Something Out There in the Distance

An evening with writer Grant Faulkner and photographer Gail Butensky, moderated by Cari Borja.

Sometimes you leave because you are searching for something. Sometimes you leave because you don't know how to stay. In Something Out There In the Distance, writer and flash-fiction master Grant Faulkner and photographer Gail Butensky take us on a journey across the American desert with two lovers, Dawn and Jonny, who set out on one final road trip together. She photographs the landscape. He drives. And somewhere between the two of them lies the question that has propelled travelers, writers, lovers, and wanderers across America for generations: What are we running from, and what are we hoping to find?

Told through spare, luminous flash fiction and haunting photographs from the edge of the American West, something out there in the distance is an extraordinary collaboration between word and image. Together, the stories and photographs create a landscape at once vast and intimate; a world of desert roads, motel rooms, memory, longing, restlessness, love, and loss. But this is not simply a book about a road trip. It is about the strange human impulse to believe that somewhere just beyond the horizon, another life might be waiting for us. And perhaps it is about one of the oldest questions we carry with us: Can you ever really escape yourself?

Grant and Gail will join cultural anthropologist Cari Borja for a conversation about the making of this remarkable collaborative work, and the fertile territory where writing and photography meet. Together, they will explore the American road as both landscape and metaphor, the creative possibilities of telling a story through image and text, and the ways that collaboration can produce something neither artist could have created alone.

Because perhaps every journey contains two stories: the one we tell about where we are going, and the one we discover about why we left.

Grant Faulkner is the co-founder of Memoir Nation (and also the co-host of the Memoir Nation podcast), the co-founder of the Flash Fiction Institute, the co-founder of 100 Word Story, and an executive producer on America’s Next Great Author. He has published All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, a collection of short stories; Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories; and a “flash novel,” something out there in the distance, a collaboration with the photographer Gail Butensky. He has also published three books on writing: The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story; Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo; and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide.

Gail Butensky is a renowned photographer whose work has been featured on numerous record covers as well as in books and magazines. She is the author of the photography book Every Bend.