An idea born from outreach

Proposal for Post New Narrative -- submitted April 12 for the &Now conference. This idea came from my experience in community outreach this semester and the work in Rob Halpern's class on cross genre from Prose Poetry to New Narrative.


Market pressures, fewer publishers and a declining appetite for confrontational and challenging works have pushed literary art to the margins of mainstream society. I also think we can embrace this.

We can use literary art to create a community in which it can be received, fostered and amplified. In this way, literary art remains alive and relevant.

I propose to compose and perform a cross-genre piece that will use new narrative techniques. as a means to create community. As a model, I am following the work of New Narrative writers Robert Glück and Bruce Boone who re-textualized the narrative of the gay experience in San Francisco in the 1980s. Their work speaks directly to creating and acknowledging a community of readers and participants within their story telling. They name names in their community and weave narratives around them. They also implicate and invite the reader into the community in various meta-text moves.

Modern literary artists must find new canvases that provide alternatives to market-driven channels. Our community should comprise part of our canvas. Literary art can do the work of creating community within its aesthetic. It can be instructive in how it can be experienced as well as sustained.

I am a graduate assistant in Eastern Michigan University’s MA creative writing program. My goal is to advance literary art in a society less and less hospitable for it. The commercial forces of publishing and media, and the corporate gospel of commodity culture are pushing art and artists aside. While commercial forces control their channels – we can intervene in real time and space.

We have started that process at Eastern Michigan where creative writing graduate students complete a required community outreach class. We spend at least three hours a week in the community developing a public art project such as a poetry workshop and competition or work with a nonprofit on an existing project. We attend a handful of graduate seminars during the semester responding to literary and artistic theory and case studies on community art projects. We keep a blog, give a multimedia presentation on our experience and write a final reflection paper. The idea is to encourage community building in the arts – to help develop our own creative practices within the context of building a “creative space” in the community.

Boone and Glück were concerned with redefining the gay narrative. They intervened in this narrative and reclaimed it. Their work synthesized intent and product. I think a similar way can be found here. Not only can we create communities in where art making is possible, but we can sustain these communities with the art itself.

My creative piece will be a hybrid form of critique and narrative that performs the work of community building around marginalized cultural production. The text will in both form and theme a manner in which artistic community can be built, advanced and embodied. My text will engage the reader both as an outsider and one who is implicated and invite the reader into the community.