The place of interest, then, this corner between literature and truth, will

form a certain angle. It will be a figure of folding back, of the angle

ensured by a fold. —Jacques Derrida, from “The Double Session”

In this generative prose writing workshop, we will examine the different ways in which

writing can allow for what cannot be articulated—either because there are simply no

words to accurately depict what must be said or because the speaker quite simply cannot

utter what must be said—and how allowing space for the unspeakable can result in a

form of haunting, a suspension, we might say, of the present or, rather, a folding in of the

past in the space of the present. Our meeting will begin with the discussion of an outside

text, after which we will move on to a series of readings and generative writing exercises

which will result in a collection of first drafts from which students will be able to

construct entirely new works. During this weekend course we will read and engage

with texts that engage with the concept of haunting in its many forms. Some of the work

we may read and discuss include texts by Joy Williams, Clarice Lispector, Hannah

Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser.

CYNTHIA CRUZ is the author of Hotel Oblivion, (Four Way Books, 2022) Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018), How The End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). She is also the author of Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug, 2019) and The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (Repeater Books, 2020). Forthcoming in 2023 are a new collection of poems, Back to the Woods (Four Way Books) and a novella, Steady Diet of Nothing. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, BOMB, and the Boston Review.  She has published essays, interviews, and book and art reviews in the Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Guernica, and the American Poetry Review.