please forward**** Sister Spit Montreal workshops Tuesday April 27th2010. 10:30am - 5pm About Sister Spit the tour: The legendary, raucous, rowdy performance gang, Sister Spit, lands in Montreal on Tuesday, April 27 with a vanload of queertastic brilliance! Don't miss this multimedia explosion of zinesters, fashion plates, slam poets, novelists, performance artists, poets and fancy scribblers. Featuring queer luminary Michelle Tea, legendary trans film director and screenwriter Silas Howard, queer graphic novelist and anti-racist activist Elisha Lim, lesbian slam-poet/performance artist Lenelle Moise, trans psychic memoirist Len Plass, queer zinester/portraitist/graphic novelist Nicole J. Georges, and Power Point loving shape-shifter translady Annie Danger!! These workshops are free of charge! We will also have snacks for participants! Yum! Please register by emailing your name, contact phone number and email address, along with the workshop title in the subject line to wssa.concordia@gmail.com or psa@genderadvocacy.org (for the workshops taking place at the 2110) We will email you what you need for the workshop once you are registered. Simone De Beauvoir Institute Room MU-110 2170 Bishop St. 11-1 Building a DIY Literary Career w/ Michelle Tea How to create a vibrant, glamorous, engaged, excited and perhaps even profitable literary career without a big publisher, publicist, or agent in advance. Discussion will explore various literary communities, literary organizing, national reading series, how to create your own reading series, how to take your show on the road, communicating with bookstores, self-publishing, and collaborations. Michelle Tea is the co-founder of the long-running Sister Spit open mic series and original Sister Spit tours. She is the founder and director of RADAR Productions, which runs a monthly reading series at the San Francisco Public Library, oversees the Sister Spit: The Next Generation tours, and runs the RADAR Lab writers' retreat. 2:30-4:30 Memoirs of the Formative Years w/ Len Plass In this workshop we will have an open discussion on writing memoirs with a focus on childhood. Topics will include: how to write from the perspective of a child while maintaining a mature tone, mixing fiction into memoir and whether this is morally and honestly legitimate, and the emotional ramifications of writing about things you'd otherwise rather forget. We will also take time to write and some people will be able to share their work for some good old fashioned critiquing. QPIRG Lounge, suite 204 - 1500 de Maisonneuve O. 11-1 Quit Your Job w/ Elisha Lim In this workshop, Elisha will facilitate a conversation about sustainable unemployment. Share your ideas about how to live off grants, bursaries, merchandising and freelancing, minimal rent, travel and food expenses, and how to basically do nothing but what you love. Elisha hasn't had a real job in 4 years in Toronto, Montreal and Berlin. 2:30-4:30 Zines & Feminism (Plus a little 101) w/ Nicole J. Georges This workshop discusses the importance of alternative media for social change, both historically and in contemporary culture. Zines are shown as a device for grassroots organizing in the Riot Grrrl movement. Students discuss basic feminism and learn to critically discuss the media around them. This workshop can be linked with Zines 101, giving students the opportunity to create their own media on-site. 2110 Centre For Gender Advocacy Lounge, 2110 Rue Mackay. 11-1 Trans 101 w/ Annie Danger In this one and one-half hour workshop, transsexual activist and performance artist Annie Danger takes participants through the basics of transsexual and transgender awareness. Participants learn key terms and ideas, discuss tenets of trans-awareness, learn the finer points of acting as an ally, get to ask and answer the awkward questions, and examine personal experiences from within the seminar group. Annie Danger has worked independently doing Trans 101 workshops based on training she received through TransAction in 2000-2002. TransAction was a transgender activist collective focused on securing transgender rights in all sectors of society with an eye toward the complex intersections of race, class, and sexism as they affect transgender individuals. Annie also worked a short time with TGVIPP, the Trans and Gender Variant in Prison Project and with CUAV, the Community United Against Violence. 2:30-4:30 Trespass This! w/ Silas Howard A DIY film workshop focusing on using fiction and metaphor to tell personal stories. This workshop/practicum examines the relationships between voice, style and language along with issues of memory, identity, and desire. Through hands-on scene study, writing activities, and examining model films, participants will come away with story telling strategies for approaching the different phases of film and other narrative forms. In particular, the workshop will explore the representation of outsider stories, new voices, and transgressive narratives in stories and film. Participants of all levels are encouraged to attend, but no previous experience is necessary. History Seminar Room LB 1041-1, Library Building, 1400 de Maisonneuve O. 11-1 Radical Voice and Movement w/ Lenelle Moïse This is an interactive and highly physical performance workshop for actors, musicians, dancers, poets or anyone interested in radical self-expression & improvisational vocal composition. As Lenelle guides participants through a series of ensemble theatre exercises & thematic "sound jams," the voice & body are explored as political texts that compliment the written word. ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Michelle Teais the author of four memoirs, a collection of poetry and a novel Rose of No Man’s Land. She has edited anthologies on class, fashion, personal narrative and lesbo-centric fiction. he co-founded Sister Spit Ramblin’ Road Show in the 90s and is the diabolical mind behind Sister Spit: The Next Generation. She lives in San Francisco where she runs the queer literary arts organization, RADAR Productions. Tea is at work on a graphic novel, a sci-fi novel, a young adult novel, a vengeful roman-a-clef, and someone else’s memoir. Len Plassis a San Francisco-based writer.In 2001 he co-founded Junkyard Books, a short lived press that released one anthology--Lowdown Highway--which featured both his writing and his keen eye as co-editor. He has also been published in the Bay Area’s Inside Pride Guide. He has been writing and performing for 13 years, at events such as RADAR Reading Series, K’vetch, and Homo A Go Go. He organized and performed in the Lowdown Highway 2004 national summer tour. Len Plass writes ragged, self-loathing tales about every tired, worn-out kind of heartbreak and hardship. Elisha Limwas born in Toronto and grew up in Singapore, in a Catholic convent girls' school overrun with queers, many of whom inspire her first graphic novel 100 Butches published on Sister Spit Press. Other sources of butch inspiration have been her bosses on German construction sites, her neighbors on the Spanish coast, her fellow drag kings in Israel/Palestine and restaurant guests subject to her waitressing in London. She returned to Toronto, and now proudly co-hosts a weekly party by and for queer people of color, called Fresh to Def. She was thrilled to be named "Artist in Residence" by Curve, a "Queer Woman to Watch" at afterellen.comand to run her strips in magazines like Diva, LOTL, CapitalXtra! and No More Potlucks. www.newhearteveryday.blogspot.com Nicole J. Georgesis an illustrator, zinester, and pet portrait artist from Portland, Oregon. She is the author of the autobiographical comic zine-turned-book, Invincible Summer, and is hard at work on a graphic novel for Beacon Press. Visit her http://www.nicolejgeorges.com Annie Danger(Andrea Maybelline Danger) is into shape shifting. She wants to take us all on a journey from authority to leadership, violence to rioting, men and women to creatures, and from dogma to praxis. And fuck if she doesn't want it to be the most thoughtful and fun trip you've had in a while. She plies her trade with as many media are possible/necessary so look out for power points, kiddie pools, satellite feeds, pizza parties, and medical fetish family hours. Danger is an artist deeply committed to the notion that a revolutionary artist must make revolution irresistible. She is a transsexual woman born and raised in New Mexico and rooted in the San Francisco Bay area ten years strong. http://anniedanger.webs.com/ Silas Howard co-directed his first feature, By Hook Or By Crook, with Harry Dodge. This indie classic was a 2002 Sundance Film Festival premiere, five-time Best Feature winner and was picked up by the Sundance Channel. Howard’s screenplay, Exactly Like You, (co-written with Nina Landey),was a Nantucket Screenwriters Colony fellow and finalist for the 2006 Sundance Filmmaker’s lab. The project was selected for the 2007 Film Independent Directors Lab, Los Angeles Film Festival Fast Track Program and IFP’s No Borders in 2008. Howard's writing is also featured in the several anthologies, and currently he is writing on a novel set in San Francisco's early 90's homocore scene. Howard was a founding member of the notorious queer punk band Tribe 8 and a co-founder of Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Café, where many a bagel was burned and spoken word uttered. Lenelle Moïse is an award-winning poet, playwright, essayist and nationally-touring performance artist. She creates intimate, fiery, politicized texts about the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, spirituality, culture and resistance. She has performed her one-woman show Womb-Words, Thirsting at theatres and colleges across the U.S. Her writing is published in a number of anthologies, including Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists and Brassage: An Anthology of Poems by Haitian Women. Visit www.lenellemoise.comfor more.