Words Fail, with Zeyn Joukhadar

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Editor's Note

Words Fail: On Opacity and Refusal
Saturday, January 24
9 AM – 12 PM PT/ 12 PM – 3 PM ET
Online

In the right hands, the experience of failing to understand can be as potent for a reader as having all the information. For racialized, queer, trans, disabled, and multilingual writers, illegibility, opacity, and untranslated text can be opportunities: they can be used to characterize alienation or estrangement, to destabilize and surprise, to refuse dominant narratives, or even to create the textual scaffolding required to hold emotions that would otherwise overwhelm a text—and, possibly, a writer. In this three-hour craft intensive suitable for prose writers working in fiction and nonfiction, we will discuss a range of interdisciplinary work and theory from Esmé Weijun Wang, Etel Adnan, Rashaad Newsome, Percival Everett, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and others as well as engage in generative exercises to explore the possibilities afforded by illegibility, opacity, and the refusal to explain.

SCHOLARSHIP

The scholarship for this intensive has already been awarded.

BIO: Zeyn Joukhadaris a Syrian American writer and the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night, which won the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Literature and the Stonewall Book Award, as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, and elsewhere and has been included in anthologies such as Both/And, This Arab Is Queer, Kink, and others. Joukhadar has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and translates from Italian to English.