Program Schedule, Society for Early American Literature Biannual Conference

Thursday, March 2

9:00–10:30 a.m., Session 1

The mystical part of me reaches for reference, and the Lord helped me to go on reading. I'd rather be a canary in a coal mine than a library cormorant.

10: 30 a.m., 1941

Traffic down the whole block, big, bumble-bee cars, buses, vans, dust mushrooming all up and down Black Wall Street. An old man sits on the roof of his freshly washed car with a top hat and a cane but no story. Off-kilter fluorescent lights clash with the immaculately tiled ceiling of the five and dime: the people underneath are glaring, not smiling. A man and woman cross the street, arm in arm; they have wool hats on their heads and serious looks on their faces. Maid's Day Off. It's not the kind of fun that makes you smile.

859th Remove

I confess to being in the mood to do things never attempted in the canonical twenty, like go to Walmart and drink a Diet Coke. We've gone so far from where we came that on some nights … well, at least I still remember the boiled bear I gnawed on.

8:00 p.m., Reconciliation Way

An erased field across the street. A sense of flatness, due to novels I've read that take place in Oklahoma. A star on the sidewalk with Hank Williams's son's name on it. If you're a city, you have two choices: commemorate or bury the evidence. There's no in between. It's been nearly one hundred years and they're still trying to get the white rioters to disarm. The Promised Land. C'mon, keep moving, moving, along the trail.

Friday, March 3

8:00–9:30 a.m., Session 1

It is not my tongue or pen can express what I attempt, here, alone with God, Who Challenges and Divides.

Final Assignment

I never got the chance

to "trace back [my] own tracks in the snow"…

That trick doesn't work anymore.

11: 30 a.m.−12: 30 p.m., Plenary Lecture

Reference's "double potential": it points in two directions.

Direction One: the strict rigor of the real.

Direction Two: a faded black-and-white image from the Internet issued from a laser printer, the toner of which sorely needed refilling,

which is to say it wasn't really MY FAULT I didn't know what I was doing.

Fear of being left behind in Deep Time with only an old misreading of a corner of a painting to cling to.

Q: "What does the novel do that nonfiction can't?"

A: I spent my entire childhood looking out the window. I called it

RESEARCH.

The rest of the day was a blur.

________

Saturday, March 4

Virginia−North Carolina, 1710

I dance my dance, I walk my walk, I write my abstracts, but last week in a dream I saw the cloud of Theory, and the very next day I saw it again, this time in the real sky, as I was walking to Starbucks with Brian. Now it follows me everywhere, darkening the texts I love. I heard on NPR that time is altered, the seasons are changed, and disaster will bloom in the confusion.

________

Syacust Ukah, Cherokee Chief, 1762

I am the one "incarcerated in the past," not you, on the cover of the program, calm and North American, gold-stripped fabrics and Times New Roman across your breast, Ostenaco, Ustanaskwa, Utsikhi.

________

Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 1817

When you accidentally reverse the relationship between Reality and the Novel, and you're shipped off to America as punishment. Hungry crowds await you. The newspapers print your made-up name and language.

________

Noon, Executive Room

When you accidentally reverse the relationship between the Novel and Reality, and your life becomes a novel, and there you are on Fox Business Network talking about the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake … and you haven't yet gotten to what you meant to say, the one thing should...