Convivialities

Convivialities is a collection of dialogues with contemporary writers and artists conducted over great distances and extended periods of time. These conversations with Dana Michel, Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes, Shanzhai Lyric, Cecily Nicholson, Raven Chacon, Divya Victor, Carlos Soto Romn, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Gail Scott, Kevin Davies, The Culture and Technology Discussion and Working Group, and Ryan C. Clarke focus on poetics, both the theory of poetry (its forms, histories, and critical categories) and the theory of poiesis (i.e., making). The dialogues vary. Some are chatty, others theoretical. They model how we might talk, think, and listen together, both to one another and to the sites and greater communities where we are situated. Convivialities investigates how the collected writers and artists craft their works, the contexts in which they make them, the intellectual and artistic histories that inspire their own ways of working, and the cultural issues that are at the core of their practices. And, perhaps most of all, it asks how they continue to create in a world ravaged by climate crisis, economic crisis, settler colonialism, and imperialism.