Department of English

• Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Class of 1942 Garden

RSVP to wh@writing.upenn.edu or 215-746-POEM

XFIC is an experimental nonfiction journal for writers who want to test the boundaries of longform. The type of stories we most want to publish are ones where the writer is in pursuit of immediate experience. Reality as it is unfolding before your eyes. Then, in workshop, we will take the raw material of experience and transform it into compelling narrative through radical and experimental techniques. Xfic seeks writers seeking new ways to discover meaning, who seek to be more daring, more performative, more pretentious, more excellent, more virtuosic, funnier and weirder, and, most of all, who seek to directly engage reality and invent it at the same time (and who are capable of inhabiting such paradoxical spaces).

JAY KIRK has been dismantling and recreating the art of literary recreation over the past seven years in a project called AVOID THE DAY (to be published by Harper Perennial in 2019), a book that evolved out of his years as an award-winning longform journalist for magazines like Harper’s, GQ, the Chicago Reader, and The New York Times Magazine. He received a Whiting Fellowship for AVOID THE DAY in 2017, and an earlier excerpt of the book appeared in Harper’s Magazine as “Bartok’s Monster.” While reinventing his own path as a writer, Jay has been cataloging his theories which he will be using to generate questions for the writers who join XFic 145. How do we make more radical choices? How is reality supposed to appear? How is narrative like a controlled crash? How can we generate new kinds of meaning? How can the nonfiction writer invent their own world and then, once invented, perform in that reality? www.xfic.org

Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program

KWH Calendar: writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/1018.php#10

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