DEPT. OF INSPIRATION
WRITERS AT WORK
Issue of 2005-05-23
Posted 2005-05-16

A room of one’s own, in which to write: it’s an old and chronically romanticized idea—the solitary space, with an ashtray, an Olivetti, the morning light just so. Each writer has his own preferences and fetishes, of course. For Proust, it was walls insulated with cork, to keep sound out. For Bellow, a tilted drafting table, so that he could write standing up. Cheever looked out a window facing the woods; Hawthorne turned his back on one. Joseph Heller worked atop a shag carpet. The ideal persists, in a wireless age. Amy Tan surrounds herself with furniture from Imperial China.

In Queens, recently, an artists’ collective called Flux Factory commissioned architects to design three writers’ “habitats”—human terrariums, essentially, into which writers would move for a month’s time, as part of a “living installation” called “novel.” Three subjects relocated to the boxlike spaces about a week ago, and on June 4th they are expected to emerge with finished books. The Flux designers did not seek advice from other working writers about what makes a productive or inspirational space. Their guiding principle seems to have been: Just think what Solzhenitsyn could have written had his prison cell been properly feng-shui’d.

The week before the writers moved in, Flux’s president, Morgan Meis, gave a tour of the unfinished boxes. “This one is pretty much a hobbit hole,” he said of the first box, which was constructed mostly from found materials, bounty from a month’s worth of “dumpster diving” by its designer, Ian Montgomery. Meis sat down and made a serious face, impersonating a writer. “So you sit here and concentrate, and you look out,” he said, gesturing toward a dirt trough, where fast-growing grasses were to be planted, “to mark the passage of time.” He added, “The roof will grow, too. The space will be growing through the month, as you write.”

Nearby, an architect named Paul Davis was tinkering with the space his firm, Salazar Davis, designed for the writer Laurie Stone, a wood box with translucent walls and a ramp through the middle. He had read some of Stone’s work for inspiration. “A theme of her writing seems to be herself and her thought processes—how she evaluates herself in relation to external circumstances,” he explained. “She said that when she finds herself in scary circumstances, that incites her to make beautiful things. So we wanted to take a friendly little happy cube and unsettle her in a provoking way.” For a retreat, he built her an alcove for yoga.

The third habitat, for Ranbir Sidhu, is the only one that prominently features books as décor. “We’re working with units of storage to deal with writing as product,” Mitch McEwen, one of the designers, said. “It’s a literal writing factory.” The product on display included John O’Hara’s “Gibbsville, Pa.”; a travel guide to Budapest; the Grolier Encyclopedia, Volume IX (Red-Str); “Kant’s Life and Thought.”

One of the most time-honored elements of writing-room mythology is the preference for a particular writing instrument. As Jill Krementz demonstrated in “The Writer’s Desk,” William Styron requires No. 2 pencils and yellow legal pads, and John Ashbery likes a Depression-era Royal manual typewriter. Jonathan Franzen still uses MS-DOS software on an old I.B.M. clone he found in the classifieds for a hundred and fifty dollars. At Flux, each writer was issued a Mac laptop. The rules forbid the participants to watch television or leave their boxes for more than ninety minutes a day, but, perhaps unwisely, they encourage a more contemporary method of wasting time: blogging. By day three, yoga was evidently not enough to keep Laurie Stone from going stir-crazy. She wandered out of her box and began cataloguing the items in the Flux Factory kitchen for her blog: “A 15-roll sack of Bounty paper towels. A five-pound plastic jug of honey with sticky cap. A 32-ounce bottle of red hot sauce. A two-quart vat of Kikkoman soy sauce. A crate of oranges. . . .” A novel it was not.

A trip to Flux during visiting hours last week suggested that the writing process may be the same wherever you do it. Grant Bailie, who now occupies the hobbit hole, was sitting, Indian style, in front of the window, smoking. Ranbir Sidhu was sitting at his desk, sipping from a large coffee mug and staring at a mostly blank screen. Laurie Stone didn’t respond to a couple of knocks on her wall. She appeared to be napping.

—Ben McGrath

The New Yorker Unlocks Secret to Blogging

The New Yorker s always enterprising Ben McGrath made the harrowing, God-awful trek to Queens last week to visit Flux Factory, an alleged artists collective…

read the rest of the post..

Young novelists in love!

We were glad to see that we weren’t the only ones amused by the Times’s editorial about Flux Factory’s “Novel” installation. One almost wonders whether this bit of preaching is an editorial joke on readers, since it is hard to imagine such a complete lack of playfulness. The project sounds intriguing, and we hope to go see what architects dreamed up as concentration pods and what the subjects manage to produce…

click here to read the rest of the post.

Flux Takes ‘Novel’ Approach To Art
“Novel” makes writers and their lives part of a new exhibit at Flux Factory.
By Molly Langmuir

For the past three months, Ian Montgomery has been rummaging through dumpsters, collecting wood. “It’s all found wood,” he said as he walked through the small living space he was constructing in Flux Factory’s gallery. It was one of three such spaces furiously being built last Friday that are part of a living installation at Long Island City’s Flux Factory.

On Saturday, May 7, three writers were enclosed in the habitats and for the next 30 days they will live in them, emerging at the end having completed a novel. Every day the writers are allowed to leave for an hour and a half, but each time they do they have to sign out a card with the time they leave, the time they return, and the reason for leaving. At the end of the 30 days, all the time cards will be displayed on the walls of the gallery.

Each night, the writers will eat together, with the meals provided by guest chefs and local restaurants. Once a week, they will be allowed to use their cell phones.

“We’re regulating them,” said Kerry Downey, who is curating the show with Morgan Meis, “But the idea is that with a couple regulations they can focus.”

Montgomery’s domicile is the only one with a window to the outside world and the view is the very large and decidedly unorganic-looking New York Presbyterian Church across the street. Inside the space, a found-wood staircase curved up to the second level, where there was a Spartan looking bed and a large bell hanging next to it. By the window were shelves with books and a bottle of Aberlour whiskey.

Montgomery said he was leaving the whiskey for the writer.
Down on the first level, there was a desk, a small fridge, and some grasses growing under a bright light. “The plant life will mark the time,” Montgomery said, and then pointed up to the wooden slats that made up the roof, “The roof is also growing.” The floor will be covered in dirt to catalogue the areas of movement.

Once the writers and artist/architects had been chosen, the group had to decide amongst themselves who they would be paired with. As it turned out, Montgomery got Grant Bailie, Salazar Davis Architects got Laurie Stone, and Tricky ink. got Ranbir Sidhu. Each living space is entirely different. Salazar Davis’s, which was being worked on by Paul Davis last Friday, was going to have white wall-to-wall carpeting, translucent plastic shingles and a zebra stripe on the outside. Davis said, when finished, it would look something like “a glowing chartreuse zebra-striped box.”

Each week, there will be public readings on Saturdays, and viewers can come observe the writers at work Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Stone, the writer paired with Salazar Davis, had expressed that she was nervous about being observed. In response, Davis explained that her space was set up in such a way that Stone would be able to see the visitor better than the visitor could see her. “She called herself our rat,” Davis said. “We’ve made the visitor her rat.”

Tricky ink’s installation, which will house Ranbir Sidhu, has walls made of shipping boxes. Their domicile was described by Downey as more process oriented than the other two. “It’s about compartmentalization,” Downey said, “and about how the writer accumulates ideas.”

Flux Factory is also very process oriented. Asked what would happen if the writer’s didn’t produce a novel after the 30 days, Downey said that there was only so much Flux Factory could do, “We’re doing this because we believe in the process.”

For directions and specific hours go to www.fluxfactory.org.

Times Teaches, Can’t Do

The New York Times editorial page never shirks the Big Questions, and today it pronounces on a Long Island City reality-art thingamee at the Flux Factory called Novel: A Living Installation. The deal is a trio of aspiring fiction hands gget locked into isolated cells for 25 days until they emerge with completed novel manuscripts. And the Times being the Times, no artsy publicity stunt is too trivial to pontificate upon: part of the meaning of making a novel is commanding the time to do so and owning the workings of imagination, however they pace themselves.

read the rest of this post…

Writing Inside the Box
Published: May 10, 2005

Over at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City, three fiction writers have agreed to isolate themselves in small writing cells for a project called “Novel: A Living Installation.” Each has promised to finish a novel by June 4. That is 25 days away. Odds are that these will either be teeny-tiny novels or very bad ones.

The writers will not be on public display, except for limited viewing hours. Still, the whole thing calls to mind the great Monty Python sketch in which Thomas Hardy writes a novel in front of a crowd in Dorchester. The spectators go wild and the commentators comment, yet Hardy reposes in the tranquillity of a writer’s concentration, sure of his own purpose.

The writers at the Flux Factory have their own purposes, too, quite apart from the larger purpose of the installation. That is the puzzle of this piece of art. The more seriously the writers take the proper business of making their own work, the more the installation trivializes the nature of writing. It’s certainly possible to write in public. It’s even possible to write on a tight deadline in public and to do so when you know people are watching you. But part of the meaning of making a novel is commanding the time to do so and owning the workings of imagination, however they pace themselves.

The originator of this project said the idea had come to him when he had imagined locking himself into a closed space and finishing his dissertation on Walter Benjamin. That would have been a good idea. The air would have been thick with self-reference. But one has to hope that in a week or two, these writers will burst from their cubicles, repudiate their deadlines and return to the world in which literature is really made.

Back to the article in question for this editorial

Or read the Gawker.com post on this editorial

Would You, Could You in a Box? (Write, That Is.)
By JULIE SALAMON
Published: May 9, 2005, NY Times, Art Section

The novelist Laurie Stone understood that her desire to go into the box was a symptom of something, she just didn’t know of what. Ms. Stone, 58, will have a month to consider her decision from the confines of a sleek-angled structure, about 140 square feet, whose walls resemble shoji screens made not of rice paper but of translucent cellular plastic panels. Her temporary home was built just for her, in a converted factory in Queens.

On Saturday night, in front of 200 onlookers, Ms. Stone and two other novelists, ensconced in neighboring pods, embarked on a variation of the spectator sports made familiar by reality television. Ms. Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie are the participants in “Novel: A Living Installation” at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City. The goal is for each to complete a novel by June 4. The purpose is to consider the private and public aspects of writing.

No cameras will record this voyeuristic experiment, though visitors can peep occasionally (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m). The potential for public humiliation comes not from the perils of constant surveillance, but from the more familiar writers’ problem of failing to meet a deadline. Make that deadlines. They will give weekly readings of their works in progress on Saturdays at 8 p.m., and take part in two public discussions scheduled for this coming Sunday and May 22.

What the novelists write is not as important as how they live while they are writing. Each habitat was designed by builders who, like the writers, entered a competition. The writers can emerge for only 90 minutes a day and must record on time cards the reason for their absence (laundry, bathroom, snacks). Each evening they will gather together to eat a meal cooked by a chef from a local restaurant.

For the Flux Factory curators, the exhibition (or exhibitionism) is an extension of an experiment their group has been conducting for a decade. Seventeen of the mostly youthful Fluxers, as they call themselves, live in the Flux Factory, a 7,500-square-foot space, which has the trappings of a college commune. (”Novel” is in the 2,000 square feet set aside for exhibitions.) The Fluxers’ mission is to constantly consider the relationship between life and art, a process oiled by grant money.

The idea for “Novel” came to Morgan Meis, 32, a founder and the president of Flux Factory, as he was trying to finish his dissertation on the Marxist philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, and his theories of experience. “I said I should do a project called ‘Dissertation’ where I lock myself in a box” and just finish the thing, Mr. Meis said.

Instead, he staged this show, together with Kerry Downey, 25, a fellow Fluxer. They put out notices on various Web sites, at graduate schools and architecture firms. Two hundred writers and a dozen designers applied.

With no money at stake and little prospect for celebrity, why did the writers, all past the age of youthful impulse, decide to participate?

Ms. Stone, a trim, lively woman with stylish short hair, was drawn by the isolation. “The idea of escaping from TV, all media, was very appealing to me,” she said, in an interview before the experiment began. She came with the essentials: books, makeup and linens. Her main worry was that she would not adjust well to living in such close proximity with strangers. “I’m afraid I won’t be flexible,” she said, “I won’t be happy. I’ll be rigid and terrified.”

The writing and reading aspect did not alarm her. “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked, and laughed. “I’ll be terrible and give a bad reading. I’m extremely experienced with that.”

Mr. Bailie, 43, had different motives. He received some fine reviews for his first novel, “Cloud 8,” published in 2002, but earns a living as a security supervisor for an office complex and mall in downtown Cleveland. Mr. Bailie, who paid for his plane ticket to New York, also has a wife and two children from a previous marriage, so his writing time is limited.

His space resembled a cross between a rustic hut and a primitive ship’s cabin (but with electrical outlets). Its designer, Ian Montgomery, 24, is a carpenter and fine arts graduate of Bard College who has lived at the Flux Factory for eight months. In keeping with the Fluxers’ experimental gestalt, Mr. Montgomery, with a mop of curly hair and a beard, wore a casual black dress over his jeans. Barefoot as he navigated his creation, he explained why he had decided to include a “grow table,” a board covered with dirt sprouting wheat germ, clover and rye.

“I’m really interested in the potential energy that can be exerted in a short amount of time by plants and writers,” he said.

The third writer, Mr. Sidhu, 38, moved to California from India when he was 13, and has lived in New York for seven years. He was looking for freelance work when he saw an ad for the project on Craig’s List. “This seemed so much more interesting,” he said. “The business models are consolidating and making publishing narrower and narrower, whereas this breaks open that model through play, refocusing on what’s really important, which is the writing itself.”

Mr. Sidhu will be living in an airy space defined by various boxes and movable plexiglass walls designed by two graduate architecture students at Columbia University, Mitch McEwen and Kwi-Hae Kim.

Paul Davis, one of the architects who designed Ms. Stone’s abode, had been up all night adding the finishing touches and was still attaching panels with a staple gun an hour before Ms. Stone secluded herself.

Mr. Davis, 43, has sleek good looks that seem more suited to a martini ad than a warehouse art-happening. His firm, Salazar Davis, mostly does fancy residential and retail jobs, with clients that include AgnËs B. and Air America radio.

He said he loved his break from the functional: “It was fun to remove ourselves from the practical business of selling something and be set loose to explore the ramifications of what it is to inhabit a place.”

PEN & PEN
By JEREMY OLSHAN

WRITERS often do their best work behind bars.

Cervantes penned most of “Don Quixote” in the pen. Dostoevsky found inspiration in incarceration.

In the tradition of those literary inmates, three novelists locked themselves in a Queens art gallery Saturday, with a self-imposed sentence of 30 days and 75,000 words — give or take a few paragraphs off for good behavior.

Grant Bailie (left), Laurie Stone and Ranbir Sidhu are part of a novel project
in which they are locked in a
Queens art gallery with a deadline.
Photo: J. Scott Wynn

Grant Bailie, Laurie Stone and Ranbir Sidhu must complete an entire novel each, while being confined to individual “habitats” — a k a artsy cells — in the Flux Factory in Long Island City.

They’ll have no contact from the outside world — except gallery visitors who come to gawk at these scribes in solitary.

“We’re exploring what it is to be a writer,” says Morgan Meis, curator of the exhibit, titled “Novel.”

“On the one hand it’s an intense, solitary and personal experience,” he says. “On the other, it’s always a public expression in which the writers reveal more about themselves than they intend.”

On Saturday night, the three prisoners — chosen from 200 applicants — arrived at the writers’ cellblock with laptops and luggage. Each habitat, designed by a different architect, was intended to fit the idiosyncrasies of its occupant.

Bailie, 43, is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s, and his first novel, “Cloud 8,” was published in 2003. He unpacked clothes, books and a Buddha statue.

With its dirt roof panels, which will soon sprout a garden, his quarters look like the shelter Frank Lloyd Wright might build were he stranded on a desert island.

“This sure beats my regular job, where I have to sneak in my writing when no one is looking,” he says. “I don’t know how interesting I am going to be to watch, though. I’m not a very good typer — I guess that could be amusing.”

The hovel-ists are fed by a retinue of rotating chefs. Each can clock out of their confines for 90 minutes a day, and they’ll be released for weekly Saturday night readings.

Stone, 58, is a longtime writer for the Village Voice. She’s often been a writer-in-residence, but this is her first time in captivity.

“I’m not too worried about the self-restriction,” she says. “With some candles and perfume, and a lot of books, I am going to make this my own little house.”

Paul Davis, one of the designers of Stone’s habitat, says after reading her work and meeting with her, he knew she needed a great deal of privacy.

“The orange entrance ramp seems like it leads to an inviting doorway,” he says. “When, in fact, visitors actually end up sliding down the other side without ever seeing Laurie.”

Sidhu, 38, a novelist and archaeologist, said it may be hard to write without his usual break — watching television makeover shows.

His cell is made from airport packing crates, with white Lucite wall panels that can be raised and lowered on pulleys.

“This is completely different from the normal way I write,” says Sidhu, who brought crossword puzzles for procrastination. “I’m not going to have much room for my usual late-night pacing around.”

Each writer has some idea of what they’ll work on during their Houdini-meets-Hemingway adventure, but hadn’t written a word before Saturday.

“I don’t think it will be a novel exactly,” Stone says. “But it will be something.”

Realizan Big Brother literario

EFE
El Universal online
Nueva York, EU
Lunes 09 de mayo de 2005

14:31 Un proyecto literario a medio a camino entre la exhibición y el exhibicionismo ha llevado a tres escritores a encerrarse en minúsculos cubículos durante un mes, con la intención de escribir una novela.

La idea, puesta en marcha por el colectivo artístico Flux Factory, de Long Island (Nueva York), se inició el pasado fin de semana con el ingreso de los tres escritores en sus pequeños hábitats contiguos, de los que solo podrán salir durante 90 minutos al día, según explica en su página web.

En presencia de unos 200 espectadores, los novelistas Laurie Stone, de 58 años, Ranbir Sidhu, de 38, y Grant Bailie, de 43, iniciaron el proyecto llamado “Novela: Una Instalación Viva”, que se desarrollará hasta el próximo 4 de junio.

Aunque no hay cámaras, la idea, según sus promotores, es crear una especie de Big Brother donde el público podrá acudir diariamente a las instalaciones para seguir la vida y experiencias de los participantes.

Si bien el objetivo final es escribir una obra, la propuesta del colectivo artístico va más allá, pues pretende analizar las implicaciones públicas y privadas que conlleva el ejercicio de la escritura.

Más que la humillación de no contar con intimidad o de vivir en cubículos de unos 13 metros cuadrados, los escritores se enfrentan a la peor de las pesadillas para un autor: no tener la inspiración suficiente para crear una novela antes de la fecha de entrega.

Para mayor presión, los artistas han sido citados todos los sábados, a las ocho de la noche, para leer los fragmentos escritos de sus novelas, así como para participar en dos debates públicos, programados para el 15 y el 22 de mayo.

Cada uno de los hábitats ha sido diseñado por un arquitecto que, como los propios escritores, han sido elegidos por concurso.

Con esta iniciativa, los responsables de Flux Factory han querido profundizar en una experiencia que ellos mismos conocen, pues cerca de una veintena de los artistas del grupo conviven en una especie de comuna, en un espacio de unos 700 metros cuadrados.

Este colectivo artístico se dedica, a través de todos sus proyectos, a analizar la relación y la dependencia entre la vida y el arte.

La moda de “Gran Hermano” llega a la literatura
EFE
9 de mayo de 2005

Un proyecto literario ha llevado a tres escritores de EEUU a encerrarse en minúsculos cubículos durante un mes con la intención de escribir una novela. Aunque no hay cámaras, la idea es crear una especie de “Gran Hermano” donde el público podrá acudir diariamente a las instalaciones para seguir la vida y experiencias de los participantes.

El proyecto, puesto en marcha por el colectivo artístico Flux Factory, de Long Island (Nueva York), se inició el pasado fin de semana con la entrada de los tres escritores en sus pequeños hábitats contiguos, de los que solo podrán salir durante noventa minutos al día.

En presencia de unos doscientos espectadores, los novelistas Laurie Stone, de 58 años; Ranbir Sidhu, de 38, y Grant Bailie, de 43, iniciaron el proyecto llamado Novela: Una instalación viva, que se desarrollará hasta el próximo 4 de junio.

Si bien el objetivo final es escribir una obra, la propuesta del colectivo artístico va más allá, pues pretende analizar las implicaciones públicas y privadas que conlleva el ejercicio de la escritura.

Escribir una novela en un mes

Más que la humillación de no contar con intimidad o de vivir en cubículos de unos trece metros cuadrados, los escritores se enfrentan con la peor de las pesadillas para un autor: no tener la inspiración suficiente para crear una novela antes de la fecha de entrega.

Para mayor presión, los artistas han sido citados todos los sábados, a las ocho de la noche, para leer los fragmentos escritos de sus novelas, así como para participar en dos debates públicos, programados para el 15 y el 22 de mayo.

Cada uno de los hábitats ha sido diseñado por un arquitecto que, como los propios escritores, han sido elegidos por concurso.

Virtual Reality: Gawking at Writers in Unnatural Habitats
by Ed Park

Georges Simenon could write a novel in 11 days; according to a since debunked legend, he once finished an entire book in a day, enclosed David Blaine–like in a clear room while the public watched. Beginning May 7, Flux Factory’s “living installation” Novel puts three authors—Grant Bailie, Ranbir Sidhu, and former Voicean Laurie Stone—in three different enclosed environments for 30 days. Visitors can watch them scribble or stew from 3 to 5 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends. On June 4, the writers come out of the chrysalis having completed a brand-new novel. (Then they’re welcome to participate in my installation, which is a five-year artwork called Revision.) Designed by a team of architect-artists and guest curated by Bee Season author Myla Goldberg, Novel features weekly Saturday-evening readings of the works in progress. A May 15 panel discussion (featuring Goldberg and journalist-fictioneer Tom Bissell) and a May 22 forum with the space designers will further elaborate the issues involved: creativity, solitude, concentration, how to go to the bathroom. Here’s hoping the author-subjects can stick to their stories: Didn’t Pascal posit that all human misery comes from the inability of man to sit still in a room?

Architect-artist Ian Montgomery
photo: Cody Montgomery

At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, three novelists were enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architect/artists. For thirty days, this was their reality. Nightly, they dined together (courtesy of a revolving cast of chefs). Public readings of the novels-in-progress were held every Saturday evening, with viewing hours throughout the week. On June 4th, each writer emerged from his or her habitat, having completed a novel.

The three habitats were constructed during months of collaboration between the writers and architects. This process was designed to address complex issues of design, desire, and space (or lack thereof). NOVEL took the isolation of the writer to a rather extreme conclusion in order to investigate what would be produced under those conditions. But, just as writing is solitary, it is also a performance. The writer, sitting alone, is always conscious of an audience, whoever that may be. NOVEL combined the private and public aspects of writing in a striking way. The goal for NOVEL was to facilitate the production of quality fiction and explore the act of writing itself as a performance, installation, and kinetic, living sculpture.

The experiment lasted from May 7th to June 4th, 2005.

Click on the image above to view pictures from the show (it will take a minute to load, please bear with us). Click on the construction image to view pictures from the installation process. Click on Tubby to view the outtakes.

Artistic Personnel For Novel

Writers

Laurie Stone is author of Starting with Serge (Doubleday, 1990), Close to the Bone (Grove, 1997), and Laughing in the Dark (Ecco, 1997). A longtime writer for the Village Voice (1975-99), she has been theater critic for The Nation, critic-at-large on NPR’s Fresh Air, and a regular writer for Ms., New York Woman, and Viva. She has received grants from NYFA, The Kittredge Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Poets & Writers, and in 1996 she won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle.

Ranbir Sidhu is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize in fiction and his work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Zyzzyva, Other Voices, Press and a Houghton-Mifflin college reader among other publications. Trained as an archaeologist, he has worked in California, Nevada, Israel and France. One of his finds, a 3,000-year-old woman, made cover skeleton of Biblical Archaeology Review. Most recently, he worked for the United Nations in Sri Lanka as a communications consultant.

Grant Bailie is a Cleveland-based writer and artist. A contributor to McSweeney’s and Zygote in My Coffee among others, Grant’s novel Cloud 8 was published in 2003 by Ig Publishing. His work was selected for honors by the Writer’s & Poets League of Greater Cleveland and he had been a featured speaker and reader at book events in the US and Canada. His paintings have been exhibited at William Busta Gallery and Joyce Porcelli Gallery.

Read his exclusive before-the-box interview with Night Train’s Tom Jackson here.

Architect-Artists

Salazar Davis Architects, founded in 1998 by Mauricio Salazar and Paul Davis, is a full-service Manhattan-based architecture and design firm. Salazar Davis entered the Queens Museum of Art Design Competition in 2001 and was chosen as one of five finalists from among several hundred entrants. Now in design phases on projects ranging from a Williamsburg restaurant to NYC broadcast studios for a national talk radio network, the office is also active in California.

Tricky ink. is a collaboration between Kwi-Hae Kim and Mitch McEwen, two artist/designers pursuing a Masters of Architecture degree at Columbia. Kwi-Hae entered architecture through sculpture and set-design at RISD where she received a BFA in Sculpture. Mitch entered architecture through political economy and painting at Harvard. Tricky ink. focuses on materials, performance, and temporality as design problems. Recently, they co-produced a hoax real estate development company, complete with website and project plans for a temporary skyscraper. (See www.newamericansprawl.org)

Ian Montgomery received a B.A. in Studio Arts at Bard College in 2003 and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Lacoste School of the Arts in 2002. Trained as a Carpenter and furniture maker, his current work combines found materials with organic patterns and processes. NOVEL will be his first NYC gallery show.

Guest Artists

Myla Goldberg: Guest Curator for Writers
Myla Goldberg’s first novel, Bee Season, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000, and the winner of the Ribalow Prize and the Borders New Voices Prize. It is being made into a major motion picture and has been translated into nine languages. Myla has written book reviews for the New York Times and Bookforum. Her short stories have appeared in Harper’s, failbetter, and McSweeney’s. She is most recently the author of Time’s Magpie, a book of essays about Prague. Her next novel, Wickett’s Remedy, will be published by Doubleday in October 2005.

Alexander Briseño & 306090: Architectural Consultant
Alexander Briseño holds a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Michigan and runs Sohbr Studio, and architectural/design firm. He has also attended the Swiss program of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, located in Vico Morcote. Alex is Series Editor and Publisher of 306090>Architecture Journal, was a designer for Dimensions Volume 15 and has held instructor positions in theory/writing and drawing at the University of Michigan and Pratt Institute. He recently completed travels as a Booth Fellow throughout northern Italy. Alex has worked for several award-winning architecture firms throughout the United States and has thus gained a wide range of project experience. He is a registered Architect in the State of New York, a member of the American Institute of Architects.

Guest lecturers

Tom Bissell’s criticism, fiction, and journalism have appeared in Harper’s, Men’s Journal, Esquire, McSweeney’s, The Boston Review, and Best American Travel Writing 2003, among other publications. He is the author of Chasing the Sea (Pantheon, 2003) and is currently writing a book about Vietnam scheduled for publication by Pantheon in 2006.

J.M. Tyree was a Keasbey Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: Best of the McSweeney’s Humor Category (Knopf), New England Review, Discover, and The Believer.

Flux Factory and the NOVEL crew would like to express ultimate gratitude to the following
for their culinary support:

H&D Bagels, El Shater, Carri Skoczek, Melanie Cohn, Miwa Koizumi,
Gianna Chachere, Cafe Bar, La Vuelta, Ariyoshi, Cavo Cup and Lounge, Sage cooking,
Dazie’s, La Vuelta, Dan Spicer, Jen Sotham, Lil Bistro 33, Diane Campbell, Ten 63

This program was supported in part by Material for the Arts, Tekserve, and public funds from
the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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