Jennifer Colville is a community arts organizer and writer. She is the director of the Porch Light Literary Arts Centre, which provides a space for artists and writers to harness their crafts and find community. She is the founding editor of “Prompt Press,” a program connecting book artists, visual artists, and writers.
Her collection of short stories, “Elegies for Uncanny Girls,” was published in 2017. Colville speaks in and leads workshops on creative writing on the “Inventive Feminist Voice” and the intersection of visual art and writing.
The Daily Iowan: What is the meaning behind the title of the panel?
Colville: The Lights-On Salon panel is derived from our organization’s name, Porch Light, and the fact that our lights are on for evening salons, or discussions, on weekdays. We also like the name because [the salon] features writers, artists, and thinkers who are bright lights in the community and visiting writers who are bright lights on a national or international scale.
You did a topic on curating as writing. Are there other topics you explore in these sessions?
Yes. This fall, we mostly collaborated with the International Writing Program. These, of course, are successful writers dealing with important topics from different countries around the world, so we asked them what they wanted to talk about. Our first salon featured Catarina Gomes, a writer from Portugal who wanted to talk about the ethics of writing about family and friends. She seriously considered this issue as she launched into a new project that would, in part, be about her father. She posed her ethical concerns to the group as questions, which was great because it made the session run like a conversation rather than a lecture.
Who created the Lights-On Salon? How did it come about?
As the director of Porch Light, a community-based writing center, my team has been looking for ways to collaborate with some of the wonderful writing programs at the University of Iowa. Cate Dicharry of the International Writing Program was excited to collaborate, and we both liked the salon format with salons offering a less formal, more social approach to the exchange of ideas.
What is the mission of the Lights-On Salon?
Our mission is to connect the community, university writers, visiting writers, local artists, and students around topics of mutual interest in a social and conversational space.
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Who leads the salons?
As for leaders of the salons, we prefer to call them conversation starters because they don’t give formal presentations. Our goal is to pair each featured writer with a different artist/writer/thinker from the community who is interested in the same topics or questions. For example, at our last salon, the topic was “The Gains and Losses of Translation,” so for that, we paired Nurit Kazstelan from the International Writing Program with Thomas Mira Y Lopez, a visiting professor in the translation department and also an Iowa City community member.
What was your favorite meeting to attend or host and why?
I enjoyed being in conversation with Putra Hidayatullah about writing as curating. Putra was an IWP writer and curator who has worked with famous curators globally. But more than that, I was interested in how his curating was informed by writing and vice versa. I liked his description of how the unfolding of physical spaces in a museum can function narratively, ie. the first room asks a question or places two ideas together; then, subsequent rooms explore different angles of the question and allow people to walk through the space to come to their conclusions. We also talked about how the visual works its way into his writing through catalogs of surreal images. As the publisher of Prompt Press, an ekphrastic and book arts journal, I’m always interested in how visual/spatial art and linear/sequential art can merge.