Renee Gladman Talks Architecture at Pin-up

On the occasion of her new book, Prose Architectures, Renee Gladman joins writer Drew Zeiba at Pin-up magazine for a conversation about interactions between prose, architecture, and the body as it plays out in language. Zeiba introduces their discussion with a note about Gladman's relationship with home, geographically, and in genre: "Renee Gladman is hard to pin down. The former Harvard Radcliffe fellow is usually described, all too simply, as a writer in 'experimental prose.' Her literary investigations range from fiction — including her Ravicka series (which chronicles a mysterious city with a yellow sky) — to personal essay, such as the 2016 'Calamities,' and even books of poetry and visual art." Let's start there: 

She has also edited for the notable poetry and experimental prose press Leon Works, as well as the Leroy chapbook series and taught writing and literature at various universities. In Gladman’s novel The Event Factory, the first of the Ravicka series, the narrator is caught thinking: “Architecture again, it always comes to that.” This refrain might also be true for Gladman herself, whose work so often explores the relationship between narrative and architecture and what it means to live through both. Most recently this architectural interest has taken the form of “prose architectures” — proto-linguistic drawings in the contours of buildings and cities. The drawings have been exhibited at We Buy Gold in Brooklyn and Poet’s House in New York, and have been collected in her most recent publication Prose Architectures.

What keeps you returning to architecture?
I’ve talked about architecture for a long time. I feel like it emerged out of questions I used to have — or answers I used to find — in the city. I used to want to write about the city all the time and a lot of my books take place in cities. Then I used to talk about the sentence as a city, as a space to move through where you encounter punctuation like derailments or signs. It just got to be more abstract. I realized that, because my lexicon in drawing is these simple lines that become cityscapes or building structures, I could draw towards this notion of architecture that I was really interested in. The drawing speaks to this kind of confluence of ideas, where architecture is now a kind of paragraph or a kind of drawn shape that’s full of language or full of the suggestion of language.

Read on at Pin-up.