MFA PUBLIC LECTURE AND READING SCHEDULE FOR SATURDAY, JANUARY 4
All lectures will be in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly; 84 Blue Ridge Circle; Black Mountain, NC 28711.
9:30 AM
KAVEH AKBAR ~ Crushed Glass and Medusa’s Veil: Exploring the Revelatory Break
In his A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno talks about experiencing the crack in a blues singer’s voice or the static of a grainy film as being “the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” If we accept as American writers that our medium, the English language, is one of the deadliest colonial weapons ever invented, then its breaking becomes a political urgency. How do we undermine our language’s inherent corrosiveness, turn a violent technology against itself to speak to things—doubt, sex, identity, justice, rage—it would rather us leave unspoken? This lecture will discuss writers—including Robert Hayden, Jean Valentine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Jos Charles—who use revelatory breaks in idiom, form, and syntax to render with clarity what is too urgent, too momentous, for mere rhetorical speech.
10:45 AM
JEREMY GAVRON ~ James Joyce’s Refrigerator, or Thirteen Ways of Looking at Lists
List making helped conjure writing out of the primordial soup – and may be returning it there in the shape of the Buzzfeed listicle. In between, lists have crossed from ledgers, journals and refrigerator doors into literature in a whole list of ways. This lecture will take an idiosyncratic look at some, mostly contemporary, examples of lists as literary tools and forms. Texts will include Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, and Debbie Urbanski’s “An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried” (short and available on the net), as well as probably some Lorrie Moore, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, and Guy Gunaratne.
Readings will begin at 8:15 PM in the Region Room of Blue Ridge Center at Blue Ridge Assembly.
C.J. Hribal
Sandra Lim
Antonya Nelson
Dan Tobin
The public is welcome to attend the morning lectures and evening readings in fiction and poetry offered during the Master of Fine Arts Program winter residency. Events last approximately one hour. Admission is free. The schedule is subject to change. PLEASE NOTE: The winter residency will be held at Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, NC, not on the Warren Wilson College campus.
For more information, call the MFA Office: (828) 771-3715
