Conferences in large chain hotels – academic or otherwise – are generally not a good thing involving half-hearted attempts at critical reasoning and wet scrambled eggs self-served from silver trays. &NOW, which will be held in Buffalo October 14-17, on the other hand, is a very good thing (that might still include wet scrambled eggs). This is a festival of innovative literature and literary arts. And they are quite serious about the when they use the word innovative. I’ll be there. So will Johannes Goransson, Tim Wood, and J.A. Tyler. (And a lot of other people like my friends Lara Glenum, Joyelle McSweeney, Danielle Pafunda … go here to see the list – pretty awesome). Johannes, Tim, J.A. and I will be doing a panel called “Words and Pictures: Life After Rupture in Image-Text Collaboration.” It’ll be a critical discussion of various ongoing image-text projects that I’m working on with each of them respectively. Johannes and I continue to chip away at our epic Genius Child Orchestra graphic novel/collage poetry work, which we’ve been working on in some form for several years now (my upcoming comic chapbook, The Remains, from MC Hyland’s Double Cross is a section from this project). Tim and I will talk about our Nine Frayed Leaves book projects (separate site coming soon). And J.A. and I will present our book Glimpse which we are working on furiously these days, and I hope to show samples of on this site soon. Later in the weekend I’ll also be a part of the Action Books reading along with Johannes, Joyelle, Lara, and Arielle Greenberg – particularly looking forward to reading with that esteemed group.