RENEE GLADMAN

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the fictional city-state Ravicka, as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in BOMB, e-flux, Granta, Harper’s, n+1, Paris Review, and POETRY. Gladman has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from numerous organizations, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the Lannan Foundation, and was the recipient of a 2021 Windham-Campbell prize in fiction.

1. THE DELTA QUADRANT

   In the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001), Captain Janeway and her crew get pulled through a wormhole and end up in the far reaches of outer space (I think it was going to take them about seventy-five human years to get back to Earth going at maximum warp speed, unless they found another wormhole or spatial anomaly that would shorten the trip). When I tried to imagine the distance from our planet to that point in the universe, when I tried to picture the expanse all at once, it broke my brain. Nevertheless, the Delta Quadrant became my top desired travel destination.

   Star Trek: Voyager, 1995–2001, still from a TV show on UPN. Season 1, episode 1 “Caretaker, Part I.”
2. COUNT OSSIE AND THE MYSTICAL REVELATION OF RASTAFARI, “GROUNATION” AND “GROUNATION CONT’D.” (1972)

   I have these intervals throughout the day while drawing or working on a difficult puzzle where I find I need to sing at the top of my lungs, sound out instruments with (fictional) precision, and punctuate my tribute with “ah” and “ohhh eeooeeoo.” When this has happened over the past few months, I’ve turned to these extended pieces. They have everything: drums, chanting, off-key singing, horns, church time, jazz club, after hours, hips moving, and body dipping, and the latter track ends in a holler, followed by colossal silence.

3. THE SCORES OF WADADA LEO SMITH

   I am not a musician. And although I can’t read music, I love many kinds, especially the difficult, vanishing, ethereal variety (except when I want to dance). As a thinker, I’ve always been grateful for sound’s invisibility, for the ways it can reach beyond the known and codified toward a wilder, more alive space: A score provides a kind of map to that terrain. Smith’s hand-drawn, vividly colorful scores seem to unfold with a keen awareness of the unquantifiable places they have seen and will see.

   Wadada Leo Smith, Sarhanna, 2011, mixed media, 8 3⁄4 × 12 1⁄2".
4. BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD, “THE MONUMENT DRAWINGS,” 1996–97

   There are many drawings or series of drawings to which I could dedicate my days; drawings with which I want to share a light-filled space, where I can sit with my tools—my pens, my paper, my laptop, my journals, everything I use to make things—and record how my mind changes from their proximity. Currently, I am sitting with a catalogue of internationally acclaimed artist and writer Barbara Chase-Riboud’s “Monument Drawings.” I understand when I’m looking at them that there are stories behind each title, that each drawing exists as a kind of tribute to a great artist or thinker, but what I’m sitting with is less what is true about the drawings than what reaches out of them toward me: the weight of light and dark in them, the relation of sharp and blur, and the layering of shape, intercut by negative space or shade.

   Barbara Chase-Riboud, Monument to Man Ray’s The Enigma of Isadore Ducasse Philadelphia, Penn. U.S.A., 1996, charcoal, ink, etching, and aquatint on paper, 31 1⁄2 × 23 3⁄4". From the series “The Monument Drawings,” 1996–97.
5. VAL JEANTY

   I wish I could get Haitian electronic-music composer and turntablist Val Jeanty to DJ my life. She would pull from my surroundings all the strange, the spiritual, the dense glowing dark, and the bright depths and make full embodiment possible. I’d travel, too: Portals would open, light would soften, then go dark. Deep pinks and yellows would emerge.

   Val Jeanty, Brooklyn, 2017. Photo: Richard Louissaint.
6. MAL WALDRON, “WARM CANTO” (1962)

   I love songs that are like architectures, full of strange rooms that open and close with your breathing. You find this piece in the middle of your day, the slow expanse of 3 PM, when something is pushing at your consciousness but you can’t quite identify it. You need a coffee or a strong tea. You need a shift in the visual plane: Step outside, take a breath, note something on the horizon—or in the space between you and the horizon—return, then play this song.

   Mal Waldron, North Sea Jazz Festival, Carel Willink Hall, The Hague, July 15, 2000. Photo: Brian Foskett/Heritage Images.
7. SWITZERLAND’S MUZEUM SUSCH

   In November 2019, my love and I traveled from Berlin to Zurich, then from Zurich to Susch to visit the Emma Kunz show, a version of which we’d seen at London’s Serpentine Galleries the previous summer. A red train carried us there through the alpine mountains. The museum, housed in a former monastery, appeared to us in the dimming winter light as a set of two or three ancient buildings, blanketed by snow, and so elusively situated that it took us at least twenty minutes to find the entrance. Once inside, I remember a lot of climbing and turning into intimate, low-lit spaces holding Kunz’s works and gazing in wonder at stunning views out of the accompanying windows.

   Muzeum Susch, Switzerland, 2019. Photo: Conradin Frei.
8. ANNE TRUITT, YIELD: THE JOURNAL OF AN ARTIST (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022)

   The only thing I probably love more than encountering a visual or language-based work so powerful that it reshapes me on a cellular level is reading a reflective text on how that work came to be, or what was going on in the artist’s life as they made that work, or what the writer thought of her materials, how her body felt, what her days looked like as she wrote. The published journals of world-renowned sculptor Anne Truitt (1921–2004)—Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), Prospect (1996), and now, posthumously, Yield—are unique in that they contain all these perspectives. Truitt is an artist pondering the lives of the objects she’s made, and she is a writer writing, pulling her experiences as a creator, mother, and friend through gorgeous, meditative prose. The final book,Yield, is somehow even more exceptional, as it gives us a view that we don’t often have access to but very much need: the voice and perspective of a brilliant woman approaching the end of her working life and her death.

   Anne Truitt in her Twining Court studio, Washington, DC, 1964. © Estate of Anne Truitt. All rights reserved/Bridgeman Images.
9. SEATTLE’S DRINK BOOKS

   I have never visited this book-and-natural-wine shop, but I am in love with its concept. It is described on its website as a “place for readers, natural wine lovers, and folks who are interested in building community around thoughtful, drinkable art.” Each month, they match a gorgeous bottle of wine with a work of experimental or unconventional prose (focusing on woman authors), accompanied by a thoughtful, lyrical description of why the pairing was made. Their Instagram @wedrinkbooks is delectable for browsing.

   Wine and book pairing from @wedrinkbooks’s Instagram feed, September 29, 2022.
10. RIVER HALEN, DREAM ROOMS (BOOK*HUG PRESS, 2022)

    “I have decided instead to do the whole dance in public. To show my body moving through some positions. I am not doing this to overwrite the blank. It’s still there, around and between the gestures.” This is a tender, funny, and profound collection that employs both poetry and prose to, as Halen says, “properly attend” to the world, to inscribe safe and productive spaces for the unfolding of a trans self.