#workshop2016

Stage Management Workshop with Mr. Joel Ogdol, UEDC Alumnus from Batch 2007.

All the amazing readings happening during the week of the trans women writers’ workshop.

Genre Reassignment

Trans writers of NYC are invited to join Topside Press at GENRE REASSIGNMENT. Bring 4-6 minutes of prose, poetry, or whatever you call your current genre, 2 letters from therapists or psychologists (Master's degree or above) attesting to the veracity of your genre, notarized proof that you've been writing in your current genre for a period of not less than twelve (12) months, and certified original birth certificate indicating that you were assigned "writer" at birth.

Date: Tuesday, August 16

Location: Metropolitan

Time: 8PM

Butterfly Metaphor

Date: Wednesday, August 17

Location: BGSQD

Time: 7PM

Emerge, Synonym!

Date: Friday, August 19

Location: BGSQD

Time: 7PM

Foreshadow

Date: Saturday, August 20th

Location: Le Petit Versailles

Time: 7PM

Kay Gabriel is one of the 26 participants in this summer’s trans women writing workshop, please donate and share. Every little bit help and this is our final push for fundraising.

Donate to help make this workshop as amazing as possible for these 26 writers.

Usually I write cause I’ve got a polemic, right now I’ve got two.

I feel a little bit like that girl in A Chorus Line who sings “Dance: Ten, Looks: Three,” like that monologue she has? “I never heard about the Red Shoes, I never saw the Red Shoes, I don’t give a fuck about the Red Shoes!” Something like that I think expresses, albeit in an unkind way I don’t actually want to emulate, my position with respect to trans literature as it’s currently, frequently, constituted. What I mean is it’s cool if you started writing because you read Nevada, a book that’s very dear to me and has more than a few tricks up its sleeve, but that isn’t me. I want to talk about some of the reasons why I do write but first I want to talk about why I feel like I need to say so explicitly—why I need to cut against the presumption of a certain kind of shared canon.

The problem at hand is thus one of canonization: my concern isn’t with Nevada but rather its contemporary reception three years down the road from its pub date. It’s been burdened with a mythos it can’t sustain, no book can: the novel that kicked off the trans literary “renaissance” of the 2010’s, the novel that articulated and brought into being a broad-scale sophistication of trans literature by invoking trans readers as its audience. This cultural narrative is weighed down by a social counterpart, according to which reading Nevada makes you figure out you’re a girl. (Actually, this gesture arguably goes against the thrust of the novel, which turns on the failure of connection between Maria and James, really the older woman’s inability to invite her younger counterpart to entertain transition.) The problem here is, once more, not with Nevada but with the appropriateness of the historical narrative that posits this decade as the moment of a trans cultural movement. It’s certainly the case that trans people are producing more culture, and doing so via engagement with a particular, if sometimes limited, canon of art and texts. But what this situation really tracks is a certain form of massification enabled by whatever social media platforms of web 2.0, inheritors of prior forms of trans internet sociality on 4chan and LiveJournal.

More trans people making art is, like, definitely a good thing. But this quantitative expansion of trans cultural production also operates via the relatively new insitution of a canon of trans literature, an institution that is, in my understanding, gaining force as we speak. The problem is that the narrative of a renaissance in response to a relatively circumscribed and recent canon narrows the horizon for art and analysis. Treating the writers and artists of the current decade as a vanguard or renaissance renaissance misses the long and torturous history of trans art. This tradition can’t be reduced to anything so simple as the narrative whereby trans memoir for a cis audience yielded only recently its dominant position to trans literature for a trans audience: where does Alan L. Hart—who penned his work in the 20’s and 30’s!—fit in, for instance? Or how about—as Trish Salah discussed at length in her keynote address at the University of Toronto’s Trans Temporality conference in April 2016—the flourishing trans art and criticism of the 90’s and 00’s? (In which regard I can’t recommend highly enough Salah’s essay “Notes Towards Thinking Transsexual Institutional Poetics,” available in Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard [Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013]. The essay provides a neat account both of some of this cultural production—the Counting Past 2 film festival organized by Mirha-Soliel Ross at the University of Toronto from 1999-2001; the film Gendertroublemakers produced by Ross under the pseudonym Jeanne B. and her then-girlfriend Xanthra Philippa McKay—as well as the risks of the institutionalization of that cultural production: Salah argues that Counting Past 2 was more welcoming to sex workers, for instance, than many trans cultural institutions of the following decades.) Finally, we might say that the problem with a trans canon is its limitation in identity, even in a minoritarian position as the foundation for the art we make. I’m not saying should be jettisoned entirely; that position would simply rephrase the transphobic proscription against trans literature. But it’s fair to ask how the demand to see oneself reflected limits rather than expands cultural engagement, an understanding of history, and our own aesthetic commitments.

These reflections on canonization and our own cultural moment bring me to the Topside Summer Writing workshop. I’m looking forward to our week together, to benefitting from each of you as peers and mutual editors, and to engaging with your work in an intense and focused setting. The strengths of this kind of space are clear, e.g. that none of us will be placed in the awkward position of being a token, at least on the basis of gender; that we can take certain cultural and social reference points for granted and for others assume some level of shared experience; and also, maybe most importantly, that few of us have had access to this kind of dedicated formal workshop training, and I count myself in that number. So the workshop in its best capacity will expand access to peers, networks, editors, agents, and publishers. The fundraising effort is fundamentally about increasing access to this kind of educational environment. This is crucial. At the same time, I’d like to invite us to consider some of the narratives, implict or explicit, concerning the work we’re going to be doing: one of those narratives, that we are taking up the mantle of trans literature from the relatively more established writers and artists of the present decade, turns on a promise of canonization at this moment we have already described to ourselves as the point of renaissance or vanguard. What we are witnessing might equally be the intensification of institutionalizing pressures. These pressures are, to borrow a term from Lawrence Venuti, fundamentally axiological, related to the ascription of cultural, literary, and social value: their effects range from what kinds of books end up collected in libraries, hosted in archives, or taught in Trans Literature university seminars; to which and what kind of writers receive recognition and compensation for our work; to what kinds of texts are translated, into what languages and for what readerships; to what kinds of aesthetics and forms are validated by virtue of this canon. It’s true, important, and cool that you can just go out there and do shit, as merritt k tweeted recently. But that capacity, which as it concerns us here is effectively the capacity to be recognized in an alt lit scene and ultimately paid for the work you do there, depends inevitably on a transfer back and forth between social and cultural capital. My claim is that institutionalization basically raises the price of entry here—which is at heart the process that has taken place, over the past three decades, in US literature overall, in which it is now much more difficult to operate without the institutional validation of an MFA than it would have been in the 80’s, 90’s, or even 00’s.

My earlier claim about the limitations that canonization sets on aesthetics brings me to my second polemic, so let me repeat myself. The institutionalization of a certain kind of canon involves aesthetic prescriptions on the art that can belong to it. Viviane Namaste has written that “autobiography is the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak” (Namaste 2000, 273n3). Even after the heyday of the trans memoir, this prescription remains firmly in place if under a different guise. We might see it as an imperative to disclose the self or a pseudautobiographical version of it, an invitation for a woman to testify to her particular experience of bullshit, or the implication that this is if not the only then certainly the fastest way to get taken seriously as a writer within a certain scene. I get why we do this. It’s important for us to be able to show each other our scars, literal and figurative, to be met with understanding and sympathy, and to be able to express these in art, sometimes in a sophisticated way, sometimes totally raw. But there’s a difference between making space for the articulation of a life, however brutal its experiences, and setting or passing on an imperative to disclose the self via certain authenticating gestures. I resent this imperative as a structure that elicits disclosure to establish authenticity—and considering that the statuses in question often relate to trauma, sex work, addiction, mental health, and seropositivity, small wonder many of us choose to be discreet in some or other capacity—and suspect it as an implicit injunction for emerging artists to gain recognition and credibility. Like the periodization of trans art as being in the grips of a renaissance, this prescription narrows the possibility for aesthetics by closing off work that writes from outside a personal voice, from a position of abstraction, in an experimental register, or from—as Thel has persuasively discussed elsewhere—the wrong kind of subject position. What if we could entertain a more ambitious view of art? Call it arch, I’d probably like that.

But here I am engaged in negation when I haven’t even told you what’s in it for me, so let me be both more honest and more fun. Here’s my deal. I spent most of high school probably writing about the sex I wasn’t having, and none of it was even fic, which seems like a waste. Then I kept doing it because I got really excited by John Ashbery, I still do. He doesn’t tell my story but he doesn’t tell anyone’s, really, or I mean unless you’re actually a white gay ex-pat midcentury American writer and you have to beat O’Hara at the Yale Younger Poets Series, actually I forgot who won that. And then I read Bernadette Mayer’s poem “Sonnet We Are Ordinary C’Mere,” which made me gay. Consider:

Excerpts I love you from abstracts So what who cares songs of one and Experience of this is a case like Whole and I am not from there I write To you to say I know nothing as ever No rhyming no everything there is No proceeding no thinking you will be my What will you be? And that is the end

Except for the instance What are you wearing? Why aren’t you here? Where’d you put the window?

C’mere Tell me the rest of it