“I read Kapil because her use of language and her take on the universe is unlike any other. She brings, not only an entanglement of cultural experiences, but a commitment to presence and witness, to seeing everything that passes before her.”

—Sina Queyras, Lemon Hound

TALK: “What is Ban? [A short talk on narrative and diaspora]” with respondents Gail Scott, Ashok Mathur, and Alex Leslie
February 15, 2:30pm
Capilano University Library room 322
Co-sponsored by the Liberal Studies BA
Free and open to the public

READING: TCR narrative issue launch
February 15, 8:00pm (doors 7:30)
1965 Main Street at E. 4th
$5 at door

WORKSHOP: “Writing the Hybrid”
February 16, 12-5pm
See description and registration details below. Limited spaces available.

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches writing and thinking at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, as well as Goddard College’s low-residency MFA. She teaches across genres, with a particular focus on experimental prose writing. Recent classes at Naropa have engaged architecture, animal studies, performance art, and memory as ways to approach or navigate contemporary narrative and poetics. Kapil has written four full-length, cross-genre works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press 2009), and Schizophrene (Nightboat Books 2011). Currently, she is writing a novel of the race riot, BAN. An on-going experimental pedagogy and reflection can be found at her blog: “Was Gertrude Stein a Punjabi?”: http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com.

Workshop Description: Writing the Hybrid
Bhanu Kapil
We will open the hybrid through our own bodies, and through philosophies of incipience from the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Brian Massumi. How pre-body vibrates with future body: a way to think about the hybrid’s mutations, becoming and being-there-at-all that approaches form from the “inside out.” The workshop will begin with a somatic experiment derived from animal studies, embryology, and the energetics of the spine. Through meditation, visualization, and micro-movement, we will investigate the pre-space or flow (cellular) of our bodies: then place: our writing: there. Writing before it is writing. Bring a sense of what it is you want to write about: something you have not written yet and can’t unfold on the page. That is all. Bring a notebook. Writing will be followed by small group work on sensation and encounter: translating our physical findings to the page.

Workshop Registration:
Date: Saturday, February 16, 12-5pm
Cost: $50
Location: Vancouver, BC
Registration:
1) Email TCR by Feb 12 to reserve a spot: tcr@capilanou.ca
2) Then send a cheque made out to The Capilano Review to the address below. Cheque should be received by Feb 14 to confirm spot—OR can bring $50 cash to the TCR table at our upcoming narrative issue launch: February 15, 8:00pm, 1965 Main Street.

The Capilano Review
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver, BC
V7J 3H5

TCR would like to thank the Canada Council’s Visiting Foreign Artists program for their support of Kapil’s visit.