Idra Novey teaches

Visual Art and Fictional Worlds: A Writing Workshop

4 online sessions beginning Tuesday, March 4 at 7pm EST

This seminar will focus on the confluence of visual art and the development of convincing fictional worlds. Participants will read and discuss scenes about visual art in novels and stories from Rachel Cusk, Brandon Taylor, Mieko Kawakami, Garth Greenwell, Cesar Aira, and others. We'll contrast how each writer incorporates descriptions of art works to reveal the sensibility of a fictional character or reflect on shifting values about art and meaning in a particular place and era. For each session, we'll read new excerpts along with the entirety of Aira's essay On Contemporary Art (David Zwirner Books) in which Aira defines a finished painted picture as a “visible testament to the mad solitary machine that moves around inside artistic activity.” Participants will have opportunities to do some writing exercises experimenting with fictional voices discussing a work of art, or in the act of making visual art themselves.

Idra Novey is a writer and translator. Her recent novel Take What You Need was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023, a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her translations include Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. and Garous Abdolmalekian's Lean Against the Late Hour, co-translated with Ahmad Nadalizadeh, a finalist for the PEN Poetry in Translation Prize. She’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She teaches at Princeton University and her new book of poems, Soon and Wholly, is a collaboration with visual artist Erica Baum.