Heads up to our friends in Utah: we're headed to your neighborhood this Thursday/Friday. We'll be in Salt Lake City for the National Humanities Conference, leading a workshop called "Building Collaboration for a Shifting Landscape: How a Documentary Film Project Connects Poetry with Displacement in Real Life." Because the NHC is focused on public scholarship, we'll be addressing that most humanities folks have had a crisis about some point: what do the arts mean in the real world, anyway? Using Hugo's Triggering Town concept, we'll argue that the arts can define and fill in the gaps in the real world, and that concrete problems can provide the parameters of urgent art. We'll also talk about how we've structured our team around the art we're making, and how that's modeled off of how Hugo House was a triggering town for Seattle's literary community. It's triggering towns all the way down.
The NHC is only open to registered attendees, but if you're in the area you can catch Frances the Thursday at a free Literary Ruckus hosted by the Ogden Inspired Writing Series. That'll be at 7 p.m. in Ogden's Good Company Theatre. Hope to see you there!