Monday, December 27, 2010

Ryan Spooner Publishes in New Wave Vomit


MFA Candidate Ryan Spooner has not one, but three poems appearing in the most recent issue of New Wave Vomit:  "Zoo Poem," "An Objection to Night Swimming / Southern Coast / United States / America / July," and "Five Paragraph Essay by John D'Agata."  The poems can be enjoyed here.

New Wave Vomit is an electronic journal of wit and lyricism.  Submissions are encouraged, bulimia is not.

Winter Break Reading List


This semester, we had the privilege of reading some phe-nom-e-nal books. In case you'd like to pick a few up over the holiday break, you'll find them listed here:


The Complete Essays of Montaigne: by Michel de Montaigne
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: David Shields
The Gastronomical Me: M.F.K. Fisher
Gravity and Grace: Simone Weil
The Pleasure of the Text: Roland Barthes
A Room of One's Own: Virginia Woolf
Reflections: Walter Benjamin
Nox: Anne Carson
Bluets: Maggie Nelson
A Lover's Discourse: Roland Barthes
Ava: Carol Maso
The Book of Disquiet:  Fernando Pessoa
Speak, Memory: Vladimir Nabokov
Autobiography of Red: Anne Carson

+ selections of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Eula Biss, John D'Agata, Ander Monsen and others.

Monday, December 6, 2010

An Interview with Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson visits with MFA candidate Ryan Spooner




It’s difficult to come up with a biography or introduction to Maggie Nelson that surpasses Jenny Boully’s.  In fact, we won’t even try.  Instead we’ll say we’re graciously honored to have Maggie visit us recently, and even more appreciative of the time she took to meet and greet with students who’ve had all types of questions.  

Maggie Nelson is the author of multiple collections of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), Something Right, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007) and The Red Parts:  A Memoir (Free Press, 2007), which chronicles the reopening of a murder case in which Nelson’s aunt, Jane Mixer, was the victim.  

We are humbled to have had Nelson visit Columbia.  The following interview is only the tip of the brilliant, sincere, and welcoming presence that is Maggie Nelson:

How long did it take you to collect your "Bluets"?

I collected them my whole life—the blue anecdotes or memories or factoids in the book come from my childhood, from my teenage years, and from my early adulthood. But it was between 2003 and 2006 that I collected, and then wrote, most fiercely.

What was the process of assembling each of your threads throughout the book? For instance, did you collect tangible items, or bits and pieces of text? As essayists we’re all very interested in process, as it seems that different layers and stories throughout the text are seamlessly interwoven.

The process was something like building a blue bower. I collected all my pieces—some in the form of objects; some in the form of ideas; some in the form of mental images; some in the form of sentences or phrases—and literally surrounded my work space with them. I had a blue altar by my side, with all my blue objects laid out, and I made a kind of wallpaper out of index cards, each of which had a quote, image, or locution of potential use, and I hung it around my desk. The writing was basically a process of translating these objects, thoughts, facts, and memories into a web made of words.

Has there been any notable response or feedback to the moments in the book in which you describe sex? These moments are adroitly interwoven, and it'd be interesting to know how you knew when to implement them.

The book doesn’t actually describe sex in the way that, say, Catherine Millet describes it in her wonderful The Sexual Life of Catherine M., or Eileen Myles does in her brilliant Inferno. Instead, Bluets makes use of certain placeholder words (like “fucking”) that recur, sparking the text at certain moments and intervals. Sometimes the words feel empty, sometimes full. Mostly I wanted to dramatize the conjoined rhythms of thought, language, and body. You know, you’re trying to think something out very assiduously, like what the word “pharmakon” might mean, what the nature of divine darkness might be, and suddenly your body is sparked by a certain twinge, drive, memory, or flood. The writing body is many things. It isn’t that the body interferes with or interrupts the mind—not at all. I’m actually more interested in the reverse: how thought itself is a physical sensation, how ideas are felt “on the pulses,” as Keats had it.

Would this book have been any different, or the same, if you had chosen another color? Colors have their cultural and psychological associations, so do you think that this project would have been any more poignant had it been about, say, red or yellow or green?

I suppose someone else could have written a poignant book about any of those colors—think of Anne Carson’s Autobigraphy of Red, for instance—but I couldn’t have. I mean, brilliant and moving books can be written about anything under the sun. But a writer can’t feign the drive, interest, or passion required to power a whole book, and I would have been faking it had I tried to write about a color other than blue. You’ve got to go where it’s hot, I think, or at least I do. Otherwise I’m lost.

In an interview with About-Creativity.com, you mention "shifting genres" as a way to keep a freshness to your work. It seems you have an openness regarding form, but at the same time work best when given a set of constraints—for instance, you call Bluets a series of "Wittgensteinian propositions." Can you talk a bit about the ability of formal constraints to spur creativity? Which comes first: form or topic?

I don’t think it matters which comes first. Sometimes you have the subject, which aches to find a form; sometimes you have a compelling formal idea which propels you forward. I’ve worked both ways, though more often I’ve started with content. “Form is never more than an extension of content,” as Robert Creeley always used to say. I never used to understand what he was getting at, but I think now I do.

I am exceedingly interested in form, but I have to admit that the word itself kind of annoys me. Often I prefer the word “shape,” as it makes me imagine a book as a wild and wily animal rather than as a kind of static sculpture. I first got onto the “shape” idea back in college, when I read this Archie Ammons poem, the one that goes: “I look for . . . the shape/things will take to come forth in.” Later in the poem he says he’s actually “not so much looking for the shape/as being available/to any shape that may be.” This seems about right to me.

How might you respond to Bluets being called "melancholic" or "depressive?" Is this accurate? Is it even a negative criticism?

Those are wonderful words, not a criticism at all! If that were true, it would join a worthy pantheon of melancholic or depressive literature. Bluets actually talks a bit about self-help books for depression, which is a subtle hint that the book is my kind of self-help—my loose imitation of, or homage to, the kinds of books—literary and otherwise—that have helped me when I have been truly low. However, if one were to be more clinically accurate, it’s probably more of a hypomanic book—that is, evidencing a kind of “bipolar lite,” in which there are euphoric, productive highs and terrifying, sorrowful lows, but—by the grace of God—no real psychosis. 


(Note:  a PDF of this interview is also available here).

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Announcing a Columbia College Chicago End-Of-Semester Reading


Friends of the Columbia College MFA Programs:  in celebrating the hard work done by graduate Nonfiction and Poetry students at Columbia College Chicago, The Book Cellar (4736 N. Lincoln Ave.) shows its support by hosting an end of semester reading for poets and essayists looking to showcase their work.

Are you a poet who’s interested in meeting a few Nonfiction students?  An essayist looking to mingle with some poets?  Here’s your chance.  Join us at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square on Saturday, December 11 from 7 to 9 p.m. for good food, great drinks and a wonderful reading by Columbia’s MFA students.  Time slots will be limited to nine minutes per reader.

The Book Cellar is located at 4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave. in Lincoln Square

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Nonfiction Students Visit Iowa Conference

Last week a few lucky MFA students visited the University of Iowa, where famed writers from all over gathered for the university’s somewhat-annual NonfictioNow Conference.  The conference, similar to AWP’s annual conference, featured panelists and guest readers from Alison Bechdel to David Shields to Rebecca Solnit to Columbia’s very own David Lazar.  The students confessed that, whether sitting in on a riveting panel or meeting with a guest speaker, their time in Iowa was well-spent.  


Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Micah McCrary Publishes New Review in Bookslut


MFA Candidate Micah McCrary has published a new review of Joyce Carol Oates' In Rough Country:  Essays and Reviews in this month's issue of Bookslut.  Feel free to give it a read here and, of course, check out Oates' new book!

Friday, October 22, 2010

David Shields Visits During Creative Nonfiction Week



Last Thursday, author David Shields kindly visited us over at Columbia College during Creative Nonfiction Week, a week-long celebrated event presented in collaboration between the English, Journalism, and Fiction Departments (and this year co-sponsored by the Departments of Radio, Film & Video, and Critical Encounters). Shields joined past presenters Alex Kotlowitz, Art Spiegelman, Jamaica Kincaid and many others in celebrating a very diverse and widely discussed genre that continues to grow more and more in both its readership and authorship.

On his newest book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Shields spoke about the versatility of the Nonfiction genre, and on much of the controversy surrounding its credibility in an age where “memoir” is the only word needed for a piece of Nonfiction to be widely marketed. “The book is an anti-manifesto manifesto,” he said, adding that writers should “try and use the book as a source of your own work.”

The main point of the book was to rescue Nonfiction as literary art—the really rich tradition of Nonfiction going back to St. Augustine and maybe earlier, as an attempt to ask the most serious questions in the most attentive way.” The book, which is a compilation of Shields' own thoughts as well as the thoughts of his predecessors and contemporaries, is a keystone of modern cultural criticism, urging us to ask all the right questions about whether the things we find important today are really important—mostly, the media we choose to consume.

The project began, Shields said, as “a course packet in the early to mid '90s. I started developing this course on the self-reflective gesture of the essay and on documentary film. It developed into this huge, big blue binder, with literally thousands of quotations—all from people talking about the glory of the essay form.”

The book is a transitional text,” he continued, “one that has one foot in the digital world and one foot right there in traditional book culture. For readers, there [if the book were digitized] would be an open-source site in which readers would fill in the citations and when you got the citations correct the text would turn red or something.” A clear hint at Shields' okayness with the idea of using New Media within the Nonfiction genre. “The conventional novel,” he said, “the literary novel, is no longer congruent with contemporary life,” mostly because “we're obsessed with reality because we experience hardly any of it. As a result we're pretty numb, pretty bored, and we crave the real.”

And Shields, as always, has left us with poignant thought. “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings,” he said, pulling an already-attentive audience even closer. And he takes his bow and wraps everything up nicely with a paraphrased thought from the late David Foster Wallace: “We're existentially alone on the planet. I can't know what you're thinking and feeling, and you can't know what I'm thinking and feeling. The very best work constructs a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness.”