{"id":40802216526,"date":"2017-09-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-09-07T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/monmouth-universitys-visiting-writers-series-opens-with-novelist-alena-graedon\/"},"modified":"2020-06-24T16:09:06","modified_gmt":"2020-06-24T20:09:06","slug":"monmouth-universitys-visiting-writers-series-opens-with-novelist-alena-graedon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/monmouth-universitys-visiting-writers-series-opens-with-novelist-alena-graedon\/","title":{"rendered":"Monmouth University\u2019s Visiting Writers Series Opens with Novelist Alena Graedon"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2017-2018 Visiting Writers Series opens with a reading by novelist Alena Graedon<\/strong> on Tuesday, September 19 at\u00a04:30\u00a0p.m.<\/strong> in the Great Hall Auditorium on Monmouth University\u2019s campus.<\/p>\n

Alena Graedon’s first novel,\u00a0The Word Exchange<\/em>, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Paperback Row pick, and selected as a best novel of 2014 by Kirkus. It has been translated into eight languages. She has twice been a MacDowell Colony Fellow (2012 and 2017), and has also received fellowships at Yaddo, Ucross, The Virginia Center for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and Jentel. Her nonfiction has been published in\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0newyorker.com,\u00a0The Believer magazine,\u00a0Guernica, and\u00a0Post Road<\/em>\u00a0among other publications. A native of Durham, NC, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s MFA program, and she is an Assistant Professor of English at Monmouth University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.\u00a0She is currently at work on her second novel and a collection of short stories.<\/p>\n

On her first novel, The New York Times<\/em> writes, \u201cClever, breathless and sportively Hegelian in theme (the book has three sections \u2014 Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis), The Word Exchange<\/em> combines the jaunty energy of youngish adult fiction (boyfriend trouble, parent conflicts, peer pressure and post-collegiate jitters) with the spine-tingling chill of the science-fiction conspiracy genre\u2026 a nervy, nerdy dystopic thriller set in New York City in the very near future, the risk of \u201csuddenly becoming stupid\u201d is not notional, it\u2019s actual. A highly contagious, sometimes fatal virus called \u201cword flu\u201d has leapt from computers to their users, corrupting not only written language but also spoken words with gibberish and scaring the \u201cpask\u201d out of infected netizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked about her writing process, Alena offered these words, \u201cThe best advice I got about writing came from a former professor, the wonderful fiction writer Sam Lipsyte. He said: \u2018Focus on the words in front of you. It’s a\u00a0deceptively simple instruction, but it’s how I did a thing that seemed a little impossible to me, fraught and full of hubris:\u00a0write a first novel.\u2019 I took it to mean: don’t worry about the giant schism\u00a0between the book you hoped to write and the one you’re actually writing, forget about what’s happening in the “literary world”\u2014don’t try to fit into or deviate from\u00a0trends, don’t think about who may read the book one day, or if anyone will. Just write several\u00a0sentences that you don’t hate. Write some more sentences. And then, when you have what feels like\u00a0enough sentences, go back over them, and revise them until\u00a0they’re doing more or less\u00a0what you want them to be\u00a0doing, with as much vitality and strangeness–and generosity for your characters–as you can. While doing this, try to laugh at yourself as often as possible,\u00a0while simultaneously taking yourself completely seriously.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2028Monmouth University\u2019s Center for the Arts Visiting Writers Series brings the most celebrated poets and authors from around the world (Andrei Codrescu, Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn, Adam Zagajewski,) and our own back yard (Long Branch\u2019s own US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky) to the beautiful auditorium of the University\u2019s centerpiece, the historic Great Hall. For additional information, please contact the director of the Visiting Writers Series, Michael Thomas at 732-263-5635 or visit online at www.monmouth.edu\/mca <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2017-2018 Visiting Writers Series opens with a reading by novelist Alena Graedon on Tuesday, September 19 at\u00a04:30\u00a0p.m. in the Great Hall Auditorium on Monmouth University\u2019s campus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":40802224813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,28,1,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40802216526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-center-for-the-arts","category-literary-arts","category-uncategorized","category-visiting-writers"],"subheadline":"","youtube":"","thumbnail":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/568\/2017\/09\/Alena-photo_newsthumb-2.jpg","gallery":null,"featured_img":"\"\"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802216526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40802216526"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802216526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40802228926,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802216526\/revisions\/40802228926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40802224813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40802216526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40802216526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/mca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40802216526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}