SNS | 07-29-23
Featuring: Anhvu Buchanan & Kimberly Reyes
Theme: Erasure
Hosted By: Hollie Hardy
Saturday July 29, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)
Online Event
Free Admission
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The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX
Join Event on Zoom
Meeting ID: 857 5010 5806
Passcode: 360894
Author Bios
Anhvu Buchanan is the author of The Disordered (sunnyoutside press), Backhanded Compliments & Other Ways to Say I Love You (Works on Paper Press) and just releasedfrom ELJ Editions, his latest book: The Peeling of a Name. He was the recipient of a James D. Phelan Award and an Individual Artists Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. He currently teaches in San Francisco and can be found online at anhvubuchanan.com.
Buy his latest book here: https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781942004578/the-peeling-of-a-name.aspx
Kimberly Reyes is the author of the recently released poetry collection vanishing point (Omnidawn 2023), and the collections Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn 2019) and Warning Coloration (dancing girl press 2018). Her nonfiction book of essays Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills 2019) won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award. Her work is featured in various international outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Time.com, The Best American Poetry blog, poets.org, and many more. Reyes has also received numerous fellowships including from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Program, CantoMundo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshops, and other places. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and she writes about identity, ecology, sexuality, and Cillian Murphy.
Learn more and buy her books here: kimberlyreyes.online
The SNS Write-In Returns this Month!
LET’S WRITE TOGETHER!
Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, July 22, for the SNS Write-In, a generative online workshop.
July Writing Prompt:
To erase is to remove, delete, scratch out, black out, white out, exterminate, nullify, silence, or forget.
Erasure can be literal, as a coffee stain, delete key, snow storm, remodel, drought, forest fire, or murder—the genocide of Indigenous Americans—or it can be less tangible—the erasure of Black history from curriculum, the banning of books, gentrification, the silencing of truth through lies or omissions, the loss of agency or identity through denial of a name, language, media coverage, cultural practice, etc.
This month at SNS, you are invited to write into the theme of “Erasure.”
SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:
Consider the personal, things you have erased (accidentally or deliberately), denied yourself, ignored, pushed down, forgotten, gotten over, filtered out; or things that have been taken from you—a name, a pronoun, a history, a family, a home, an opportunity, a right. How have you (been) silenced, discredited, ignored, or oppressed? What have you blocked out or silently witnessed? How can you work to undo erasure by writing/righting the narrative?
Or
Write about partial erasure. Think palimpsest. Think layers. Appropriation, graffiti. That which persists and remains. The past peeking through the weeds of the present like abandoned trolley tracks.
Or
Try erasure as form:
Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of “found poetry” wherein the writer takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains. Erasure poetry may be used as a means of collaboration, creating a new text from an old one and thereby starting a dialogue between the two, or as a means of confrontation, a challenge to a pre-existing text.
Or
Consider erasure within your own poem. Add caesura, white space or [ ] or strikethroughs to emphasize what is missing, what’s been left out or erased.
Or
Something else! As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement.
FOR INSPIRATION:
Pilgrim poem by Megan Snyder-Camp
Dear— poem by Donika Kelly
Erasure in Three Acts: An Essay by Muriel Leung
Erasure of Girlhood The Slow Down 5-minute podcast, with poem by Sarah María Medina.
Or read it yourself here. (Please Note: There’s a trigger warning for this poem).
Four erasure poems by Katrina Roberts
Newspaper blackout poems & process videos by Austin Kleon
Declarations erasure poem read by the author, former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith
The Mannequin short fiction + erasure prompt by Sarah Barkat
Lessons in Erasure micro fiction by Jack Barker-Clark
The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure essay by Solmaz Sharif
Redeclarations.com interactive project by Halim Madi, in which participants create digital erasures from the Declaration of Independence.