The Gloucester Writers Center is a place for working writers in a working town
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Who’s A Class Traitor Now? On Being A Working-Class Writer or a Miscreant Artist in New England
April 29, 2020 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Let’s have a conversation together about the specifics of being a class traitor in New England. We can define it together. Public figures like Eileen Myles (Arlington, Massachusetts), Carl Andre (Quincy, MA), and Marsden Hartley (born in Maine; painted in Gloucester) will serve as touchstones. Together, we will break down how often (but not always!) the writer, the muse, the artist and the artist’s model, as categories, engage in both class erasure and class fetishization. Half-lumpen, semi-miscreant…how does the working class avant-garde, be they writer or artist- traverse the classed rift between her origins and her work?
Mary Walling Blackburn (born 1972) is a writer and artist, currently living in New England. Walling Blackburn’s work engages a wide spectrum of materials that probe and intensify the historic, ecological, and class-born brutalities of North American life. Forthcoming publications include “From the Gnome’s Genome to Trash DNA: Technologies of Ancestor Phantasy for a Final Generation” (e-flux journal). Other recent works include Quaestiones Perversas (Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, 2017), co-written with Beatriz E. Balanta; “Gina and the Stars” published by Tamawuj, an off-site publishing platform for the Sharjah Bienniel 13 and “Slowness,” a performance text in the sound-based web publication Ear│Wave│Event. Walling Blackburn’s writing has been featured in publications including Afterall, BOMB, Cabinet, e-flux journal, Grafter’s Quarterly, Grey Room, Pastelegram, and Women and Performance.