Beach Read

Saturday, June 23rd, 6-9pm
536 Beach 72nd, Far Rockaway, NY 11692

Three writers want to tell you a story, to invite you to listen to a conversation. They want to show you something, too— family photographs, 1980s artwork, tiny toys, a sixty-year-old umbrella, knicknacks and odds and ends, a projector running images of a city dismembered. They want to share keepsakes, mementos saturated and private.

Dale Megan Healey, Erin J. Mullikin, and Oscar Cuevas are all writers whose work is deeply rooted in the visual, concerning art and vignettes of imagery. Their work is confessional, from fiction and personal essay, to poetry and graphic memoir, and the borderlands between. Their writing explores grief, trauma, and place, and leverages a certain analytical lens against their experiences. They don't ask why, in that reductive search for meaning, but instead how—how to continue, how to find beauty moving forward, how to make sense of the present moment in the face of a haunted past.

Their work and the ensuing search all happen in a specific type of space, which references the “home” while often subverting it—a grandparent’s house, the house of an abusive childhood, a museum visited alone to sit and obsess over a fragmented sculpture, a guest room at a beach house, a garage. They’re all personal, home-adjacent places that are not quite home, but not completely outside of it either.

You’re invited to a garage transformed into the echo of the domestic—each writer bringing pieces of themselves to be installed throughout. Come sit on an old quilt on the garage floor and listen to a conversation, take in the readings by candlelight, escape to the beach.

Dale Megan Healey's essays have appeared in Lit Hub, DIAGRAM, The Common, The Atlas Review, VICE, and elsewhere, with work forthcoming in The Believer Logger. She is working on a book about photography, grief, and experiential art, and teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons.

Erin J. Mullikin holds an MFA from Syracuse University. A 2016-2017 Olive B. O’Connor Creative Writing Fellow at Colgate University, her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2014. As a writer and an artist, her work seeks to reinforce various modes of design and engagement, with minimalism as an exploration of space and erasure. She is the founding editor for the literary journal NightBlock.

Oscar Cuevas is a Brooklyn-based writer from Kansas. He received his MFA from Syracuse University. He was the recipient of The Joyce Carol Oates Award for Best Nonfiction Piece, The Raymond Carver Memorial Award for Best Short Story, and was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, University of Georgia Press. He won DIAGRAM's Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest. He has held fellowships at The MacDowell Colony and Syracuse University.