Creative Nonfiction Writers Series

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Creative Nonfiction Writers Series MA in Critical Studies Spring 2018 Creative NonfictionWriters Series Roberta Hunte Shayla Lawson Jerry McGill Maggie Nelson Walidah Imarisha ¶ January 24 ¶ February 20 ¶ February 27 ¶ March 16 ¶ April 11 MA in Critical Studies Spring 2018 Roberta Hunte Shayla Lawson Jerry McGill Maggie Nelson Walidah Imarisha Wednesday, January 24, 6:30pm Tuesday, February 20, 6pm-9pm Tuesday, February 27, 6-9pm Friday March 16, 6:30pm Wednesday April 11, 6:00pm Creative Mediatheque Bridgelab Room 413 Mediatheque Mediatheque Roberta Hunte will discuss Shayla Lawson will be leading In his book, Dear Marcus, Jerry Poet, scholar, and nonfiction Walidah Imarisha will be Nonfiction her work and screen her film a discussion/workshop on McGill addresses the man who writer Maggie Nelson earned lecturing about her writing and Sista in the Brotherhood. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009). shot him and the result is an a PhD in English literature at research. This event will include Writers inspiring narrative about the the Graduate Center, CUNY. a reception and book signing. Dr. Roberta Hunte is an educator, Shayla Lawson’s work has moments in life that shape Her published writing is often Series facilitator, consultant, and appeared in print & online us—those that catch us by described as genre crossing Walidah Imarisha is an educator, cultural worker. She is an at Tin House, GRAMMA, ESPN, surprise, that blindside us, but or hybrid. Bluets (2009) is writer, public scholar, and Assistant Professor in Black Salon, The Offing, Guernica, present us with opportunities perhaps her most well-known spoken word artist. She edited All events: Pacific Northwest College Of Art Studies and Women, Gender, and Colorado Review, Barrelhouse, for growth, reflection, work mix of scholarship and two anthologies, Octavia’s 511 NW Broadway, Portland Oregon Sexuality Studies at Portland and MiPOesias. She is the compassion, and forgiveness. poetry. Her critical study of Brood: Science Fiction Stories More Info: State University where she author of, A Speed Education in He has traveled the globe aesthetics and cruelty, The Art From Social Justice Movements cal.pnca.edu teaches courses on reproductive Human Being, PANTONE, and the mentoring disabled children of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), and Another World is Possible. pnca.edu/criticalstudies justice, inequality, feminism, and forthcoming, I Think I’m Ready to and sharing the experiences was named a New York Times Imarisha’s nonfiction book, Free and open to the public the African American experience. See Frank Ocean. She is a 2017 in his life that evolved from Notable Book of the Year. Her Angels with Dirty Faces: Three She facilitates trainings on Oregon Literary and MacDowell his transformative encounter genre-bending memoir The Stories of Crime, Prison, and equity, diversity, and inclusion. Colony Fellow, and a member with Marcus. Jerry McGill holds Argonauts (2015) was a finalist Redemption, won a 2017 Oregon She is a collaborator and of The Affrilachian Poets. a B.A. in English literature for the National Books Critics Book Award. She is also the producer of a play, My Walk Has from Fordham University and Circle Award. Nelson’s many author of the poetry collection Never Been Average, and a short an MFA in education from honors and awards include Scars/Stars. She is currently film, Sista in the Brotherhood Pacific University in Oregon. grants and fellowships from working on an Oregon Black both informed by her research the John D. and Catherine T. history book, forthcoming from on black tradeswomen. She is MacArthur Foundation, the AK Press. Imarisha has taught in co-chair of the board for OPAL, Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Stanford University’s Program Environmental Justice and the Foundation, the Guggenheim of Writing and Rhetoric, Portland co-chair of Trimet’s Transit Foundation, and the NEA. State University’s Black Studies Equity Advisory Committee. Department, Oregon State University’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department, and Southern New Hampshire University’s English department. ¶ January ¶ February ¶ February ¶ March ¶ April.
Recommended publications
  • 03 WIF 2010 Countries 1
    After being diagnosed with AIDS, Hervé Guibert wrote this devastating, darkly humorous and personal novel, chronicling three months in the penultimate year of the narrator’s life. In the wake of his friend Muzil’s death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, from holidays to test centres, and charts the highs and lows of trying to cheat death. On publication in 1990, the novel scandalised French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert’s close friend Michel Foucault. The book became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. The book has since attained a cult following for its tender, fragmented and beautifully written accounts of illness, friendship, sex, art and everyday life. It catapulted Guibert into notoriety and sealed his reputation as a writer of shocking precision and power. Praise for Hervé Guibert: ‘Hervé Guibert’s novel, created in the white heat of his own impending death from AIDS, is written with urgency, clarity, controlled rage. It is an important document charting the shock of diagnosis and illness, but, more than that, it is an astonishing piece of writing, whose tone is gripping and fierce; it is electrifying in its searing honesty and its control of rhythm and cadence’ —Colm Tóibín ‘One of the most beautiful, haunting and fascinating works in the French autofictional canon. Guibert grapples with his own AIDS diagnosis, and the death of his friend Muzil, in a dazzling piece of writing. It’s a book that gives me goosebumps every time I open it – I’m thrilled that it’s being reissued in the UK, where Guibert’s extraordinary writing deserves to be much better known’ —Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again To the Friend prelims.indd 1 27/04/2021 17:33 ‘Guibert’s life work looms before me not merely as what Keats called (describing the Elgin Marbles) the “shadow of a magnitude”, but as the magnitude itself, sans shadow’ —Wayne Koestenbaum, Bookforum ‘Reveals a writer of courage, beguiling flai, and sometimes maddening nastiness … The rare book that truly deserves the epithet “unflinching”.
    [Show full text]
  • Who Is It For? Personal Writing and Antagonistic Readers
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2018 Who Is It For? Personal Writing and Antagonistic Readers Dana Glaser The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2594 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] WHO IS IT FOR? PERSONAL WRITING AND ANTAGONISTIC READERS by DANA GLASER A master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 DANA GLASER All Rights Reserved ii Who Is It For? Personal Writing and Antagonistic Readers by Dana Glaser This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies in satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts. Date Nancy K. Miller Thesis Advisor Date Dana-ain Davis Executive Officer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Who is it for? Personal Writing and Antagonistic Readers by Dana Glaser Advisor: Nancy K. Miller Feminist accounts of how “the personal” is used in feminist critical nonfiction have theorized that the effect of the personal is to connect the writer with readers who share a sense of her investment in the subject matter.
    [Show full text]
  • Nelson Great-To-Watch NHR-6E.Pdf
    ••• MAGGIE NELSON AMERICAN SOCIETY is SATURATED with violence--and not just theviolence horrif­ ically displayed in early December 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a former student returned to shoot 20 children and 6 adults before he trained his rifle on himself In 2011, the homicide rate in the United States was more than four times greater than Germany's and more than eight times Japan's. But violence hereis not just a social fact-it's also a cultural phenomenon, as poet, critic, and essayist Maggie Nelson understands. Anyone who watches television and YouTube, or spends hours playing video games, will recognize its pervasive­ ness. But Nelson finds violence in a place we might never think to look-in the high arts, especially the cutting-edge tradition known as the avant-garde. Past defenders of the artistic avant-garde celebrated the possibilities opened up by "aesthetic shock," the experience produced by radical disorientation. But -they have tended to soft-pedal its complicity with sadism and terror. At times, Nelson herself seems to be thrilled by the avant-garde's liberating openness, but she tries to nudge artists and art lovers toward what one reviewer, writing in the New York Time�, calls a "post-avant-garde aesthetics." Such an aesthetics--a new :frameworkfor the arts-might, as Nelson claims, "deliver us to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative and just way of inhabiting the earth." Nelson's shift from art to "inhabiting the earth" might seem to give too much importance to what goes on in galleries, museums, and film festivals.
    [Show full text]
  • Real Worlds: Brassaï Arbus Goldin
    Real Worlds RealWorlds_Guts_Final.indd 1 11/21/17 1:05 PM Real Worlds: Brassaï Arbus Goldin Hilton Als Maggie Nelson A.L. Steiner IN CONVERSATION WITH Lanka Tattersall The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles RealWorlds_Guts_Final.indd 2-3 11/21/17 1:05 PM CONTENTS 6 Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments PHILIPPE VERGNE 8 Preface LANKA TATTERSALL LANKA TATTERSALL IN CONVERSATION WITH 13 Hilton Als ON Brassaï 29 Maggie Nelson ON Arbus 45 A.L. Steiner ON Goldin 60 Contributors RealWorlds_Guts_Final.indd 4-5 11/21/17 1:05 PM DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD AND Pelosi, Esquire, Matthew Marks Gallery, and Fraenkel Gallery. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Above all, our heartfelt thanks goes to the estates of Diane Arbus and Brassaï, artist Nan Goldin, and the contributors to this publication: Hilton Als, Maggie Nelson, and A.L. Steiner. Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin brings together the works Arbus, Brassaï, and Goldin continue to inspire scholars, artists, of three of the twentieth century’s most influential photogra- and viewers alike. Their manifold contributions to the art of the phers of modern life. Drawn primarily from The Museum of last century have fundamentally expanded the definitions of doc- Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s extraordinary photography umentary photography, while offering simultaneously elegant, collection, the exhibition provides a remarkable opportunity to brutal, and tender depictions of their “Real Worlds,” worlds explore the work of Brassaï (1899–1984), Diane Arbus (1923– that our brilliant contributors—Als, Nelson, and Steiner—have 1971), and Nan Goldin (1953–). generously and keenly explored within this publication. I am This exhibition would not have been possible without the deeply grateful to each for lending their critical voice and vision acquisition, in 1995, of an astounding collection of over two to this project.
    [Show full text]
  • Off Scene.Pdf
    Off Scene published on the occasion of the exhibiton Aliza Shvarts: Off Scene May 11—June 30, 2018 Curated by Sarah Fritchey Artspace New Haven, CT some objects exist as complicated layers of wet sediment and bone, ossified indexes of past event punctuated by a palpable sense of things still happening 01 INTRODUCTION BY SARAH FRITCHEY 03 ALIZA SHVARTS: MATERIAL FICTIONS BY ANGELIQUE SZYMANEK 09 BANNER (YALE DAILY NEWS) 11 ON SABOTAGE 13 CITE / SITE 23 NONCONSENSUAL COLLABORATIONS, 2012-PRESENT NOTES ON A SHARED CONDITION 35 SIBBOLETH 41 POSTERS 43 HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A FICTION? NEW YORK VIRUS 47 HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A FICTION? BOGOTÁ VIRUS 50 HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A FICTION? NEW HAVEN VIRUS 51 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION BY SARAH FRITCHEY I checked into a hotel room to write this intro- further feedback. Shvarts’ ordeal became a duction. It’s the first time I’ve been alone over- topic of public debate, and in a follow up ar- night in years, and it feels like anything might ticle, a Yale spokesperson described her work be possible. One man in an elevator called as a “creative fiction.” As her story circulated me sweetheart; another admired my ability nationally and internationally over the inter- to swipe my key card and hit button six be- net, it received hundreds of reader comments. fore missing my floor, he was on twenty-two. This is where the exhibition Aliza Shvarts: Off A young woman held a door for me and I Scene begins, with the question of who has thanked her.
    [Show full text]
  • Embracing Maternal Eroticism: Queer Experiences of Pleasure in Maggie Nelson’S the Argonauts
    Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 3(1-2), 08 ISSN: 2542-4920 Embracing Maternal Eroticism: Queer Experiences of Pleasure in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts Mollie Ann Kervick 1* Published: September 10, 2019 ABSTRACT In this essay I approach The Argonauts (2015), specifically Nelson’s attention to maternal desire and eroticism through the lens of motherhood studies and matricentric feminism. I argue that The Argonauts provides a compelling contribution to a fairly new, but increasingly pertinent, discourse of empowered mothering. Nelson’s accounts of the erotic experience of mothering, coupled with details of her sexual experiences within and outside of her relationship with her partner, Harry, address what has heretofore been a deep- seated contradiction between the maternal body and sexual and erotic pleasure and desire. Nelson makes space for the consideration of motherhood and the erotic not as antithetical, but deeply entwined realms of experience. By drawing on Audre Lorde’s meditations on the erotic, as well as scholarship on maternal eroticism, I contend that The Argonauts exposes aspects of feminine and maternal experiences that transgress a patriarchal institution of motherhood which ultimately seeks to contain these experiences within the private sphere of the family. Keywords: motherhood, neoliberalism, academic feminisms, mothering, eroticism INTRODUCTION In her genre-defying poetic/critical memoir The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson explores the interstices of sex, mothering, and language in the age of North American neoliberalism. Nelson reflects on her experiences of family- making with her partner, artist Harry Dodge, through her journey of conceiving and giving birth to her son Iggy while learning to care for her stepson at the same time.
    [Show full text]
  • Maggie Nelson's Bluets
    A Strange Connectedness: On the Poetics and Uses of Shame In Contemporary Autobiography D i s s e r t a t i o n zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Philosophie in der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen vorgelegt von Jocelyn Elizabeth Parr aus Otahuhu, New Zealand 2016 Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Dekan: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leonhardt Hauptberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies Mitberichterstatter: Dr. Pascale Amiot (Université de Perpignan) Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 17. Dezember 2014 Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen: TOBIAS-Lib Abstract This dissertation studies the way that shame can be a pharmakon—a toxic affect or an intoxicating form—with as much potential to heal as it has to harm. I argue that shame informs, inspires, and limits contemporary forms of autobiography. I begin and end the dissertation with works of literary criticism that are loosely autobiographical autobiographical. Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling and Kate Zambreno's Heroines both aim to rebut traditional forms of literary criticism by writing in the form of memoir, thus generating a protective enclave for identities they call ‘minor’ (queer in the case of Cvetkovich, female in the case of Zambreno). Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station fictionalize their autobiographies thus questioning on both a fictional and a metafictional level whether or not anything—art, in particular—can have meaning. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets traces the shame of heartbreak, depression and longing across two hundred and forty propositions, all of which are in hot pursuit of something blue.
    [Show full text]
  • Episode 82 Maggie Nelson
    Rachel Zucker speaks with Maggie Nelson: Episode 82 of Commonplace RZ: [Intro]: Hello, and welcome to episode eighty-two of Commonplace featuring writer, critic, and professor Maggie Nelson. I'm your host, Rachel Zucker. Many of you listening will have read at least one of Maggie Nelson's incredible books. Some of you no doubt are dedicated fans of Maggie's book Jane or her book The Art of Cruelty: a Reckoning, or The Argonauts, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2015 and was a New York Times Best Seller or her cult classic Bluets published by Wave in 2009 and reissued by Wave in a special 10th anniversary edition last year. Maggie Nelson has won almost all the big prizes: an NEA fellowship, Guggenheim's Creative Capital Award, and the MacArthur, and her books sell. She is widely read and deeply appreciated by poets and scholars and by people who hardly ever read poetry or criticism. There are, of course, many excellent reviews of Maggie's work, fabulous interviews with Maggie wherein she talks about queer theory, feminist theory, the American obsession with violence and missing or murdered white women, art, identity, grief, the New York School poets, pain, pleasure, the color blue. You can find links to a few of our favorite reviews and interviews and to Maggie's books on our website, commonpodcast.com, and in our show notes. For those of you unfamiliar with Maggie's oeuvre, you have many delights ahead of you, including this conversation, which I recorded with Maggie at her office at University of Southern California on October 15th, 2019.
    [Show full text]
  • Becoming Autotheory Ralph Clare
    Becoming Autotheory Ralph Clare Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 85-107 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2020.0003 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754798 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Ralph Clare Becoming Autotheory he impact of the recent boom in what U.S. critics Tand publishers are increasingly calling autofiction is a notable, if curious, phenomenon. Authors such as Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk, as well as the wildly success- ful translations of works by Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante, have gained both readerly and critical accolades. In various ways, aut- ofictional works collapse fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography into texts that, as Marjorie Worthington writes, “constantly play with read- erly expectations about memoir and fiction, thwarting both and thereby forcing a recognition that . the line is at times rather permeable” (149). While something about these authors’ works seems radically new, however, several critics have put this boom into historical and cultural perspective. Autofiction, it turns out, has a notable literary and historical lineage.1 Yet within this swath of autofiction, something truly new is emerg- ing: autotheory. Autotheory constitutes something related to yet en- tirely distinct from autofiction. Whereas autofiction responds primarily to the post-postmodern literary scene and the rise of the anyperson memoir, autotheory responds more so to the institutionalization and the so-called death of theory.
    [Show full text]
  • Maggie Nelson's Many Selves
    LIFE AND LETTERS APRIL 18, 2016 ISSUE IMMEDIATE FAMILY Maggie Nelson’s life in words. By Hilton Als ay 5, 2015: that was when Maggie Nelson’s ninth book,M “The Argonauts,” came out. Published two months after the author turned forty-two, the slim, intense volume, which tells the philosophical, sometimes comic tale of Nelson’s ever- developing consciousness, combines—like a number of other masterpieces of American autobiography—memoir, literary analysis, humor, and reporting with vivid instances of both the familiar and the strange. Central to “The Argonauts” is the story of Nelson’s great love for Harry It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves that Dodge, a West Coast sculptor, makes her readers feel hopeful. Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New Yorker writer, and video artist who is fuidly gendered. As Nelson embarks on her intellectual and emotional journey, Harry also goes on various excursions in order to become the person he is now, whom Nelson describes, quoting a character from Harry’s 2001 flm, “By Hook or By Crook,” as neither male nor female but “a special—a two for one.” Sara Marcus, in an elegant and concise review of “The Argonauts,” for the Los Angeles Times, notes the way that Nelson circles “away and back again to central questions about deviance and normalcy, family- making and love.” What Nelson is asking, throughout the book, Marcus says, is “How does anyone decide what’s normal and what’s radical? What kinds of experience do we close ourselves of to when we think we already know?” Last month, the book won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, but long before that it was passed around and praised by any number of readers who knew nothing, or next to nothing, about Nelson’s interest in queerness, let alone lives like the ones her memoir grew out of and embodies.
    [Show full text]
  • Am Ia Bad Feminist? Moments of Reflection and Negotiation In
    AM I A BAD FEMINIST? MOMENTS OF REFLECTION AND NEGOTIATION IN CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST IDENTITY Elizabeth Ryan Brownlow A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2020 Committee: Sandra Faulkner, Committee Chair George Bullerjahn Graduate Faculty Representative Susana Peña Jolie Sheffer ii ABSTRACT Sandra Faulkner, Committee Chair In 2014 Roxane Gay published Bad Feminist, a collection of personal essays written from her position as a Haitian American feminist academic. This work quickly skyrocketed in popularity across both academic and nonacademic audiences. Representative of the increasingly public-facing authoethnographic scholarship of feminist academic women, Gay’s work is a product of its time. For this dissertation, I examine Bad Feminist along with two other also wildly popular autoethnographic works produced in the same decade, Tressie McMillan Cotton’s Thick: And Other Essays and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. I examine these texts as public- facing, accessible works that communicate their academic feminist authors’ feelings of feminist inadequacy in order to address larger issues of feminist practice and theory. Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s theory of becoming feminist, I analyze the “bad feminist moments,” expressed in these texts as moments of feminist crisis to identify what causes them and what functions they might serve. Using qualitative methodological triangulation, better known as mixed-methods research, I employ topic modeling and content analysis across all three texts to identify patterns that reveal not only why and how academic feminists might feel like they are bad feminists, but how and why they choose to share the moments in which they feel like bad feminists with others.
    [Show full text]
  • 5F5c6e7b6b960dcb427b33ea17
    WAVE BOOKS SEATTLE AND NEW YORK MAGGIE NELS ON BLUETS PUBLISHED BY WAVE BOOKS WWW . WAVEPOETRY.COM COPYRIGHT© 2009 BY MAGGIE NELSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WAVE BOOKS TITLES ARE DISTRIBUTED TO THE TRADE BY CONSORTIUM BOOK SALES AND DISTRIBUTION PHONE: 8oo 283 3572 I SAN 631 76ox THIS TITLE IS AVAILABLE IN LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHER LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN PUBLICATION DATA NELSON, MAGGIE, 1973 BLUETS I MAGGIE NELSON. 1ST ED. P. CM. ISBN 978-1 933517 40-7 (PBK. ALK. PAPER ) I. TITLE. PS3564.E4687B56 2009 8n'.54 Dc22 2009005830 DESIGNED AND COMPOSED BY QUEMADURA PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 FIRST EDITION WAVE BOOKS 020 And were it trne, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain. PAscAL, Pensees 1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excre­ ment coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became some­ how personal. 2. And so I fell in love with a color-in this case, the color blue-as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay un­ der and get out from under, in turns. BLU ETS 3· Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say.
    [Show full text]