FRIDAY APRIL 09
2:00PM - 7:30PM PST
SATURDAY APRIL 10
10:00AM - 7:00PM PST
The 2021 Experiments in Dissonance Symposium on Interdisciplinary Writing focuses on student research and practice in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts and students' contributions to the expanding field as they relate to the Program's four concentrations: Image + Text, Documentary Strategies, Writing + Its Publics, and Writing + Performativity.
This year, the symposium is partnering with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, featuring a keynote lecture by Douglas Kearney.
Experiments in Dissonance is titled in homage to Nathaniel Mackey’s foundational text, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing from 1993. In this incredible book, Mackey is closely attentive to Black writers from the United States and the Caribbean such as Kamau Brathwaite, Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major, as well as poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, and studies how these writers “engage the discrepancy between what we often presume as 'norms' in creative practice, and the qualities of experience that such norms fail to accommodate.”
In this spirit of critical-creative engagement across disciplines, underscored by all the intricacies and demands of our times, the MFA Creative Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts encourages writers to similarly interrogate and hold the space between inherited formal and genre conventions and the pleasures of risk-taking artistic endeavor, and in doing so, we celebrate the dissonance that positively agitates the status quo and advances new, vibrant forms of being in the writing arts.