The 2018-19 Stetson Spotlight Series continues on December 7 with a presentation by Dr. Teresa Carmody, Assistant Professor of English, who will speak on “Archive: A Novel-Essay”.
Date: Friday, December 7
Time: 1:30 pm- 2:30 pm
Location: Lynn Business Center 124
Snacks will be available. All are welcome!
SPOTLIGHT NOW OFFERS CULTURAL CREDIT!
Please encourage your students to attend.
Click here for a complete schedule of Stetson’s Spotlight Series.
“Archive: A Novel-Essay”
As a young writer, I studied creative nonfiction before landing on fiction as my primary mode or genre. It was a decision I announced, I remember, at my MFA graduation, CNF-degree in hand. For the next fifteen years I wrote and studied fiction, albeit often highly autobiographical or hybrid forms, such as autofiction and the roman à clef. Yet a few years ago, I found myself thinking seriously again about creative nonfiction, alongside the archives of several writers who had influenced my own work: Clarice Lispector, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf and Kathy Acker, to name a few. With support from a summer grant, I’ve been spending time inside these writers’ archives, official and unofficial, while writing a series of essays about coming into my own creative self-awareness via readings of their work. In this presentation, I’ll talk about the project’s inception, read excerpts from completed lyric essays on Virginia Woolf and Kathy Acker, and show images from the archives of Clarice Lispector and Zora Neale Hurston.
Some guiding questions:
How does creative practice both determine and anchor change?
How might a creative practice mediate internal and external worlds?
Teresa Carmody, Ph.D., is a writer, editor and publisher. Her most recent book, Maison Femme: a fiction (2015), is a roman a’ clef about two women who run an independent press out of their basement in Los Angeles. Written via constraints and incorporating images by Vanessa Place, Maison Femme draws on the structure of their shared house to explore the border between writing and publishing, between private and public, between memory and the archive. Carmody is also the author of Requiem (2005), a micro-collection of short stories lauded by the American Book Review as “darkly poignant,” and which David L. Ulin describes a “marked throughout by its own quiet tone of authority, which works to peel back the surface of what we imagine and examine what is going on underneath.”
Stetson Spotlight Series
The Stetson Spotlight Series at Stetson University is a showcase of faculty research, creative inquiry, and other scholarly engagement to the campus community. Presenters are primarily recipients of grant awards through the Stetson Summer Grant Program.
Click here for a complete schedule of the Stetson Spotlight Series.