Welcome to Deep Water 2026. This year’s festival is devoted to TIME SHIFT: stories, performances, and art that refuses to move in a straight line. From speculative fiction and historical revision to memoir, biography, installation, and live performance, the 2026 program explores what happens when the past won’t stay buried, and when the future feels suddenly very present.

The festival opens with a special keynote presentation by Jad Abumrad, the multiple Peabody Award winning creator of Radiolab, beginning with the only surviving audio recording of Virginia Woolf – a voice trying to name a consciousness for which no adequate language yet exists. From there, Abumrad moves through more than a century of writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other “weirdos” wrestling with what he calls “time-quakes.” You really don’t want to miss this.

Meanwhile, Joyce Carol Oates arrives with a new collection of stories built around charged moments when a life suddenly tips into something else. Francine Prose, Nghi Vo, and Rebecca Lehmann raid the past through speculative history and literary trespass. George Packer, Ben Fountain, and Amal El-Mohtar consider the futures already taking shape inside the present, while Marlon James and Fab 5 Freddy return to a New York where cultural collapse gave way to explosive invention. Siri Hustvedt and Nicholas Boggs ask how we write lives (Paul Auster, James Baldwin) refracted by memory and time.

This year’s visual art also deepens the theme. At The 108, local artist Amy Yoes presents Memory Method, a black-and-white stop-motion animation on a continuous loop throughout the festival. Meanwhile, Raphaele Shirley who gave us 100 Pink Smoke Flares (Twice) at last year’s festival, returns with a new installation, 20F, to cap Saturday’s program.