Tag Archive for 'events'

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Cindy St. John and Julie Strand

Jan ’10
15
7:00 pm

Dancing girl press poets  Cindy St. John (People in Love Will Read this Book Differently) and Julie Strand (The Mae West Defense) will read from their work.

Cindy St. John lives in Austin, TX.   Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Southern Review, Broadsidedpress.org and The Florida Review.

Julie Strand lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is the Education Coordinator at Woodland Pattern Book Center. Her poetry has appeared in Wicked Alice, Arsenic Lobster, WOMB Poetry, Rock Heals (A Narrow House Weekly) and others.

The dancing girl press chapbook series was founded in 2004 to publish and promote the work of women poets and artists through chapbooks, journals, book arts projects, and anthologies. Spawned by the online zine wicked alice, dgp seeks to publish work that bridges the gaps between schools and poetic techniques–work that’s fresh, innovative, and exciting. The press has published over 50 titles by emerging women poets in delectable handmade editions.

For more info: http://www.dancinggirlpress.com

The ACT-I-VATE Experience and Salon With Dean Haspiel!

Nov ’09
13
7:00 pm

Dean Haspiel, co-founder of the premier online comic art collective, ACT-I-VATE.com, will be hosting a multimedia salon to celebrate the release of The ACT-I-VATE Primer,  16 original stories by some of the most highly respected visual storytellers working today. This will also be the Chicago debut of The ACT-I-VATE Experience, a 30-minute documentary by filmmakers Seth Kushner and Carlos Molina about how ACT-I-VATE is leading the webcomics revolution. Dean will be projecting panels from his contribution to the Primer,  “Bring Me The Heart Of Billy Dogma,” while discussing the journey these stories have taken from print to web and back again. Joining Dean will be Chicago-area multimedia writer Tim Hall, whose groundbreaking text-comics for ACT-I-VATE have already sparked spirited discussion and debate in the comics community about visual writing and pictureless comics.

The Act-i-vate Primer boasts original art and stories by Joe Infurnari, Roger Langridge, Mike Dawson, Nick Bertozzi, Tim Hamilton, Dean Haspiel, Simon Fraser, Molly Crabapple & John Leavitt, Mike Cavallaro, Pedro Camargo, Jim Dougan & Hyeondo Park, Ulises Farinas, Michel Fiffe, Maurice Fontenot, Jennifer Hayden, and Leland Purvis.

“ACT-I-VATE makes comics better.”        –Warren Ellis [from the ACT-I-VATE PRIMER foreword]

For more info: http://www.act-i-vate.com

Stephen Elliott and Joe Meno

Nov ’09
1
3:00 pm

Don’t miss Stephen Elliott Reading From The Adderall Diaries, with  Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps.

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina’s former lover, and Hans’s former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of.

At the time of Sturgeon’s confession, Stephen Elliot is paralyzed by writer’s block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed in San Francisco’s underground S&M scene. What kind of person, he wonders, confesses to a murder he likely did not commit? One answer is, perhaps, a man like Elliott’s own father.

So begins a riveting journey through a neon landscape of false confessions, self-medication, and torturous sex. Set against the backdrop of a nation at war, in the declining years of the Silicon Valley tech boom and the dawn of Paris Hilton’s celebrity, The Adderall Diaries is at once a gripping account of a murder trial and a scorching investigation of the self. Tough, tender, and unflinchingly honest, it is the breakout book by one of the most daring writers of his generation. For more info: www.stephenelliott.com

Reading with Stephen Elliott is local author Joe Meno.

“Meno’s distinctively imaginative and compassionate fiction is forged at the intersection of ordinariness and astonishment. In this tragicomic family drama, his fifth novel, [The Great Perhaps], he creates a topsy-turvy household. Jonathan and Madeline Casper, timid and insular, are scientists at the University of Chicago. He is devoted to the elusive giant squid and prone to seizures at the sight of a cloud; she is conducting a bizarrely disastrous lab experiment involving pigeons. Amelia, the older of their two teen daughters, is suspended for writing inflammatory editorials in the school paper, while Thisbe has taken to ardent prayer. With anxiety running high over the Iraq War and the 2004 election, Madeline takes off in pursuit of a strange man-shaped cloud; Jonathan hides in a child’s fort of sheet-draped furniture; their valiant, neglected daughters run amok, and Henry, Jonathan’s ailing father, escapes from the nursing home. As Meno masterfully, and meaningfully, conflates the fantastic with the everyday, he reaches back to Henry’s broken childhood and a stint in a World War II internment camp for German Americans. Tender, funny, spooky, and gripping, Meno’s novel encompasses a subtle yet devastating critique of war; sensitively traces the ripple effect of a dark legacy of nebulousness, guilt, and fear; and evokes both heartache and wonder.” –Booklist

Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnenzimmer Reads From Formal Additive Programs

Oct ’09
29
7:00 pm

This is not another portfolio book by an artist… or at least it’s trying not to be. Formal Additive Programs, Nadine Nakanishi’s first release is an attempt to provide insight into a daily art practice and process, while focusing on the commonalities of figurative and abstract images. Formal Additive Programs offers 18 simple instructions to help the reader expand upon a singular idea, a practice that aids Nakanishi in her art-making everyday.

This book release party will also feature Dakota Brown and Nick Butcher. Brown, who wrote the poetic preface to the book, will be reading from his work. Butcher (www.nickbutcher.net) is to follow with a musical set, interpreting the 18 steps of instruction that make up the books content. The audience is encouraged to draw along with the instructions and the music.

Can a set of instructions be so beautifully imbricated as to occlude their own identity as instructions? Can rules for drawing be expressed in a language that eschews the visual, a language more attuned to the patterns of acoustic space and kinesthetics? Nadine Nakanishi’s Formal Additive Programs answers these questions with an enthusiastic, quiet, unpretentious ‘yes’. The title indicates that these are programs for constructing patterns. With these programs, Nakanishi demonstrates how suggestions, rules, axioms, can allow emergent creative processes to thrive. The familiar paradox is that creativity can perhaps best be conceptualized in terms of limits. The particular can find its horizon in the infinite, as long as contingency is allowed to breathe life into the project. Formal Additive Programs builds bit-by-bit, but this is something very different from deductively-arranged building blocks.  These aren’t building blocks at all. To keep things aural: these are more like building tones.— Dave Park, Associate Professor of Communication, Lake Forest College

Formal Additive Programs
Format, 7” x 9.75”,
Cover and Interior, 2-pms colors / Interior, 28 pages
Hand-printed silk-screen dust jacket – First printing, limited Edition 250

For more info about the author go to: www.yoneko.net, or www.sonnenzimmer.com

Thumbs + Knuckles and The Dreaded Biscuits Zine Launch and Reading

Oct ’09
22
7:30 pm

What do you get when you mix 36 graphic designers, 34 writers, and 3 illustrators? The result is a double Zine featuring emerging writers and designers from Columbia College Chicago. Columbia faculty members Craig Jobson, Patrick Hogan, Jotham Burrello, Rob Duffer, and John Upchurch, the intrepid Production Manager, supervised the production of a 68-pp full color “Zine Columbia — Summer 2009,” aka “The Dreaded Biscuits / Thumbs and Knuckles”.

The Zine’s on-line presence can be found at:

http://adweb.colum.edu/~thumbsandknuckles/

http://adweb.colum.edu/~thedreadedbiscuits/

Please come celebrate the eighth Zine produced since 2003, and the first one printed offset. Featured readings and merriment will ensue between the book stacks of Quimby’s.