The &NOW Festival of New Writing is coming to UCSD

- Illustration by Adam Vieyra

The &NOW Festival of New Writing: Tomorrowland Forever will be held at UCSD Oct. 13 through 15. The roving, biannual conference attracts practitioners of the literary arts that you’re not likely to find on the shelves of your local barnes & Noble.

“Instead of writing that follows the usual conventions of realism,” explains Steve Tomasula in an email interview, “a lot of the writing at &NOW has more affinity with conceptual art, where the form, or idea driving it, is as important as the work itself—writing that likes to stretch the boundaries, cross-pollinate or form hybrids with other kinds of writing, art, music.”

Tomasula founded the conference at the University of Notre Dame in 2004. Since then, it’s hopped around the country, settling briefly at a college or university and moving on.

&NOW has all the usual accoutrements of an academic affair: presentation of papers, panel discussions and keynote addresses. As mainstream fiction hews toward the bottom line, writers who reject work designed for mass consumption can be found at institutions of higher learning.

But there’s another side to the conference that’s more whimsical and anarchic. The Tomorrowland Forever Book Fair promises the sale of “literary objects/experience” and a gallery show. Where most writers conferences try to lure attendees with the presence of agents of publishers, &NOW touts a performance booth called “Innovation in a Box.”

“The festival could be called having fun with language,” Tomasula says. “It has a lot more affinity with indie music or film than NY publishing.”

That’s what attracts underground writers like Melanie Page, adjunct professor at St. Mary’s College and Indiana University- South Bend.

“Other conferences tend to separate genres, gender, age/experience and nationality: Here’s a panel of/about Latin writers, here’s a panel of/about female writers, here’s a panel of/about people from MFA programs, etc.,” Page says via email. “I think the word mishmash is the best way to describe &NOW, in the sense that it collapses what other conferences do into forward-thinking panels where anything can happen.”

Page attended the last &NOW conference in Buffalo and looks forward to coming to San Diego in the fall where she can interact with like-minded writers.

“They’re living, breathing authors who will sit down and talk writing with you, volunteer to do a reading at your college, take you out for a drink,” she says.

For Page, it’s all about fostering a community of writers who are more interested in the future of literary arts than in trying to cash in on yesterday’s trends.

With the rise of electronic-publishing platforms, the ubiquity of text-generating smart phones and mainstream publishing models in crisis, the future of books has never been quite so tantalizing. &NOW is coming to show us what that future might look like.