Michael Hyde, Courtney Zoffness, and Laura Dave each read from their fiction on Alumni Day at the Writers House, May 12, 2007. Recordings of each of the three readings--and profiles of the writers as well as photographs of the event--can be found on a special event page we've created. Click on the image here to the right and view a video excerpt from this program: Jessica Lowenthal introduces Courtney Zoffness. Courtney, by the way, teaches creative writing workshop here at Penn, which "explores the bridges and boundaries between fiction and nonfiction."
Saturday, July 07, 2007
three young fiction writers
Michael Hyde, Courtney Zoffness, and Laura Dave each read from their fiction on Alumni Day at the Writers House, May 12, 2007. Recordings of each of the three readings--and profiles of the writers as well as photographs of the event--can be found on a special event page we've created. Click on the image here to the right and view a video excerpt from this program: Jessica Lowenthal introduces Courtney Zoffness. Courtney, by the way, teaches creative writing workshop here at Penn, which "explores the bridges and boundaries between fiction and nonfiction."
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
