The Creative Writing Program’s BathHouse Events features writers and artists performing and discussing their works.

BathHouse Events showcases multi-media approaches to writing, improvised and interactive performances, discussions on the role of art in contemporary life, exhibits, collaborations, and innovative writing by groundbreaking established writers and exciting new artists. Recent guests have come from all over the United States as well as Kenya, Russia, Canada, and England. With four to six events per year and over 200 attendees per event, BathHouse Events is an integral part of EMU’s thriving undergraduate and graduate Creative Writing Programs. Student responses range from  “mind-blowing,” to “surprised, happily surprised, at how much more I understood by just listening and watching,” to “captivating—I forgot I was at school.”

Our name, “BathHouse,” connotes hybridity and history, recalling the 19th-century sanatoriums, bathhouses, and mineral water wells that flourished in Ypsilanti, Michigan at the turn of the century. The "foul smelling" waters of the Atlantis well—in the vicinity of the current Jones-Goddard dorm on the EMU campus—were bottled and shipped nationwide and touted as a cure for 33 disorders of the blood, until the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. It also shares its name with BathHouse the Creative Writing Program’s online journal of hybrid literary art and hypermedia, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinarity and innovation.

All events are free and open to the public.

To hear and see past readings and performances, see the Photos/Video section here.

For more information on all events, contact the EMU English Department at 734.487.4220 or email erandol1@emich.edu.

2011 - 2012

September 28 (readings by EMU faculty), Sponberg Theater, 5-6:45 p.m.
Laura Wetherington, Jill Darling and Sara Williams.

Nov. 10, Sponberg Theater, 6:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Taylor Brady

Feb. 7, 2012, Student Center Auditorium, 2:00pm
Dodie Bellamy

March 12, 2012, Dreamland Theatre, Time TBA
Konrad Steiner

Laura Wetherington is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate English Department and Cabrillo College. Her first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance, was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the 2010 National Poetry Series and is forthcoming in October from Fence Books. She has poems in or forthcoming from Otoliths, Verse, Eleven Eleven, Bombay Gin, Oxford Magazine and Just Magazine. Laura co-edits textsound.org with Anna Vitale. Here is an interview with Laura about Textsound.org http://portal.webdelsol.com/pds-interview-textsound.htm Other resources for Laura can be found on her website and blog. http://laurawetherington.com Jill Darling has an MFA in creative writing and is working on a Ph.D. dissertation on 20th century American experimental women writers such as Gertrude Stein, H.D., Lyn Hejinian and Claudia Rankine. She writes stories, poems, essays and other hybrid work. Her full-length online book is entitled, Solve For (BlazeVOX, 2008), which can be found online at: http://www.blazevox.org/ebk-jDarling%20REAL.pdf Her published chapbook is entitled, Begin With May: A Series of Moments (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Jill’s poems and creative essays have been published in: Upstairs at Duroc, The Bombay Gin, A, Phoebe, Aufgabe, Highway 14, Poets and Poems, Factorial, New Millennium Writings, Quarter After Eight, /NOR, 580 Split, Poetry in Motion and the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders. Here is a link to Jill’s review of Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise in How2 Journal: http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/current/index.html Other resources for Jill can be found on her blog: http://jdnotes.blogspot.com Sara Williams graduated from University of California, Santa Cruz in Creative Writing and Literature. She earned her MA in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University focusing on writing and art. A 2010 InsideOut Literary Arts Project Writer-in-Residence at Detroit’s Bagley Elementary, she currently teaches creative writing at EMU.

Taylor Brady is the author of Microclimates (Krupskaya, 2001), Yesterday's News (Factory School, 2005) and Occupational Treatment (Atelos, 2006). He is co- author with Rob Halpern of Snow Sensitive Skin (2nd edition published this year by Displaced Press. Recent work from a book-length project, In the Red, is collected in a chapbook, For I Know Not What I Did Last Summer (Trafficker Press). A second book-length project, “Maps, Jokes and Heavy Armor,” has appeared in segments in various small magazines. Taylor is the editor of a volume of collected essays by Los Angeles poet Will Alexander, Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. All of the titles listed above are available through Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org), with the exception of the chapbook, which can be ordered directly from the publisher at www.traffickerpress.com. An interview with Taylor by Brian Whitener can be found at: www.traffickerpress.com/pages/interviews/brian-whitener-interviews-taylor- brady.html An excerpt from "Maps, Jokes and Heavy Armor" in Jacket #40 can be found at: http://jacketmagazine.com/40/at-brady-taylor.shtml A review of Snow Sensitive Skin by Thom Donovan in Jacket #37 can be found at: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/r-hallpern-brady-rb-donovan.shtml A discussion of Yesterday's News in the context of an inquiry into "caption poetics" by Ariel Goldberg in Jacket #40 can be found at: http://jacketmagazine.com/40/ goldberg-photography.shtml A recording of reading in Oakland's Condensery series housed at A Voice Box can be found at: http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/a_voice_box/2011/02/taylor-brady-condensary-11511.html Here is a recording of a reading with Rob Halpern of Snow Sensitive Skin: http:/ /andrewkenower.typepad.com/ a_voice_box/2009/06/taylor-brady-and-rob- halpern-spd-open-house-41208.html His poem, “Outer Space Employment Agency,” can be found at: http://www.shampoopoetry.com/shampoothirtyeight/brady.htm Other works by Taylor can be found at: http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooTwentythree/brady.html A discussion about Microclimates can be found at: http://www.krupskayabooks.com/brady.htm Here is the text of an introduction for Taylor given by Rob Halpern: http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/263 A review of Occupational Treatment by Amber Dipietra can be found at: http:// galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com/ 2009/05/occupational-treatment-by-taylor- brady.html

Dodie Bellamy is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles. She is the author of the buddhist (Publication Studio, 2011) and Letters of Mina Harker (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); as well as a collection of fiction, memoirs and essays in Pink Steam (Suspect Thoughts, 2004); an epistolary collaboration on AIDS with the late Sam D’Allesandro entitled Real (Talisman House, 1994); and a cross-genre collection of pedagogical essays and fictions in Academonia (Krupskaya, 2006). Her book Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons, 2002), which is a radical feminist revision of the "cut-up" pioneered by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Poetry. She writes: “Cunt-Ups is a hermaphroditic salute to William Burroughs and Kathy Acker’s, “Is the cut-up a male form?” I've always considered it so -- needing the violence of a pair of scissors in order to reach nonlinearity. Oddly, even though I've spent up to four hours on each cunt-up, afterwards I cannot recognize them -- just like in sex, intense focus and then sensual amnesia.” Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, Out/Look, Nest, and the San Diego Reader as well as numerous literary journals and web sites. In January 2006, she curated an installation of Kathy Acker’s clothes for White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative art space. She lives in San Francisco with her partner Kevin Killian with whom she has edited over 150 issues of the literary/art zine, Mirage #4/Period(ical). Dodie's work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, the anthologies Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache, The Best American Erotica 2001, High Risk, The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets, A Poetics of Criticism, The New Fuck You, Primary Trouble and Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women. She is currently working on The Fourth Form, a multi-dimensional sex novel. A review of the buddhist can be found at: http://www.thefanzine.com/articles/books/518/ the_buddhist_by_dodie_bellamy_in_review Asked to write a paper on alternative forms of memoir for the 2007 Modern Language Association conference, Bellamy wrote, Barf Manifesto (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). A review of it can be found at: http://www.sfbg.com/2008/12/03/barf-manifesto Other resources on Dodie can be found on the following blogs: http://dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com/ http://newnarrative.blogspot.com/ http://www.altx.com/ebr/reviews/rev7/r7buu.htm

Konrad Steiner makes short non-narrative films in the American experimental tradition of unipersonal production, winning awards and screening in festivals worldwide. His primary interest is to use the moving image as a medium for compositions in language, sound and cinematography. http://canyoncinema.com/ catalog/filmmaker/?i=297 He served on the curatorial committee of San Francisco Cinematheque from 2003-2006. In 2007 he co-founded and produced (with Irina Leimbacher) the screening and performance series kino21.  The program calendar is archived at: http://www.kino21.org/ In the last five years, his work has increasingly involved live cinema collaborations with musicians (SF Bay Area composers Jon Raskin of ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Matt Ingalls of SFSound, new music ensemble and big band leader Graham Connah) and poets (Leslie Scalapino, Steve Benson, Brent Cunningham, Carla Harryman and Jen Hofer). In a longer term project since 2003, he has worked with dozens of writers from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Portland, Chicago, Buffalo and New York to produce shows dedicated to the renewed interest in adapting the tradition of live movie telling, an art which was brought to its apex in Japan, Korea and other East Asian nations during the silent film era. He will perform several of these "neo-benshi" pieces here at Bathhouse Events in March, in addition to screening single channel film works.   Article on live film narration from Camerawork journal:             http://www.kino21.org/PDF/ReverseEngineering.pdf Recent events include: o The New Talkies at Artists Television Access (SF)             http://www.atasite.org/calendar/archive/index-49036.html o The Cinema Cabaret at REDCAT (LA) co-curated with Jen Hofer             http://www.redcat.org/event/cinema-cabaret o Neo-benshi at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive             http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/late032610 o Form Free Form at the St Marks Poetry Project (NY)             http://tinyurl.com/78jybld o Chicago Poetry Center / Red Rover series             http://tinyurl.com/7njamo7