Lecture delivered at the Vermont College of Fine Arts on July 1, 2019
As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses. Everything else derives from that. You are creatures of your senses. All that follows—all the stuff of the mind, all the analysis, all the rationalization, all the abstracting and interpreting—follows up that point of contact, in the moment, through your senses.
-Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream
Let’s start at the beginning—before we knew about themes and metaphor, about symbols, about voice, about plot, about dialogue, about character. All those things writers obsess over. What was your first immersive reading experience? When did the book in your hand dissolve and the walls and the floor and all the furniture in the room recede beyond all your perceptions? When did your consciousness first slip away and inhabit what John Gardner described as a “continuous fictive dream”? To answer that question is to answer the question we’ve all asked ourselves: Why are you here? Not just the existential one, but the more immediate one: Why are you here at an MFA residency in Montpelier, Vermont? What was the book, or story, or poem that started you on this journey?
