Lectures on Form

Eight writers working in the overlapping fields of writing, art and pedagogy have been invited to write a lecture on form. These lectures will identify, name (or rename) a particular form or formal effect of importance to the writer, whether or not it has been identified as such before. The lectures will offer an insight to the writers’ personal reading and writing concerns, while at the same time considering how, where, and in what manner this form lives: how it lives and how it could be made to live on in their own writing and in the writing of others.

The choice of the lecture format is deliberate: of the work we have read on writing in recent years, a handful of books have emerged as especially important for our thinking, writing and teaching practices and they all take the form of published lectures.

The eight commissioned writers have been asked to work with the lecture as a potentially public, context-bound mode of address, as a speech with pedagogical intent and as a form which, once published, can instruct and communicate long after the moment of delivery has passed. The lectures written for this project can therefore and will be re-activated, re-performed in new contexts and before different bodies.