Week 3

It's already the third week of school, and I really don't have any interesting stories. In a lot of ways, it feels less like being at school and more like belonging to an overly ambitious book club. That reads exclusively literary collage. And happens to be led by David Shields, who, as far as I can tell, invented the term literary collage.* (On a side note, I really like him so far, and he is, in fact, as bald as his website would lead you to believe.)

I need to maybe find a good definition of literary collage because I am pretty sure that's what I want to write. That's what I have been writing, I just didn't know it was a real thing. Since college, I've been throwing around the term "creative nonfiction" when people grill me about what I actually write (and by "grill," I mean ask the logical follow-up question when someone says I'm a "writer"). And now I get to sound even more pretentious by saying I write creative nonfiction, primarily literary collage.

To give you an idea of some of the things on our reading list, I'd say read Bluets by Maggie Nelson, but the Seattle Public Library system did not have a copy, so it might be hard to find unless you want to buy it. Other books on the list: David Shields Reality Hunger (which is a manifesto about freeing writing from the constraints of narrative and made a lot of sense to me-- maybe because I've never been able to invent characters who do things or tell stories in a linear way). Ann Carson's Plainwater. For the Time Being by Annie Dillard.

*And by this I mean he seems to be the genre's leading proponent. Meaning there aren't very many Google hits for "literary collage," although it is an excellent description.