Saturday, October 30, 2010
4 former students read
This afternoon at Penn's "homecoming" weekend, we at the Writers House celebrated its 15th year by hosting an event, open to all, that featured four alumni writers (all former students of mine): Eric Umansky, who read an essay he'd published in Salon; Kerry Sherin Wright, former long-time director of KWH, who read part of a short story; Suzanne Maynard Miller, who, with some actor friends, staged three scenes from a new play; and Alicia Oltuski, who read about half of a short story about an East German family, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that set up a falling-of-wall re-enactment in the family store each day for tourists. The video embedded above is of Alicia reflecting on her years at the Writers House.
"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 
