About Noblesville Interdisciplinary Creativity Expo (NICE):
Each year, NICE offers the opportunity to be (re)inspired by up to four classic literary works and a standalone passage from each. The annual project breathes new life into the classics by encouraging people to discuss the works selected, engage in critical thinking, and experiment with creativity.
The brainchild of author Sarah E. Morin and artist/author Alys Caviness-Gober, NICE headed into it’s 9th year in 2023, but due to various life circumstances, we weren’t able to host a public NICE event in 2023. We’re looking into making some changes for our favorite annual literary project, so stay tuned!
We’ll always encourage Do-It-Yourself interaction with our annual NICE projects because we understand that it’s often tough to find the time to meet with us in our Zoom workshops and/or listen to (yet another!) podcast discussion, even when you’re interested in the subject matter. Most of all, we encourage DIY-NICE interaction because we want to promote our love of revisiting classic literature and encourage YOU to find inspiration from our selections to create fresh new artwork.
Content Note: Written works, especially classics and books set in historical time periods, almost always contain problematic content presented by characters, descriptive passages, and dialogue, even when authors are trying to shed light on such issues from an ally perspective. Problematic content includes, but is not limited to, intolerance of any kind and prejudice and discrimination towards any “groups” of humans related to identity by gender, sexuality, ethnicity or cultural history and/or background, skin color, religion, etc). One of our NICE goals is to discuss and confront problematic content in literature in order to reject racism, misogyny, fascist ideals, and intolerance of any kind. We’ve recorded several @theroundtable episodes that specifically discuss racism and prejudice in general, and how to address problematic elements in classics and period books. Some of the questions we asked ourselves are: what’s really there, in classic literature? How do we view the book today vs when it was written/the setting? What is the value of reading books with problematic elements? You can listen to those episodes here: Discussions Against Racism.
Annual Submissions Form:
With COVID-19 continuing to negatively impact our community, we share in podcast recordings our behind-the-scenes discussions for selecting the books and passages for our NICE project.
Each year for that process, we chose and discuss around 10-20 potential books, and after much discussion, we select our Final Four Books. Then we select and discuss about 6-10 passages from each of those four books, and (again after much discussion!) chose our Final Four Passages (one from each book).
After the Final Four books and passages are announced, we often record “deep-dives” workshop-style discussions of each book and passage, too. Our behind-the-scenes NICE discussions can be heard on our @theroundtable podcast. Any corresponding short videos can be seen on our YouTube channel.
Use the drop-down menu under this page‘s tab or click the links below to check out past NICE projects:
1st through 4th Annual NICE Projects: 2018 (4th Annual), 2017 (3rd Annual), 2016 (2nd Annual), and 2015 (1st Annual) projects’ information can be found here.
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NICE.Noblesville.Interdisciplinary.Creativity.Expo/
Bookmark Website: https://cearts.org/home/nice/
NICE annual presentation events videos can be found on our CEArts YouTube Channel.