The Something of Nothings: Memoir and Poetry

RC: Welcome, everyone, to Second Fridays. Tonight, we are fortunate to have Alice Jones and Paula Varsano in conversation.

Many of us try to write of our analytic experience. How do the private and collective intersect? Is it possible to describe the multilayered narratives where we exist?

As a poet and writer, Alice Jones tries to capture and play with moments of nothings based on her current memoir writings. Paula Varsano is a professor of Chinese literature at UC Berkeley. She specializes in classical poetry and poetics from the 3rd to the 11th centuries, with a particular interest in literature and subjectivity and the history and poetics of traditional literary criticism.

So at this point I will turn it over to Alice and Paula.

AJ: Well, thank you so much, Reyna, for bringing us all together and giving us this chance to think about writing and what it can do in expressing internal states of being. I'm particularly happy to be talking with Paula because so much of her work focuses on this expression of inner states, and in particular, states of absence. Some of you probably went to the conference with Hayuta Gurevich a couple of weeks ago. Her writing about absence very much echoes my thinking about somethings and nothings — the psychic

states of nothingness that show up in what I'm going to be reading.

What I've brought is a small segment of a much longer manuscript that I began about 10 years ago and is still an ongoing project. It's composed of moments that are shaped and laid out like a journal because I think that dailiness is the place where we experience. That's where life is, in the moments. And it's also where the nothings are.

There's an epigraph to this section from C. D. Wright's “Just Looking,” which says:

Begin with nothing, remote starting p