Nomadic Artist in Residence Program in The Philippines [January 2015: Feliz Lucia Molina & Ben Segal]

enero 8th, 2015 |  Published in News

The Unifiedfield is proud to introduce the next artists participating at The Unifiedfield Nomadic Artist-in-Residence Program in The Philippines: Feliz Lucia Molina and Ben Segal, a couple of writers who will stay with us in Olango island from the 15th Jan till the 30th Jan 2015 focusing on the writing of ´The Beginning´, a sequel to their poetry manuscript The Middle.

*On the 16th of January they will participate at a poetry reading with other fellow local writers and poets at Turtle´s Nest Book Cafe and Gallery in Cebu (special thanks to the host of this event Bambi Beltrán).

And on the 27th of January there will be a presentation and workshop conducted by our writers-in-residence at The University of The Philippines. The UP Cebu Creative Writing Program will be glad to facilitate the opportunity for students, local writers and literary enthusiasts to engage ideas with Feliz and Ben (special thanks to Prof. Shane Carreon).

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Feliz Lucia Molina

Feliz Lucia Molina lives in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in Writing & Literature at Naropa University, MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University, and is PhD ABD at European Graduate School in Switzerland. She is a poetry fellow of Kundiman and has been in residence at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Camac Centre d’Arte in France, Mustarinda House in Finland, and Haisyakkei Art Residency in Japan. She is the recipient of a Manuel G. Flores Prize (Philippine Artists and Writers Association, San Francisco), Weston Poetry Award (Brown University), Michael S. Harper Award for Poetry (Brown University), and a grant from The Giles Whiting Foundation.

She is the author of Undercastle (Magic Helicopter Press, 2013) and The Wes Letters (Outpost19, 2014). E-books include Hair Hearts Flip and Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things (Gauss PDF) and Roulette (Electronic Literature Organization, Volume 2). Her writing and interviews have been published in various magazines such as The Volta, The Conversant, Bomb Blog, The Fanzine, HTML GIANT, The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to Continent. Journal and Entropy Magazine. Her writing has been in exhibited at UCSD in La Jolla, California, and Conflictable Cube Gallery in Toride, Japan.

She has taught courses in poetry, film, literature, and creative writing at Brown University, UC San Diego (UCSD), Cal State San Marcos, and National University. She currently teaches Experimental Forms (Creative Writing) at UC San Diego.

+info: www.felizluciamolina.com

Ben Segal

Ben Segal lives in Los Angeles, California. He holds a BA Literary Theory, Fiction Writing, & Philosophy from Hampshire College, MFA in Literature from UC San Diego, and is PhD ABD at European Graduate School. He was a 2011 visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a contributor to Continent. Journal and Entropy Magazine.

He is the author of 78 Stories (No Record Press), The Wes Letters (Outpost19), and co-editor of the anthology The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Lit Pub Books). His chapbooks Science Fiction Pornography and Weather Days were published by Publishing Genius and Mud Luscious Press, respectively, and his fiction has been published by or is forthcoming from Tin House, Tarpaulin Sky, Gigantic, and Puerto del Sol, among others. His collaborative poetry book “The Middle” and collection of short fiction “Failure Projects” are forthcoming.

He has been a writer-in-residence at Mustarinda House in Finland and Haisyakkei Art Residency in Japan. At these residencies he completed two collaborative books with Feliz Lucia Molina, The Wes Letters and The Middle.

+info: www.houseofdrawingstoo.tumblr.com

Feliz Lucia and Ben’s Segal Residency Project:

“We would like to pursue a sequel to our poetry manuscript The Middle, which we completed at Haisyakkei Art Residency in Japan in 2013. The Middle is an attempt to write from the “center” or “middle” of a text. The process was achieved by developing a constraint and the result was a 96-page book, which is currently under consideration by publishers in the US. Selections are published and forthcoming in the following magazines & journals: Gendaishitecho, HTML GIANT, comma, poetry, Coconut, The Offending Adam, and Animal Shelter.

The prequel of The Middle is The Beginning, which we would like to write while in residence in Philippines. This time, we would use another literary constraint that would enable us write from the “beginning” of a text. We anticipate that much of the content of this work would find inspiration while traveling and living at the TUF Nomadic Artist-in-Residence Program. The result would be another 96-page book filled with “beginnings” based in Philippines and we would also like to collaborate with a Filipino poet for translation of selections of The Beginning. We would also send the final manuscript to publishers in the US.

The Middle, The Beginning, & The End are separate poetry books. It is important that these works are composed while in transit, traveling to spaces unknown and yet familiar to us, and guided by the spirit of wandering around new territories, languages, and geographies. We are curious to see where these literary works will take us. We are following the text as it will be written. We are literally approaching language as an fragmented and unified field.

It would be an honor to live and work on The Beginning in Philippines for a short while to see how the land and it’s citizens influences poetic lines of flight, sentences, and fragments that point toward a beginning. After this work, we plan to begin writing The End in another country”.

How The Unifiedfield residency will benefit our poetic practice:

“We are trying to write a book that is constantly beginning and that, thematically and conceptually, concerns itself with the idea of beginnings. This is very analogous to the way in which The Middle is written from its own middle while investigating the idea of the middle.

To compose The Beginning we will employ the following constraint: Like in The Middle, the book will consist of a series of 96 linked prose stanzas. Feliz will begin writing two stanzas that each could function as the beginning of a long poem. Then Ben will write two stanzas. One stanza will be written at the beginning of the manuscript. The second can be written in any position the writer chooses. Feliz will follow with a new beginning stanza and a new stanza placed at the position of her choice. We will continue to develop the book by trading off in this way until we reach 96 stanzas.

Every stanza will be conceived as a potential beginning at the same time as it will connect (thematically and/or linguistically) to its adjacent stanzas. The Beginning, like The Middle, is part of a triptych of serial prose-poems in which we juxtapose strict formal constraint with an open exploration of our place in the world through travel. A major component of our poetics in this project is the attempt to forge a singular textual identity (a voice) through our shared experiences and the shared form provided by the constraint. We are interested in the idea of merging subjectivities into a voice, especially given our status as a bi-national, multiracial, male and female collaborative team.

Our process produces work that addresses universal philosophical concerns (like subjectivity or the meaning of a beginning) through extreme attention to the specificity of the place in which we write, honoring and thinking through particularity of the people and landscapes we encounter.

Part of this commitment to specificity can be scene in our desire for our projects to exist as installations before they are published as books. We installed The Middle as a wall-sized text piece with accompanying drawings at the Conflictable Cube gallery in Toride, Japan.”