Marisa Silver – The Perplexing Now (January 2025)

How do we write about a moment of social and political upheaval even as we are living through it? Can our feelings of destabilization and uncertainty translate into meaningful fiction and poetry, or is the perspective afforded by the passage of time a necessary ingredient? By examining work by artists who have produced fiction, poetry, film, and music during crises, we’ll explore ways to write the now right now. Among the works we’ll discuss will be The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, Systems by Charles Yu, George Floyd Story, by John Edgar Wideman, poems by Tim Dlugos, the film The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir, and the Olivier Messiaen composition, Quartet for the End of Time.