• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Outline for “At Home and Out of Place” Anne Goldman, event organizer, moderator, and panelist Megan Harlan, Patrick Madden, and Angela Morales, panelists We’ve divided up our 60 sessions as follows: I: brief introductions (see bios) approx 3 minutes total II: short readings (see the passages excerpted below): 15-20 minutes total (more or less) III: a conversation about craft using questions generated from the literary dialogue our four separate readings create (see a list of questions for discussion below). approx 35-40 minutes (the remainder of the time) After brief introductions (please see the bios provided below), each writer will read a 4-5- minute excerpt for her or his work. These excerpts are provided below. This should bring us to approximately the 25-minute point. We will spend the thirty-fiveminutes remaining discussing issues of craft that arise from the conversation our excerpts help create. We have come up with a list of questions as possible prompts for discussion, but we expect the conversation to proceed organically. I: Bios: ANNE GOLDMAN’s books include Stargazing in the Atomic Age (UGA, 2021). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, The Guardian, the Georgia Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Southwest Review, Volt, and elsewhere. Her essays have been named as notable in Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and Best American Travel Writing. Stargazing’s titular essay was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Goldman teaches creative writing and American literature in California at Sonoma State University. MEGAN HARLAN is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the 2019 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2020. Her essays have been cited as distinguished in Best American Essays 2018 and 2019, awarded the Arts & Letters Prize for Creative Nonfiction, and have appeared in journals that include AGNI, Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, River Teeth, and the Cincinnati Review. Her first book, Mapmaking, won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and features poems published in the American Poetry Review, AGNI, TriQuarterly, PBS Newshour, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She works as a writer and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. PATRICK MADDEN is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), and coeditor of After Montaigne (2015). He teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts; with Joey Franklin he edits the journal Fourth Genre; with David Lazar he edits the 21st Century Essays series at the Ohio State University Press; and he curates the online essay resource www.quotidiana.org. ANGELA MORALES, author of The Girls in My Town and graduate of the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program, is the winner of the River Teeth Nonfiction prize and the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, The Southern Review, The Normal School, and other journals. She teaches English at Glendale Community College and is now working on a memoir about early childhood memories. II: Readings: Anne Goldman, Excerpt from “Listening to Gershwin,” Stargazing in the Atomic Age (UGA, 2021) pp 78-80 (704 words) For all her apparent pliancy, my mother refused to enroll us in music lessons. Private instruction was expensive, but it was the ambition of Wayland’s elect that rankled. The town’s elite fitted their small Mozarts with costly instruments in expectation they would bloom into prodigies. The four of us children had no such pretensions, but since the elementary school rented both strings and brass, we too were allowed to perform experiments upon its battered specimens. After school, our house vibrated with the distempered sound of an ungainly brass trio and viola, an arrythmia that would have confused even the relentless metronome of a pacemaker. But I persisted in wanting to play the piano, and at thirteen, my mother arranged for a teacher. We had inherited a Steinway baby grand from my grandmother, a compact mahogany beauty whose keys my father reanimated, piano-player-like, when we coaxed him to remember a few measures of the Rachmaninoff concerto he had performed for a high school competition. Later my mother played too, her facility for sight-reading a different gift from my father’s ear. When I was very young, however, the piano sat silent. To my small child’s gaze it was an umber expanse glassy as the sea above the blond hardwood floor. A fine quartz crystal, my father’s wedding gift to my mother, was set at an angle atop its smooth surface, its face etched with the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet in calligraphic script: “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” Its majestic sentiment would have been discordant amid the clutter of our household without the piano’s elegant line and loveliness of tone. Our collie sat nearby on a worn spot in the living room rug, her head cocked quizzically as occasional shrieks of rage rose from my twin brothers’ room below. A green armchair, soiled with the residue of cereal spills, was positioned at the other end of the room. This was where I sat curled up most afternoons, propping a book on its frayed right arm. The piano’s polished surface gleamed in the cold New England light, exotic as a Russian grandmother at a Boston school board meeting. Which it was: the hard-won product of an immigrant daughter’s dream, resettled in the suburban home of her scientist son. From the age of thirteen until I turned eighteen, when I left Wayland, I practiced at the Steinway. We did not attend church or temple, so music was the only ritual I knew. I began with scales and arpeggios, the musical equivalent of a ballet dancer’s plies or a runner’s stretches. Something in the discipline these simple exercises demanded appealed to my quick-tempered self; when I played them well, they sounded pure as the taste of cold water. My parents have long since divorced, and the piano rests silent in my brother Charles’s home, my apartment not sufficient space to contain it. David, his twin, who stood so bashful and confident in the olive suit and bright salmon-colored tie he wore to his medical school graduation, did not live to see its displacement. The living room, which I loved witha child’s unconscious faith—the smooth pine floorboards against which the polished Steinway glowed— is accessible only in memory, as are the lucent words of the sonnet I had thought more permanent than the crystal upon which they had been carefully graven. But still I equate their calm grandeur with the piano. Inextricably but irrevocably, I have married love to music, connecting the feelings sounded by this instrument to Shakespeare’s language and the line of the piano’s dark wood to the clarity of the crystal set atop its front. As a child, my happiest times were those I spent islanded amid the family life that proceeded brightly all around me: the afternoons I read in the jade-colored armchair while my brothers and sister played in the kitchen, the hours I sat at the piano, the sounds of Bach and Beethoven and Schubert reverberating on its ivory keys. Now in memory I hear the chords of the Moonlight sonata as they subside into silence, and the abiding family love of my childhood comes back to me. Megan Harlan, excerpt from “A History of Nomadism,” Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2020), p. 160 (659 words) 1.Black Tent In the deserts near my home in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Bedouins pitched their black tents. This was the late 1970s, but the same style tent once housed Abraham and Moses, according to the Old Testament, and pre-dates those books by millennia. Out in the sands, I’d scan the horizon for the tents’ low-slung pentagram shapes, for the camels and cooking fires. My dad told me Bedouins are the most gracious of peoples, that hospitality is the cornerstone of nomadism. He said desert nomads will starve to give a visitor—even a visiting enemy—a meal. This was what interested him: insights into the varied social universes intrinsic to his career managing international contracts. But it was the black tents that repeated in my seven- and eight year-old mind like a favorite song. Their stark premise exhilarated me, then as now: a primary residence that is portable. The tent- home is as intimate and nimble as room-sized clothing. It untethers the domestic world from address, lightens it to a freedom of movement. Its inhabitants must plant roots someplace other than a patch of earth, a hometown’s fixed proximities, instead reaching ambient, skyward. Maybe a nomadic child grows like an epiphyte, all nutrients critical for development absorbed from the traveled-through atmospheres—fabrics of light, language, scent, and sound, their inherited and intuited meanings. 2. Synaptic I have a history of nomadism. Growing up, I moved on average once a year, lived in seventeen homes across four continents—very particular corners of North America, Asia, Europe, and South America—by the time I graduated from high school at age seventeen. Like traditional pastoral nomads, my sense of home was as temporary as a campsite. But unlike them, my family’s “campsites,” our homes, were never revisited. No seasonal structure directed my family’s movements; no terrain was deemed ours—our family’s, our ancestors’—to revolve around with grazing animals, whether goats or camels or sheep; no regular orbit of travel arranged the world into a geographic pattern my family might call, on the grandest scale, a home.

Load more

  6

Copy Link