&NOW 2018

From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (On Contemporary Practice, 2017) is the first comprehensive anthology of essays regarding New Narrative writing and community practices by a younger generation of practitioners and scholars. As co-editors Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw write in their introduction, “We are not interested in offering an ‘authoritative’ canon of New Narrative work, nor are we interested in consolidating an official version of New Narrative’s history. Rather, we want to use this as an opportunity to foreground New Narrative as a movement that is still coming into focus, a more or less unstable object that doesn’t want to be ‘fixed,’ codified, or hardened into a limited & limiting list of names and works. In other words, while we remain committed to a set of past works that have been identified as ‘New Narrative,’ we are equally committed to maintaining New Narrative as a dynamic and ongoing project, one with consequences for our present writing.” Roomy in the collective vision that they manifest, the twenty-four contributions to From Our Hearts to Yours address the AIDS crisis, the politics of race, the structural impacts of neo-liberalism on urban space, and the movement across queer, straight and transgender subject positions.

This roundtable presentation and discussion proposes to take up these topics through short presentations and discussion, while asking Why New Narrative now? And, What are the stakes of New Narrative for our contemporary moment?

This event will include five of the book's contributing writers, plus the its two editors.