Critical Grooves Book Lab, III (6:30 p - 8:00 p)

704 1st Avenue North,Fargo ND 58102

18 May, 2023

Description

For our third iteration (Winter-Spring ’23), we will read a collection of twenty short stories by twenty bipoc writers as well as works by both Valerie Burns (aka V. M. Burns) and Walter Mosely. In Midnight Hour (edited by Abby L. Vandiver), we discover and follow twenty BIPOC voices through an expansive terrain of crime, twisted plots, and mystery writing that is sure to keep you reading well past the dead of night. Valerie Burns’s Two Parts Sugar, One Part Murder promises a sassy, stylish mystery situated in a cozy, little Michigan town—the first installment of Burns’s Baker Street Mystery series. Finally, Walter Mosely’s classic, Devil in a Blue Dress, takes us on a scintillating ride down mean streets, through bedeviling political plots, around sick and twisted souls, and finally arriving at the doorsteps of "American-as-Apple-Pie" relationships and messy human dynamics. If this enssemble of original and diverse voices sounds compelling, please join us at Plains Art Museum on the select dates below. Light refreshments and beverages will be provided. Feel free to bring your own beverages/snacks, as well. February 23: Midnight Hour (Stories 1-10) March 23: Midnight Hour (Stories 11-20) April 27: Two Parts Sugar, One Part Murder May 18: Devil in a Blue Dress Plains Art Museum’s Voices of Creative Change Initiative (VCCI) continues its community-oriented, book group, Critical Grooves Book Lab, for a third term (Spring 2023). Critical Grooves Book Lab is a community-oriented, book-discussion forum. It fosters and encourages radical conviviality, a sharing of ideas, unlikely company, an interesting range of texts, and some rigorous dialogue that is both skillfully aplomb and sometimes prickly. Further, as a discursive platform, Critical Grooves Book Lab engages a wide array of non-canonized texts (broadly defined). It situates itself at the threshold between “common sense,” “situated knowledge,” and experiential learning. In fact, the impetus for Critical Grooves Book Lab is captured by Bonaventura de Sousa Santos’ insistence that “another knowledge is possible.” This calls attention to his insistence that there can be no "social justice" without global cognitive justice. Book Lab believes that the F-M Area, gathered around a good book, can also practice radical conviviality and intellectual exchange within the artistic and hospitable space of the Plains Art Museum. The Book Lab’s format is simple: brief introductions, introduction to the text(s)/author(s), one or two probing questions to generate some preliminary discussion, and some secondary-source referencing (this might prove useful in "thickening" our discussions in ways that compel us to consider societal concerns, complex problems, and complicated issues beyond the shallow pop-culture interpretations of contradictory and paradoxical human dynamics). Finally, and with a light touch, our sessions conclude with a voluntary go-around the group whereby texts are “rated” on a 1 – 10 scale (where participants have the option of voluntarily providing brief justifications/explanations for their ratings). That's it.