KEYNOTES
In my on-going quest to experiment with nonfictive performative modes, I’ve become more and more interested in the forms that the Keynote presentation can take. Here are some recent iterations–multi-discursive and multimedia–even if, it could be said, “you had to be there.” Nothing can replace embodied performance, and yet it’s also my hope that the refashioned Keynote can still enjoy an afterlife. The following journals and platforms have helped me to realize that intention.
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“Nonfiction’s Underground”
A High(Key)note
Originally delivered at NonfictioNow, sponsored by the University of Notre Dame, June 13, 2025.
Now available as an audio as well as readable text with some of the images that appeared with the original at BLACKBIRD, volume 23.4, Summer 2025.
This Keynote, an address to writers, is my response to our current moment. Is it possible to respond in a language other than the one presented us by contemporary politics? I turn to the unconscious; to dream; to calling and being called; to the power of Eros as an answer to the death drive that suffuses these times.
Fellow Keynoters were Kiese Laymon and Camille Dungy.
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“Timeless Dwelling: Imagining a Genre of the Yet-to-Be”
Originally delivered June 20th, 2024 at a day-long Symposium alongside a previous day’s workshop for faculty and students at Oxford University under the aegis of the Creating Criticism project hosted by Joe Moshenska and Iris Pearson. Now available at creativecritical.net
The Keynote answers the question of whether it matters what we call what we’re doing–experimental criticism, creative nonfiction, lyric essay, etc., and homes in on a genre I aim to re-discover and reinvent–the Literary Étude or Study–in an era where “study” as verb and noun might be fast disappearing.
Here is Joe and Iris’ description of the Project:
The colloquium began with a plenary address by Mary Cappello, whose remarkable and varied body of work has been a lodestar and an inspiration for ‘Creating Criticism’ since its inception. Cappello’s short book Lecture is exemplary of our central concerns in the way that she combines critical reflection on the history and nature of the lecture form – what it might be, what it tends to become – while creating in the process a new version of the very form that she seeks to understand, and the kinds of thinking it can embody and provoke. Here we reproduce a version of Mary’s plenary lecture, framed by some additional reflections on the nature of the plenary or keynote as a curious subgenre of the lecture form. This pair of texts form a bridge between Cappello’s wider body of work and the specificity of the remarks delivered at the colloquium, both an autonomous occasion and an integral part of a wider authorial whole.
And here are the links to the Keynote as after-image:
“Vanishing Acts/The Embodied Keynote”
a meditation on the keynote as a genre and the questions and contexts that informed this keynote
“Timeless Dwelling: Imagining a Genre of the Yet-to-Be”
the Keynote proper
a folio of Images that accompanied the Keynote
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A (Low)Keynote
A pandemic challenge recorded in my living room in December 2021 when NonfictioNow, set to occur in New Zealand, needed to be reconceived and reoriented.
“Pause/Rewind/Play” is a digitally-mediated love-note, to bridge community, trace movement and investigate pause.
Fellow Keynoters were Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Behrouz Bouchani.