Literati is thrilled to welcome author Meghan O’Gieblyn who will sharing her new essay collection Interior States. She will joined for a discussion about her work by writer and Literati bookseller Young Eun Yook.
About Interior States:
A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere.
What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka “Flyover Country.” She writes of her “existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still,” and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture (“Hell”), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design (“Species of Origin”), the paradoxes of Christian Rock (“Sniffing Glue”), Henry Ford’s reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages (“Midwest World”), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity (“Ghosts in the Cloud”). Meghan O’Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California – which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.
MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN is a writer who was raised and still lives in the Midwest. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The Point, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Best American Essays 2017, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She received a B.A. in English from Loyola University, Chicago and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband.
Young Eun Yook is a singer/writer born in Korea and New Jersey. She is a recipient of the Lucille Clifton memorial scholarship from Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and The Paul Mariani Fellowship at The Glen Workshop. You can find her work in the anthology, Goodbye Mexico: Poems of Remembrance and elsewhere. Young Eun received her MFA from the University of Michigan where she won The Meader Family Award and the Se-AH Haiam Scholarship. She is a Kundiman fellow.
Irina Khutsieva is RC Artist in Residence.
The theater world in Russia is lively as ever, with a range of styles and interests represented by innovative and original work. But that world is also under significant threat as the Russian state puts increasing pressure on theaters and especially directors. The substance of the great art of theater is communication, respect, reverence, and an unflagging belief in humanity. Theater thrives on humanity the way flowers feed on soil, sun, and water. It in turn produces the conditions for humanity to grow. Theater produces and nurtures community and brings people together. In her lecture, Irina Khutsieva will expound on the relationship between theater, state and society in today’s Russia.
Irina Khutsieva is a stage director and acting instructor in Moscow, Russia. Trained at “GITIS,” the Russian Academy of Theatrical Art, she has more than 30 years of experience in Russian theater. She now directs her own studio theater, the Chamber Theater, Moscow, founded in 2004. Khutsieva has staged more than 50 plays in Russia, Germany, and the U.S. She has worked at one of Russia’s most distinguished theater academies – the Shchepkin Higher Theatre Institute, associated with the State Academic Maly Theatre of Russia. She also has extensive experience teaching college drama majors. A specialist and practitioner of the Stanislavski Method, she incorporates the principles and traditions of Russian psychological theater and has also developed her own staging and teaching methods. In recent years, she has directed a major gala performance shown on Russian national TV and has run workshops for professional actors in regional towns throughout Russia.
U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies Consciousness Next! Series presents Dr. Julia Mossbridge, whose recent book The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life (with Theresa Cheung) was published on October 16.
The presentation will feature examples of precognitive experiences—where an individual has knowledge about the future that s/he could not have obtained via “normal” channels—and will cover what makes a precognition something other than coincidence. Dr. Julia Mossbridge, who contends that receiving accurate information about future events is neither unscientific nor uncommon, will explain how the scientific evidence for precognition, combined with what we know about consciousness and the nature of time, makes precognition a reasonable phenomenon to investigate further through research and application.
Mossbridge is a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University in the Department of Psychology. Her book Transcendent Mind, published by the American Psychological Association in 2017, is one of the first academic books to examine paranormal experiences (nonlocal, physically transcendent dimensions of consciousness). Her research focus is precognition and its ramifications for creativity and healing, the time-consciousness relationship, and further capacities of consciousness that are coherent with an emergent, more integral conception of mind.
The U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies (PCCS) is directed by music professor and consciousness theorist Ed Sarath. It brings together colleagues from a wide range of fields to explore creativity and its underpinnings in consciousness and ramifications thereof for emergent models of education, spirituality, sustainability, social justice, and peace.
The PCCS Consciousness Next! series examines a range of phenomena and ideas that unite cutting-edge scientific research and age-old spiritual wisdom.
“Comics” is finally coming of age as an artistic and literary form. Now this once-maligned medium of expression is poised for new opportunities, thanks to a mutating media environment and a potential revolution in visual education. Author and comics artist Scott McCloud shines a light on these and other fascinating trends-and demonstrates why every visual choice we make matters-in a fast-moving cascade of images and ideas.
Scott McCloud is an American cartoonist and comics theorist. He is best known for his non-fiction books about comics, Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006). And he is the cartoonist/writer behind Zot (1984-1990) and The Sculptor (2015).
Seating is limited! Please register!
Join us for a reception with Scott McCloud at 6:00, prior to the 7:00 presentation in the Duderstadt Center Gallery.
Duderstadt Center, Video Studio, 2281 Bonisteel Blvd. Free. kreister@umich.edu http://bit.ly/comicswithscott
16 Hands is proud to host a book signing with one of our most popular local artists. David Zinn’s “Underfoot Menagerie” is a brand new assortment of the latest, greatest creatures from the not-quite-underground world of David Zinn! This full-color collection includes not only 134 photos of pareidolic & anamorphic sidewalk drawings, but also useful explanations of what those words mean. It’s a great gift for your inner child – or your outer ones, or just anyone who needs a little cheerful whimsy in their lives.
Join us for the Book Signing
Saturday, November 10th, 2018
from 11am – 4pm at 16 Hands
Located on the 2nd Floor of the Kerrytown Shops
https://www.facebook.com/events/166077314322733/
https://youtu.be/nW-MbHbLpBE
16 Hands, 407 N. 5th Ave, 2nd Floor. Free. 7. 16handsinfo@gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/events/166077314322733/
Lecture by U-M Afroamerican and African studies professor and former RC director Angela Dillard.
4 p.m., Rackham Amphitheatre (4th floor). Free. 615-6667.
Talk by WTOP radio (Washington, D.C.) national security correspondent J.J. Green.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
Talk by this CNN political commentator and bestselling writer, author of For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, winner of the American Library Association Stonewall Award for Nonfiction in 2013.
2 p.m., EMU Student Center Auditorium, 900 Oakwood, Ypsilanti. Free. 487-1849.
Literati is proud to be the bookseller at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Ann Arbor’s event with Kentaro Toyama at the Washtenaw Community College.
The Future of Work
Speaker’s Synopsis: Will artificial intelligence (AI) take away jobs or usher in a prosperous utopia? Will self-driving cars reduce our use of fossil fuels or accelerate emissions? What will a college degree be worth when knowledge work can be done by machine? This talk considers these and other questions through the lens of technology’s “Law of Amplification.” Paradoxically, what is needed most in a world of advanced technology is greater attention to human values.
Kentaro Toyama is W. K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, and author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. In previous lives, Kentaro taught at Ashesi University in Ghana and co-founded Microsoft Research India, where he did research on the application of information and communication technology to international development.
Yale law professor James Forman, Jr. reads from his Pulitzer-winning book examining the response by African American elected officials and citizens to the surge in crime and drug addiction that began in the 1970s.
4-5:30 p.m., 1010 Weiser Hall, 500 Church. Free. 615-8482.
