&Now 2015: Blast Radius

This panel will explore literary practices that revolve around changing sensory capacities and spatial resonances, and consider both the written text and literary practice as a materiality that concretely affects and changes the body and atmosphere. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard's canonical texts, the panel brings together five female writers who work within, around, and between different physical and emotional spaces and who question what it means to articulate via language the specific resonances and repetitions of a space, the unique architectures of the body, and the associated memories and narratives of a place. From meditations on distance, memory, devastation, and the body, to looking at how text operates like scent—as porous, pouring from one body into another, confirming our existence as shared bodies, the panel will delve into the relationship between flesh, sense, and landscape in the writing practice.