The Writer's Life Colloquium Fall 07
As part of my official “course of study” people hear me babbling about lectures and readings all the time. The blurbs below are just notes, for the sake of memory, from what I went to, maybe more interesting in a voyeuristic way than in gleaning any helpful information (sans links you might just have to know who these people are).
These are the lectures I attended in Fall 07:
September 18. Catherine Stine. Q&A galvanized me for
doing graphic novels. Even made a contact with a publisher!
September 25. David Thompson. Exploration of the
nazi-propaganda film-making went well with my War and Politics lit
class. Other amazing films shown and discussed.
October 2. Carrie Brownstein. Big fan of Sleater-Kinney and
excited by Rock N Roll Camp for Girls. Excellent example of nonfiction
writing in a community environment.
October 4. The Apocalypse Reader. Totally obsessed with
the Apocalypse (and our human/cultural obsession with it). Impressed
and inspired to learn the anthology was created by a new graduate of our program.
November 5. Sasha-Frere Jones. Interested in his writing about pop culture.
November 7. Nina Khrushcheva. Loved the creative, surreal (nonfiction!) way
she wrote about Nabokov. (Proper pronunciation is indeed na-BO-kov.)
November 14. Carolyn Forche. just plain amazing. She was a
really nice speaker. Greater appreciation of poetry due to my War and
Politics class (the russian and polish poets), and how poetry has more
in common with creative nonfiction than I’d realized.
December 10. Yona Zeldis McDonough. Confidence built for one
of my other pet-project ideas, and I found value in
everything she had to say EXCEPT that nonfiction is a red-headed step
child. Out of nowhere, she said that she thought fiction was a “higher
calling” than nonfiction (which is weird, she seems to write a LOT of
nonfiction for kids) which distracted me from her lecture. Deborah
Brodie did a respectable job of smoothing this over in a nice way. I believe transcendence is possible in nonfiction just as in fiction. Maybe Ms McDonough was thinking about cookbooks. Can’t we all just get along? Oh well, I don’t hold it against her. It was rather funny.
I went to all the student readings, and read a piece in one of them.
They are one of my favorite things. Also volunteered in order to attend the LWC
which was great. Yay Colloquium!
[nope, don’t sound like an intellectual yet. but hey, those were just notes. i’m allowed to write “yay” to myself]
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