Thank you to everyone for attending our debut: we had a wonderful conversation with Sha and Brenda, and we look forward to seeing how these dialogues continue here in Pittsburgh.

Sha was kind enough to record some of the event: if you missed his talk, you can catch it via his site at SoundCloud. Sha has several other short talks posted, so feel free to take the opportunity to poke around.

Below are the texts of the the introductions for Sha and Brenda, as well as a few pictures from the night. Stay posted for updates on our upcoming March event, details TBA!

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Sha LaBare wants to remind us that the future is already happening. We are carrying it around inside of our practices, speech, arts, and ways of imagining. There is therefore no predicting it, only enacting. And Sha asks us to look at how we make this future: what are the grounds, the assumptions, the fundamentals that we stand upon? Simply attuning ourselves to such questions can take us into strange territories, opening wormholes in the human condition. This is scary work — dangerous, even. But the result could lead us to the most beautiful thing we have yet to encounter. Sha invites us to live more ethically, more at home within the strange wildness of life, more generously in relationship with the things we can never imagine understanding.  (SJL)

Brenda Iijima is one of the bravest, most versatile and attuned poets that I know. She writes, edits, curates, collaborates, listens, makes, and reads–all voraciously and with intense generosity. And across all of her projects, Brenda is interested in the way we can rejuvenate and transform ourselves through language; by getting down into the fibers and ligatures of word work, she reminds us that that there is always an infinitely more complicated and diverse world that we are part of and creating. Interestingly, as Brenda ushers us towards these rich future possibilities, her roadmaps are in fact vestigial: she turns to the practices and relationships that we’ve buried or become blinded to, but — with careful, charged interest — can discover again. Her writing asks us to get to the root of what we are and how we be.  (SJL)