Shapes of Psychedelic Literature: A Conversation with "Elastic" Magazine

PSYCHEDELICS IN SOCIETY & CULTURE

Speakers: Venita Blackburn, Samantha Hunt, and Laura van den Berg
Moderator: Hillary Brenhouse

About the Event

In celebration of Elastic magazine's newly released second volume, join us for a conversation about the possibilities of psychedelic literature—writing that bends time, genre, and perspective; blurs waking and dreaming life; and otherwise expands beyond imagined boundaries to render our twisted present and experiences that resist straightforward or linear description. How might writing that is speculative, surreal, or formally unruly access the deepest kind of realism? What becomes possible when we move beyond the narrative shapes we've inherited?

Elastic is an award-winning print magazine of psychedelic art and literature. Its second volume, the Interspecies Issue, launched this year with support from Harvard's Psychedelics in Society and Culture program. The issue features fifty-two contributing writers and visual artists who circle the porousness of the self, ecological entanglements, and how strange and sublime it is to be a living thing among other living things.

About the Speakers

Hillary Brenhouse is the founding editor-in-chief and publisher of Elastic magazine, which debuted in April 2025. She was previously the editor-in-chief of Guernica magazine and the editorial director of Bold Type Books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. 

Laura van den Berg is the author of six works of fiction, most recently the novel State of Paradise, and an Elastic contributing editor. She teaches fiction at Harvard University and lives in the Hudson Valley. Her next novel, Ring of Night, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Samantha Hunt is the author of four books of fiction, including The Seas and The Dark Dark. She is also the author of The Unwritten Book, a collection of essays about death and literature. Hunt is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her story "Fallen Women" was published in Elastic No. 1: The Dying Issue, which was nominated for the National Magazine Award for Fiction.

Venita Blackburn is author of the novel Dead in Long Beach, California (2024), which was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, as well as the story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2018) and How to Wrestle a Girl (2021). She teaches creative writing at Fresno State University and is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization that offers free creative writing workshops to communities of color.