Staff Writer Anum Ahmad attended CUSA’s first installment of the Creative Writing Lecture series with Katie Kitamura on Wednesday, February 1st, 2023 at Dodge. 

Columbia University School of the Arts is hosting a four part Creative Writing lecture series, and author and current NYU professor Katie Kitamura held the first lecture of the semester. Kitamura is a seasoned author and most recently published Intimacies, which was one of the New York Times’ Top 10 Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her work has also been published in 21 languages, as well as currently in the process of film and television adaptations. 

The event started off with small appetizers and even a few drinks being served.  After about ten minutes of conversation, the lecture began. Kitamura explained her lecture was focused on writing from a non-human perspective. To facilitate this lecture and discussion, example packets of this type of writing were handed out at the start of the session. 

Before beginning the discussion, she spoke a bit about her writing process. Kitamura has published two novels, both written in the third person. However, her new novel in development is in the first person. Kitamura explained how she likes to be challenged by her writing, constantly changing her relationship with prose and exploring where her writing takes her. She explained, “One of our primary responsibilities as writers is to follow the rabbit hole in our sessions.” 

The idea of distributive consciousness, or multiple writers contributing to a single project, is a more niche facet of fiction. Kitamura shared her experiences working with Swedish artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby on the creative process of collaboration in fiction. She explained how, oftentimes, authorship is “fetishized,” and discussed the importance of “de-authorship”—a type of writing where the figure of the author is decentered in some way.

After sharing Tim Norton’s observation that “there is no pronoun entirely suitable to support ecological beings,” Kitamura also highlighted the challenges authors face when writing about non-human objects or beings.

Finally, the lecture moved on to an interactive reading of three passages from different novels.

The first was Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, which is told from the perspective of a mollusk, a being with no eyes, no body parts, and seemingly no consciousness. Calvino eloquently describes the potential thoughts and feelings such a being would have. I found it similar to the cutscenes of the rocks in Everything Everywhere All At Once, capturing how the narrative of non-human beings is extremely different from regular prose. The room was full of laughter as we were reading this piece, and it was my favorite out of the three. 

The next piece of writing was The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Price. In this story, a man disconnects himself from technology and quite literally steps into nature. The trees begin to connect with him, and he understands their language, their consciousness.  I found this extremely unique and also written in a different manner compared to regular novels. One of the comments Kitamura made during this discussion was, “the most important thing is tree time is different than human time.” How does a concept as simple as time get warped across different beings? 

Finally, the last piece was a short excerpt from Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer. This was told from the perspective of an eye that has cancer. Due to time restraints, this discussion ran shorter, but it brought an interesting perspective to the table: if body parts were conscious, how would they be described? This was the most abstract and difficult writing to understand, in my opinion. 

Overall, this lecture was both informative and well-presented. Katie Kitamura not only interacted with the audience but opened up an interesting perspective when it comes to the world of Creative Writing. Ii came away understanding much more  about creative perspective  as an integral part of the writing process”

The next installment of the Creative Writing Lecture Series will have Joshua Cohen speaking at Dodge 501 on Wednesday, February 8th, 7:30 PM.

Katie Kitamura via Flickr