Art Monsters Reading Group Logistics

please read through to help with confirming logistics to get us started on the reading group.

Hello!

I’m writing to you because you expressed interest in the “Art Monsters” reading group. I have added you to this announcement-only substack.

Thank you for that! I am eager to do this together.

“Art Monsters” will focus on fiction and creative non-fiction in novel and short story form, alongside peripheral contemporary and historical art. It will be low-key, slow paced, but also intimate and rigorous in our close-read analysis. I am a fan of the close read and the possibility of language.

We will start with Little Labours (2019) by Rivka Galchen, paired with Madeline Donahue’s Scissors (2022). Little Labours—inspired by an eleventh-century Japanese text The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon—is 144 pages of astute observations about babies, motherhood, and literature. Scissors presents the absurdity and joy of the never-alone mother artist. Both set the tone for what I imagine this book club to be: attentive, non-linear, and funny in its ruminations.

Then we would decide together what we want to read and how. You can contribute as little or as much as you want to the form of this group. You do not need to have read the entire books to participate. Once we have decided on a date and time I will send out an email to start us off with links and prompts. I will be sending updates from this substack.

*Little Labours is unfortunately not available in the Montreal public library system. It is available on order from Drawn & Quarterly, or else I can also share my e-book with you.

For now, some housekeeping logistics:

The plan is to begin around the 3rd week of February and meet every 5 weeks for about 60 minutes.

We will start online only, and then slowly shift to a hybrid model.

Online for those abroad/unable to meet IRL, and in person for those in Montreal who can meet. This will start in my home/yard, and hopefully rotate hosts.

I would love some feedback about a time that works for people especially if you have little ones to attend to. What is most preferable? Please reply below rather than email me back so others can see it too.

• A Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday night after bedtime (8 or 9pm EST)

• A weekday daytime, morning (~10am) or afternoon (~2pm EST)

• A weekend morning EST?

I understand no time will work best for everyone, but I would love to consider the most ideal schedule for as many of us as possible.

Format

We will discuss the book and author of the month, with prompts from me or others, as well as passages that we want to highlight, read out loud in a group, or anything else you wish. Ideally, we will make connections to the chosen art work and look closely at it, its medium, and the artist.

---

Premable

On the heels of the new year, I finished Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader. It’s a series of essays on how the experiences of daily life and literature shape each other. Specifically, how re-reading books provides you with a self-reflexive perspective on how you have changed; how you understand and what you focus on in stories hinges on your accrued experience and feeling at that moment. I love the way Gornick loves books, and the way she uses them as objects to punctuate her life’s happenings. The books mark her as much as she marks them.

I want us to consider how the books and art works we plan to read shape us now, in 2023. George Saunders explains it better than I can in his latest post from Story Club. He writes:

First, we approach the story with as blank a mind as we can manage.  We are in a certain state before we begin reading.  The mind is, essentially, a blank page. …

Then we start reading. 

Things begin to happen in our mind.

When we finish the story, we’re in a different mindset than when we started. 

On a second read, we try to recollect what happened to us.  What caused that experience?  Where were the inflection points along the way?  What did we expect here, and how did that turn out?  Where did we feel affinity for the piece, where resistance? 

Then we might try to ask why we felt the things we felt.  To change the state of a mind is no small thing.  It takes energy.  It comes from some cause.  The working assumption here is that we can know that cause, because, after all, it happened to us, just now: just now, our mindstate got altered.

I wish this re-orientation for us, too.

If you have anything to add, questions, concerns, please write me. I want to facilitate and not gatekeep.

I cannot wait to hear from you, truly.

xx

Magda