In Johanna Hedva’s new book, How to Tell When We Will Die, they write intimately about the intersections of disability, pain, sex, and art-making, subjects that seem increasingly vital for understanding everyday life in America. In this conversation, Hedva and Shearing Fellow Isle McElroy will discuss the role disability activism plays in contemporary social, political, and artistic movements—and the practical concerns of creating work while ill. Furthermore, we will talk about their critical analysis of doom and how it shapes practices of art-making and living through capitalism and climate collapse. This free hour-long conversation will also include time for audience Q&A.
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy, and political states of solidarity and disintegration. They collect knives. They garden. They are devoted to deviant forms of knowledge and to doom as a liberatory condition. There is always the body — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. Whether the form is novels, essays, theory, poetry, music, performance, AI, videogames, installation, sculpture, drawings, or trickery, ultimately Hedva’s work is different kinds of writing because it is different kinds of language embodied: it is words on a page, screaming in a room, dragging a hand through water.
Hedva is the author of four books, most recently the 2024 essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, published by Hillman Grad Books and Zando, which won the Amber Hollibaugh award for LGBTQ Social Justice writing, and was longlisted for a Goodreads Choice Award. They are the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. They are also the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, which collects a decade of work in poetry, plays, performances, and essays.
Isle McElroy is the author of The Atmospherians and People Collide, named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, NPR, Them, and the New York Times Critics. Their essays appear in the New York Times, The Cut, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. In 2021 they founded Debuts & Redos, a socially-distanced, in-person reading series for writers who debuted during lockdown and could not hold in-person readings. They have a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and they currently teach in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College.