F175.
Where Words & Music Meet: Writerly Revelations of Deep Listening
Friday, March 25, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Everyone listens to music, but writers can listen with a special ear for the lessons of craft and artistic structure, for sparking hidden pockets of forgotten or suppressed autobiography, or for guides to one’s cultural identity. Music, like writing, is multivocal. Writers attempt to translate the music we hear into metaphor, images, narratives, and revelations as we recount the often-unexpected journeys music offers and describe the places we might then arrive at in our writing.
Participants
Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and McSweeney's. He is a professor emeritus of creative writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he is a cofounder and editor at large of Ninth Letter.
Francesca Royster is author of two books: Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era and Becoming Cleopatra. She has published essays on music, culture, and identity in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Slag Glass City. She teaches English at DePaul University.
Karen Tongson is the author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters, and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. She received Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian and Queer Nonfiction in 2019. She is the chair of gender and sexuality studies, and professor of GSS, English, and ASE at the University of Southern California.
Desirae Matherly is the chair of English and languages at Tusculum University where she teaches writing and serves as nonfiction editor for the Tusculum Review. Desirae earned a PhD in creative nonfiction from Ohio University in 2004 and is a former Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Thomas Larson is the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry, The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s' Adagio for Strings', and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative.
