On Friday at 7 p.m., Westminster College’s literary magazine ellipsis…Literature and Art will collaborate with the college’s Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series to debut the publication’s 2017 issue with a reading by previous magazine contributor Matthew Gavin Frank.
Frank, a nonfiction author, poet and Northern Michigan University professor, is not the first guest reader to have been previously featured in the magazine.
“It was my idea many years ago to invite someone previously published in ellipsis who has a new book to be our featured reader,” said Natasha Saje, an English professor at Westminster College and the coordinator of the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series. “This shows everyone the caliber of our contributors.”
As for this year’s chosen guest reader, Saje said, “This reading slot makes a nice connection between the magazine and Weeks series.”
Both Saje and Frank spoke of the importance and impact this event might have on community members, though Saje seemed more concerned with the magazine itself, and Frank with the larger impact of literary events on society.
“I hope that audience members will come away from the debut with new respect for the magazine,” Saje said. The students who run the magazine put in a lot of effort, she explained, “choosing the work, organizing it, corresponding with authors, and putting on the debut.”
“Events such as this are part of the long, serpentine, interconnected and essential dialogue between writers, our readers, and our peers,” Frank said. “This sort of conversation… is increasingly becoming a necessary and urgent act of resistance; an act of fortifying the dam against the bombastic roar of anti-art, anti-diversity, anti-empathy, anti-beauty, anti-joy rhetoric that seems to be permeating our socio-political climate right now.”
Frank explained that the art community specifically needs to milk these opportunities to stand up and stand together in times of political and social turmoil, and writers are just as much artists with words as painters are with palettes.
“Each public exhibition and celebration of art pushes against that bombastic wave, and minimizes the hurt it causes, even if in small, confounding, and hardly noticeable ways,” Frank said. “And that makes these sorts of events not only crucial right now, but holy as well.”
These events that allow writers and artists to share their opinions and push back against the sting of creative oppression are important to Frank personally, he explained, because “readings like this one have compelled me to try to shape my voice as a more curious one, a more questing one, rather than one that presumes certainty for didactic purposes.”
The reading will take place at 7 p.m. at the Dumke Blackbox Student Theater in Salt Lake City, and will be followed by a full catered reception. The event and the reception will be free to the public.
The Utah Book Buzz 