On Wednesday, April 2nd, the interdisciplinary novelist, essayist, poet, and visual artist Renee Gladman, who is this year’s Ben Belitt Distinguished Faculty in Literature, read recent work in Tishman Lecture Hall. The event was hosted by the literature department at Bennington College.
Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. Her published works include a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Her newest work is My Lesbian Novel (2024), a work of fiction and autobiography. Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Since 2017, Gladman has exhibited her works on paper in galleries in the U.S. and across Europe. Her first solo show, The Dreams of Sentences, opened at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery in September 2022, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell Prize in fiction in 2021.
An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by Director of Poetry at Bennington, Michael Dumanis, and president of Bennington College, Laura Walker. In her address, Walker commemorated the legacy of Ben Bellitt, a previous instructor at the college, who, for fifty years, shaped Bennington College’s literary history. She thanked the Winston Foundation—that funds the Ben Belitt Undergraduate Writing Prize, the Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Writer, and the Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture—for their continued support of the artistic vision upon which Bennington stands today.
Gladman, who is currently teaching the seminar, LIT 4333: Reading and Writing Fiction & Nonfiction: The Emergence of Prose, read excerpts from My Lesbian Novel and Calamities. Lara Feigel of The Guardian says the following in praise of the novel: “The triumph of this book is to turn our current cultural obsession with all sorts of hybrids and mixtures from an aesthetic challenge into an urgent question of how we can make lives alongside each other. As all the best writers of comedy know, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen, the pleasure of falling in love is a structural pleasure: life at these moments is more narrative than non-narrative. Gladman makes the diagrammatic structure of comedy explicit and in doing so braids together her self-conscious interest in romance fiction as a genre and her growing obsession with it as a source of pleasure.”
When asked about the relationship between architecture and writing in the Q&A that followed the reading, she says, “how do I get architecture to do something…other than the architecture [itself]…architecture is important in writing. Drawing [can become] a way of writing. For a long time I was making these drawings that people would try to read.” Speaking of her book Calamities, she says that “[it] follows a drawing line rather than a writing line.” Gladman also answered questions related to the semantics of prose. According to her, “repetition is a way of gathering power on a page.”
The reading ended with book signing. The copies of My Lesbian Novel and Calamities were sold in Tishman.
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