An exploration of film and animation adapted from literature, and literature whose chief inspiration is the screen. Where does adaptation meet inspiration? Curated by Tommy Pico of birdsong.
Things We Both Know (Not Our Real Names)
7 minutes | USA | 2012 | Digital Projection
Directed by Finn Paul and Roy Pérez
Using a poem of the same name as a launching point, imagined interior dialogs are bookended with intimate moments in underpants.
Ticking
13 minutes | UK | 2012 | Digital Projection
Directed by Chris New
Selected Single Sentence Animations by Electric Literature
Rontel by Sam Pink, animated by Brandon Ray
The Devil’s Treasure by Mary Gaitskill, animated by Luca Dipierro
Hello Everybody by A.M. Homes, animated by Gretta Johnson
Three by Marc Basch, animated by Jason Mitcham
Alternate: Tributaries by Ramona Ausubel, animated by Myles David Jewell
With a reading by poet Kathleen Ossip
Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War, which was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School. She was a founding editor of LIT, and she’s the poetry editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts,
Tommy “Teebs” Pico is the driving force behind birdsong, an antiracist/queer positive collective, small press, and zine that publishes art and writing. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and is working on his first collection of poetry. You can follow him at heyteebs.tumblr.com
Benjamin Samuel is the co-editor of Electric Literature—an independent publisher working to keep literature a vital part of popular culture—and its flagship magazine Recommended Reading. He has an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College, and his writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Huffington Post, The New York Daily News, The Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere, including Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine, a forthcoming anthology from Atticus Books. Find him at @benasam and @electriclit.
The Birdsong Collective and Micropress were founded in April 2008 with four goals in mind: to foster sustained collaboration among artists, musicians and writers in the form of an ongoing workshop; to continually encourage each other to produce creative work; to host free, public events where members can showcase works in progress; and to circulate members’ creative endeavors in a low-cost, easy to reproduce, and high-frequency format. Birdsong members share commitments to social movements of feminism, anti-racism, queer positivity, class-consciousness, and DIY cultural production. These commitments inform our creative work in many ways, ranging from the concrete to the theoretical to the experimental.
