I was a child in Los Angeles adrift in a world of TV and spectacle and vapidity and a deep unarticulated loneliness and out-of-placeness, where I learned and loved to read and found in literature the wild connections, understanding, and a chorus of voices which spoke to me then across time, space, culture and language, and encouraged and emboldened me, and continue to do so until today.
I was a child in Los Angeles adrift in a world of TV and spectacle and vapidity and a deep unarticulated loneliness and out-of-placeness, where I learned and loved to read and found in literature the wild connections, understanding, and a chorus of voices which spoke to me then across time, space, culture and language, and encouraged and emboldened me, and continue to do so until today.
“I don’t know where to begin because I have nothing to say…”
is the opening line from an essay by the poet, Mary Reufle, called “Madness, Rack, and Honey” which meditates, among other things, on metaphors, an ad for a Coach bag, the correlation between suicide and literacy, and wasting time. It’s a good read.
Goddard College MFAW faculty Micheline Aharonian-Marcom: Like you, I’m a devotee of letters and the Imagination, of Imaginative Literature, and what I have to offer you, writers, poets, dreamers, storytellers, keepers and people of the Word, in addition to my steadfast belief in the human capacity for love, are some thoughts on books and writing and art, for in my loss of what say to you, and in my great worries about the times we live in, no doubt many years in the making but now firmly upon us as we face the consequences of our creations and of our politics, I returned over the last months to the library to seek in solitude and quiet the wisdom, the beauty, the truth and company in books—my great home since I was a child in Los Angeles adrift in a world of TV and spectacle and vapidity and a deep unarticulated loneliness and out-of-placeness, where I learned and loved to read and found in literature the wild connections, understanding, and a chorus of voices which spoke to me then across time, space, culture and language, and encouraged and emboldened me, and continue to do so until today.
Goddard MFA in Creative Writing faculty member Micheline Aharonian Marcom, along with four other artists and writers, for the past year and a half has been working on The New American Story Project, a digital oral history project recording the stories of children who have fled violence in Central America and have come to the United States as refugees. JoAnne Tompkins, a current student in the Goddard MFA in Writing Program in Port Townsend, WA, interviews Aharonian Marcom about The New American Story Project.
Goddard MFA Faculty member Micheline Marcom recalls what Schopenhauer said: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” She wonders how we might, in our “Information Age,” see better.
You could say I lost my belief in our politicians. They all seemed like game show hosts to me. — “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” Sting I. Empathy and the Iliad I read an article this week,
She’d been feeling sad all week and she said it was because of a conflict with her lover or place of employ or caused by reading too many vacuous comments in the newspaper and the proud ignorance and misanthropy of
Three Apples Fell From Heaven was Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s first novel. Here she tells us a little about its inception: I began it when I was in my late twenties and enrolled in the MFA Program at Mills College, where
For the first time in seventeen years—since I began writing books in my late twenties when I undertook advanced studies and completed my MFA—I found, in the fall of last year, that I no longer felt the urge to write
