by Chloë Moore ’24
As we announced last month, the English department is launching a new series of faculty-inspired events called Literary Salons that bring local writers and literary professionals into conversation with English Department students. Now that our first one has happened, we’d like to give you an overview of our upcoming evenings– jot them into your calendar, and we’ll see you there!
9.27.23 Claire Wahmanholm, a local poet invited by Professor Prior, visited the Literary Salon to read from her most recent collection, Meltwater. Published by Milkweed Editions, one of the foremost independent literary presses and located here in the Cities, Meltwater explores ecological change and crisis, motherhood, and more. We also got to hear some brand new poems, part of her upcoming book project “Wonder Machine.” After the reading, Dr. Wahmanholm took student questions on craft, process, and form as a both generative and restrictive tool. To round off a great evening, students got to do a writing exercise in abecedarians, a poetic form organized around the alphabet, and one of Dr. Wahmanholm’s favorite forms (she’s a “big fan of the alphabet,” in her own words). Students came up with two lists of words starting with each letter and were let loose to make it as far down the alphabet as they could. Plenty of people got all the way to Z (or zed, depending on who you’re asking), and a few students shared their poems with the group. It was a delightful event and a great start to our Literary Salon series!
10.18.23 Professors Coral Lumbley, Amy Elkins, and Daylanne English will host a “Death Panel” Salon that will follow right after our Haunted Coffee House. While death and dying are taboo events now usually relegated to sterile hospital wards, death has always been an integral part of life and literary culture. This Death Panel will feature a spine-tingling discussion of death, dying, medieval zombies, funerary herbs and spices, de/composition, rotting potatoes, spiritualism, and the afterlife. This atmospheric panel will invite attendees to become participants in the sensory elements of funeral culture, and to actively consider the horror, beauty, and aesthetics of death. Suggested dress code: mourning clothes, Gothic styles, or a simple white “shroud” with flowers. We will have Halloween-y snacks to go along with the discussion!
11.1.23 Laura Kunreuther will be joining us on Professor Tange’s invitation. Dr. Kunreuther is an anthropologist and most recently has been working on a film project called The Bridge, which is a fictionalized telling of the stories of translators working in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. The film was written by the translators themselves, and will be screened at Macalester the following day. During the Literary Salon, Dr. Kunreuther will share about her experience working on the film, and will also read from her work in “flash ethnography,” an emerging anthropological genre inspired by flash fiction. Join us for an exciting discussion about translation, anthropology, and creative nonfiction across fields!
11.8.23 Invited by Professor Elkins, Dr. Elaine Auyoung, a professor at the University of Minnesota, will join us to give a talk tentatively titled On Seeing and Being Seen: Studying Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Dr. Auyoung’s work brings together feminist theory with research on learning to explore how writers and critics can offer transformative ways of seeing. The talk will be interactive, so make sure to bring some questions!
11.29.23 Professors Coral Lumbley and Emma Törzs will host a Salon about literary fashion and dress throughout history. From sultry medieval gowns to modern power suits, an outfit—like a picture—is worth a thousand words. As Virginia Woolf says in Orlando, a novel about a time-traveling, gender-swapping heroine, clothes “change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” Clothing is culture, communication, and at its best, celebration of the embodied human experience. The Literary Fashion Salon will feature a special round table discussion about the intersections of fashion and writing with literary historian Coral Lumbley, novelist Emma Törzs, and award-winning writer Lesley Nneka Arimah. Join us for chat about the joys and woes of fashion. For an extra-fun evening, come dressed as your favorite literary figure or author!
All in all, we have a lot to look forward to with our Literary Salons this semester, so stay tuned for updates and make sure to join us!