What if you challenged three writers to produce a novel in a month?

OTR is pleased to be collaborating with Flux Factory, Inc., on Novel: A Living Installation, by hosting the web logs of three writers, Grant Bailie, Ranbir Sidhu, and Laurie Stone, who are writing novels at a most unusual residency project. - Eds.

The Show at Flux Factory, Inc., Queens, NYC
Click here for more details about Flux and Novel

Press clips about the show
The Village Voice (More >>)
The New York Times (Registration Required, More >>)
NYT Op-Ed (Registration Required, More >>)
New Yorker (More >>)

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

The Web Logs at OTR

The writers have agreed to post excerpts from their works-in-progress online, using web logs, throughout the month. This adds a real time dimension to the project by which interested parties can follow the writers' progress and process. OTR is pleased to be able to provide this portal to the writers' web logs.

The web logs will be updated irregularly, but probably at least once per week. Laurie Stone will be posting her own work directly from her habitat, while Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie will be passing their work on disk to Flux accomplices.

View Laurie Stone's web log (More >>)
View Ranbir Sidhu's web log (More >>)
View Grant Bailie's web log (More >>)

The Writers, Architects, and Artists

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.

Ms. Stone's Habitat Design by Salazar Davis Architects, founded in 1998 by Mauricio Salazar and Paul Davis, 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.

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.

Mr. Sidhu's Habitat Design by Tricky ink., 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.)

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.

Mr. Bailie's Habitat Design by Ian Montgomery, who 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.