From faculty member Stacey D’Erasmo’s residency lecture, “Love Among the Ruins”:
Like electricity, ideas travel. Sparks fly, unpredictably, ignite previously solid structures and we are changed. Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of these tropological exchanges in modern fiction is the abundant evidence they offer to the effect that categories, whether of marketing or of identity, are so obviously permeable. We look at one another, we read one another, and something happens on both sides. We connect. We long to be like, to be similes. We can’t help it and in fact, it may be that there is no other way to get there, to whatever that place is […] It is an odd sort of falling in love. Writer to writer, book to book, metaphor to metaphor. It happens both with and without us, but the profundity of its effect is undeniable.
Stacey is the author of The Sky Below
