: A Novel.

As reviewed in the New York Times Book Review: “Expertly constructed, Mister Monkey is so fresh and new it’s almost giddy, almost impudent with originality. Tender and artful, Prose’s 15th novel is a sophisticated satire, a gently spiritual celebration of life, a dark and thoroughly grim depiction of despair, a screwball comedy, a screwball tragedy. . . . It’s gorgeous and bright and fun and multi-faceted, carrying within it the geological force of the ages. It’s a book to be treasured. It’s that good. It’s that funny. It’s that sad. It’s that deceptive and deep.” (New York Times Book Review, front cover review)

Listen to a clip of Prose reading from Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932:

 

– Johnathan F. Clark

 

J. F. Clark poetry, prose, reading, sound bytes, student driven, text

Submission Call, Off the Page Festival: A Haunting

We have seen ghosts—in the flickering of light bulbs, of the body, and in the persisting reverberations of history. We hear them with our mouths and pens; we write them into memory. Who are they? Do they hear us? What do they know?

“A Haunting” will address the question of what it means to occupy an already occupied space—in the context of ghostly stories, and in narratives of indigeneity and immigration. Canadian-Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand compares her practice to the act of “unforgetting”—of re-engagement with legacies of colonial trauma as they have manifested themselves in the present. How do our bodies in the present act as the ghosts of the future? Are we haunted by our perpetuation of colonial legacies, our voices, our silences? Who and what is implicated?

With our feet on Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) territory, Off the Page invites writers and artists—with priority given to the voices of Black, indigenous, and/or writers of colour—to make words, sounds, songs that manifest their ghosts. Successful submissions may engage historical and generational traumas; they may explore or in fact embody resistance. This event sees writing as possessive, an engagement with identity, history, language, and secrets mediated through the body in performance. Submissions may include, but are not limited to, spoken word, dance, music, theatre. Collaborations between writers and other performance artists are especially encouraged.

The selected works will feature on November 4th, 2016 and lead audiences through a performance-based ghost tour that explores decolonization through haunting. Works must be received by 11:59 PM, Monday, October 24th through this form: https://goo.gl/forms/FoRLb7JuTl1yuu9m1