From the haunted East Village of the AIDS crisis to the unruly freedoms and uneasy visibility of the queer nineties, Natalie Adler and Hugh Ryan trace how one era bleeds into the next. Adler’s debut novel, Waiting on a Friend, reimagines downtown New York at a moment of grief, defiance, and erasure, while Ryan’s My Bad maps the aftershocks of that loss through the clubs, chat rooms, activism, and self-inventions of the decade that followed. Together, their books ask how queer communities remember, rebuild, and carry the dead forward, and how the past continues to shape the freedoms and fractures of the present. This panel will be moderated by Brian Montopoli.
Writing inhabits multiple times at once, drawing from memory and possibility. The Outrage: A Queer Writers’ Residency embraces the nonlinear nature of both artistic practice and queer life. Queer lives have never moved in a straight line. We inherit fractured histories and imagine alternative futures. It’s the only way to make meaning across multiple temporalities at once. In the spirit of Deep Water’s Time Shift theme, the residency creates space for stories that move between archive and invention, allowing writers to encounter the past and future as active collaborators in the work of the present.
This year’s Outrage artists will read from work developed during their residency at North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL) over the week preceding the festival.
To open this year’s festival, Sullivan County’s own Justine van der Leun joins us to discuss Unreasonable Women, her gripping and deeply reported new book about survivors of abuse who are imprisoned for protecting themselves. Built from seven years of reporting and thousands of accounts from women’s prisons, the book follows three unforgettable women whose lives reveal how violence repeats across time—and how the legal system all too often erases that history, judging a single act without reckoning with the years that led to it. A work of literary reportage with the pace of a crime novel, Unreasonable Women asks urgent questions about what happens when a system refuses to see the full story of a life.
