Fillip

Means of Production: (In)consequential Thinking with Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross
December 12th, 2019

7:00 PM
Unit 17
2954 West 4th Avenue

EXERCISES IN (IN)CONSEQUENTIAL THINKING FOR OBSESSIVE WORRIERS, IRREDUCABLE ROMANTICS AND PRENATAL DREAMERS

We’re told that all art is vital. That art is vital, or else that it is absolutely futile. We’re told that the universe is shaped like a golf ball, or else that it is shaped more like a potato skin, or else, still, that maybe it just takes the form of a simple sheet of paper. A plain sheet of paper like the kind you shove into a printer, or use to blow your nose. The kind on which you write your best lyric poetry. Anyways, whatever the shape, we’re told that A plus B naturally results in C, and that each possible shape has its own unique set of outcomes, each uniquely advantageous and uniquely calamitous in some totally distinct way. And that despite the fact that everything must, one day, come to an end (of course it must!), it is possible to soften the existential anxieties of ever wondering about any of this with a little bit of preparation, a little bit of imagination and basic reasoning.

In these times, times which no longer excite description, certain human qualities have become increasingly pervasive: extreme hopefulness, idealism, and optimism on the one hand, and comic despair on the other. These could be called our civil coping mechanisms; they could also be called sly occasions for creative intervention. Into the irksome choreography of opposites and antagonists, the irony of arguments, the faux simplicity of single-sided shapes.

We’ll look at examples of disasters and optimistic interventions in visual art and literature. Write some sentences, then some paragraphs. No, we will not make drawings. We will not make music. We will not make sculptures. This is a writing workshop. Come ready to write with a notebook and a pen. Bring a few lines describing your best- and worst-case scenarios.

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer based in Vancouver. She holds a BFA in Studio Art from Simon Fraser University (2012) and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph (2018). Her fiction, poetry, essays and art criticism have appeared in BOMB, Mousse, Fence, C Magazine, Kijiji and elsewhere, and her chapbooks include Mayonnaise and Drawings on Yellow Paper. She publishes books by emerging artists and writers under the small press Blank Cheque, and is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.