Working Together Apart

“Working Together Apart” will bring together two writer/editors, Andrew Blossom and James Dyer, to talk about the creativity and challenge of working with many different writers on single volume collections of texts. They will each discuss their newest publications and creative practice, followed by a short forum for open questions from the audience and moderator.

American writer, editor, and independent publisher Andrew Blossom is currently on a book tour promoting the new anthology, “Everything’s Coming Up Makeout: A Retrospective.” During the talk he will discuss his experiences as a publisher, the creative history of the “Makeout Creek” journal, and his work putting together “Everything’s Coming Up Makeout,” which involved reestablishing connections to fifteen years of writers and colleagues.

In addition, he will read short selections of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from authors in the volume to illustrate the diverse creative voices that have contributed to “Makeout Creek” over the years and are now celebrated and preserved in the anthology.

Andrew Blossom is a writer, editor, publisher, and the founder of Makeout Creek Books. For eighteen years, he taught creative writing at the university level, most recently as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary. With his colleagues Greg Koehler and Lauren Mass, he is the editor of the anthology “Everything’s Coming Up Makeout: A Retrospective,” celebrating fifteen years of the “Makeout Creek” literary journal and its community of writers, artists and creators. In 2024, his short story collection “I’ve Got a Message for You” and “You’re Not Going to Like It” was republished in its tenth anniversary edition.

James Dyer is a Prague based writer and editor, who writes, often cynically, about emergent trends and overlooked banal happenings in culture. He has just released his second book, “Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops: The way we attend to things.” During the talk, he will discuss his experiences writing articles about design, art, and visual culture across a wide variety of publications, as well as his experiences as an editor on his latest books.

His first book speculated on what it would mean to think of graphic designs as dynamic living things; what he called “graphic events”. His second book gives 99 practical instructions of how to behave in a world that takes the idea of graphic events seriously.

More generally, James has written independent articles on design and art for the Dutch design publication “DAMN Magazine,” as well as eclectic critical articles on design culture for Dutch Design Week, Design Digger, and Evental Aesthetics. James has also written on food, street, and experimental photography for “FRAMES Magazine” and “Soanyway Magazine.” He has a string of book reviews for academic and independent publishers, including toBe Magazine, Full Stop, Oxford University Press, Sage, MIT Press. In longer-form chapters and books, he is published by Dutch publishers Onomatopee and Set Margins’, as well as Berlin/London-based publisher’s Sternberg Press.