Cronk, Olivia E.

Goldblatt, Amanda E.

Simokaitis, Christine A.

English

NEIU Digital Commons (Northeastern Illinois University)

Work Work, Part II: Does it matter that we’re women in the “Confluent Tides of Swarm”? This is a collaged performance of works by three English Department Creative Writing Faculty (Olivia Cronk, Amanda Goldblatt, Christine Simokaitis), all of whom are women and all of whom are contingent laborers and all of whom are acting as three fourths of a grassroots “Creative Writing Minor Committee” and all of whom are writers outside of the University and all of whom confront and exist within the “tides of swarm” that comprise work of all sorts. Teaching work overlaps with writing work overlaps with intellectual work overlaps with editing work overlaps with mentoring work overlaps with performance work overlaps with committee work overlaps with household work. Our title comes from Modernist poet Mina Loy, who mothered, wrote sculptural poetry, edited journals, sewed, designed lamps, and collected garbage. Our collective work is in the realms of teaching, editing, curating, writing fiction, writing poetry, writing nonfiction, mentoring, parenting, performing in literary settings. We’ve done this before, with another three of us, but now we three are all women, and we wonder what will happen as we choose our work to read/perform and how our text(s) will act in or against these “confluent tides of swarm.” We seek to showcase and reveal: what work--even though its subtle inflections might occasionally be trackable/be present in our other life--is invisible when we are “at work” at NEIU? We seek to make visible, in the way we so often demand of our creative writing students, our work work. 

(Work) Work, Part II: Does it matter that we’re (women) in the “Confluent Tides of Swarm”?

https://neiudc.neiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&amp;context=frcas

(Work) Work, Part II: Does it matter that we’re (women) in the “Confluent Tides of Swarm”?

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