Public Lecture Series

Yanara Friedland (Fairhaven College, Western Washington University)

Talk and Reading: "Notes on Uncountry"

"Notes on Uncountry" will investigate the genesis of Uncountry: A Mythology and its attempt to create new pathways into historical space. The storylines in Uncountry re-contextualize and re-imagine content from mythic spaces, such as German folktales and Eastern European Jewish lore, as well as anecdotes from oral family memory. The work also reflects on Kent Ryden's notion of invisible landscapes: an accumulation of stories, memories, dreams and desires, over-layering the visible place, or, in other words, a record of the human, animal, and geographical history and the potential for collective memory.

Yanara Friedland is a German-American writer, translator, and teacher. Her first book, Uncountry: A Mythology was the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction award. "Abraq ad Habra: I will Create As I Speak," a digital chapbook, is available from Essay Press. She is the recipient of research grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts, supporting her current book project Groundswell, a chorography of border regions in the German-Polish and Sonoran borderlands. She is the director of MyLife Tucson, a community archive, hosted by the Jewish History Museum in Tucson and teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.