Calamities by Renee Gladman

by Renee Gladman

WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from CLMPA collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Nonfiction, Memoir, Writing, Queer, Biography

Paperback

First published September 6, 2016

About the author

Renee Gladman is an artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—all published by Dorothy. Her most recent books are My Lesbian Novel (2024) and a reprint of her 2008 book TOAF (both also from Dorothy). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, POETRY, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Gladman’s first solo exhibition of drawings, The Dreams of Sentences, opened in fall 2022 at Wesleyan University, followed by Narratives of Magnitude at Artists Space in New York City in spring 2023. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this collection of Gladman's quasi-essays to be intermittently interesting. There are two parts: (1) a series of short pieces beginning with the phrase 'I began the day...' which becomes a jumping off point for the essay that follows. These are essays in the loosest form of the word, as noted by Gladman herself elsewhere, and go in many different directions, the most interesting of which I found to be the ones related to her Ravicka cycle books; (2) a section entitled 'The Eleven Calamities' which deals with artistic process and specifically Gladman's transition from writing to drawing (what prompted it, how the two connect and circle back to each other, etc.). At one point Gladman mentions Edmond Jabès in this section and certainly Gladman is treading some similar ground as Jabès has previously walked upon. But to be honest I've found Jabès to be more compelling in writing about writing, perhaps because he is writing formal poetry that feels destined to last whereas Gladman here appears to be wandering after her personal muse in real time on the page. I was having trouble connecting with it because it felt so deeply personal and hermetic in nature; if there was a thread of universality hidden within these sentence nests I was unable to grasp it⁠—instead I felt my reading was blurred by the ephemeral quality of the text. In short, I wouldn't recommend this as a starting point for Gladman's work. However, if you've read and enjoyed the Ravicka novels you may find this of interest simply due to the insight it allows into how Gladman's mind works, which is admittedly quite astonishing to witness at times.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been writing down my dreams at night, every night. It is hard. Because as soon as I wake up I feel it receding. Like fading ink. I have developed a practice to write it down even if it seems hopeless, and it does seem hopeless. Sometimes it is just an expression, without the face to make it. Just an urge to do something. Sometimes my dream is the curve of a banana, although there is so much more behind that curve, a whole life that I have forgotten. People in that life.

But I've learned to overcome that futility. That hopelessness of never capturing the dream entirely. I write down the curve of the banana as soon as I wake and then sit with the silence and sometimes something else comes, and I give thanks. Sometimes if I wait the faded ink leaves a barest trace like water drying on paper and if I'm fast enough I can catch it and pull it back. Sometimes I can find the tail and remember that there was a cat attached to that tail.

Sometimes, not always. But sometimes overcoming that hopelessness of never actually writing down the experience of the dream, only traces that will never actually be the dream. The thought of never capturing the cat is the hardest part of attempting to catch it. (And later when I read back what I wrote, it's like I haven't even glimpsed the cat, I forget the cat was ever there). Sometimes I wake up and I think why bother, when nothing can be captured. It's useless, why fight the fading ink? But that fight, that writing down of something, anything even if it's nowhere near the cat, just the curve of a banana with a faint tint of yellow, is something. Not reality itself, but a new reality, entirely different, but having a similar structure as the reality you intended*. A few marks towards architecture.

That is, somehow, what this book Calamities is about. At least in my mind. It's a failed attempt at writing about failing to write, but in that failing it captures the attempt and the intent, which becomes something other than what was intended. It becomes its own subject matter. To write is to long to write and that obsession to think and to draw and to draw about thinking and to think about writing and to write about thinking and to think about drawing, the thing behind the thing before the thing existed in the mind that thought the thing. Oh dear.

[Jared Levine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reading this book at the counter of the bookstore I work at, and put it down when a customer came to me, ready to check out. Reading it's enjambed title slowly, they said, "Calamities" as I went ahead ringing up their books. They asked what it was about, and being right before the "Eleven Calamities" section at the end of the book, I responded something like the following: "Well, it's a little hard to explain. It's kinda metafictional. ... Well, no. They're like, literary essays, about writing, the process of writing, and uh, life as a writer, and as a poet. ... But, she writes it as if she's a character in a book we're reading, where we see her begin each day. ... It's interestingly written, and it's been easy to read. ... maybe I didn't explain it all that well ..." The customer said something like, "No, you explained that really well." Then I asked the customer if they wanted a bag, and they said yes or no, but I gave them a bag and said something like, "yeah, Renee Gladman is really cool."

I stand by my inclination to call this work metafictional, though what we are reading isn't fiction. Through the bulk of the book, we see Renee Gladman referencing her other works, and parts of herself and her life, but with distance, as if Renee Gladman is an observable thing that we can spectate with wondrous glee. The inclusion of the "Eleven Calamities" part at the end, really brings the aforementioned together in a way that is so clever, and honest, and maybe a bit mundane and repetitive but in the absolute best way.

Renee Gladman, shines in this collection, as an artist wielding a pen. I find myself 'nerding out' over the sentences she's meticulously crafted.

10/10

[Shilo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was filled with wonderful nuggets, but also at other times very hard to follow. It was like I had to be in the exact right mindset, with not too much mental energy, and not too little. I felt as though I was walking a very tight rope, where one moment I understood everything, and then the next I understood nothing at all.

[k-os]

I began the day late and read a story in bed about a doctor who felt at home in other people's pain. I fried eggs and listened to records, trying to make more of an effort not to scratch them when I flipped their sides. The sun was brighter than it had been in a while. In fact yesterday I didn't leave the apartment at all, it was so gray and cold. I lay on my couch and tried to guess a six-letter word by process of elimination. Harry texted me about a writer we admire and wanted to know what he likes to read, so I found the answer for him online. I alternated between making plans for the weekend, staring at the bookshelf I'd recently alphabetized, and finishing a slim essay collection about "non-events in the crucial way that this was why you were writing of them in the first place—for much of the day nothing happens, nothing ever happens, you were trying to say" (119-20). Much of the writing in the collection was too abstract for me, too glancing and preoccupied with lines and layers, but at the same time this is the most prose I've written all week, a week in which I have been alone in my apartment with time on my hands to alphabetize my library. I made plans to go for a walk with friends later. My phone tells me the sun should still be out.

[Roman Kurys · Rating 1 out of 5]

Frankly, it just appears that this book was not for me. I ventured outside of my comfort zone to try and explore and no. That experiment didn’t work, but I tried.

This is in essence a journal. A compilation of thought from a writer describing their own writing process. Renee talks about how she creates, how she thinks of ideas etc.

You see how this would be pretty appealing, right?

My issue is that it’s too abstract. It’s words how they came into her head, how she thought them and then wrote them down exactly how she thought them. And on and on each new day.

I think I understood what Renee was trying to say. I think. And I see the chaos coming together into a singular point of focus that ends up being the only thing that matters - the story she is writing.

The delivery of the message is not effective for me to immerse and want to follow. It’s kind of like geometry mixed with doodling added to the real world happenings that produces written words that become her novels. It’s confusing through and through and very difficult to follow.

I think I get it. I’m not sure though.
I’d suggest to steer clear, unless you are looking for an abstract short story collection.


Roman

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays strikes me similar to the trend of being embarrassed by fiction--a condition I first noticed being lamented on by David Shields. That void seemed to be filled by writers like Knausgaard, Ferrante, Cusk, Dyer and Manguso.

This was in some way, a response to writers like David Foster Wallace, Franzen and Soer about the how novels should be written; difficulty vs. pleasure, and the importance of satisfying or denying a readers expectations. Many of these books know are much more memoir/essay closer to personal nonfictions and autobiographical fiction in a way that wasn't as ostentatious as Philip Roth.

The problem is that Calamaties by Gladman is too focused on writing, rather than...the unfocus and banalities of life. It feels dream-like, yet--also too determined to be a dream.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best experimental literature I have read since David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” and the most cogent, extended meditation I have ever read on the failure of language. What starts as a series of essays that take the form of what I can only describe as equations (how a series of people, things, hierarchies, gender, and race unfold as the thresholds between them are erased) collapse into a series of “calamities” that try to uncover the subterranean meaning behind these events. Stunning.

[Kristen Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is so intimate. You enter the daily like of a writer, observing people, the atmosphere, and the moments that make up our own existence. Read this and examine what makes us human.

[Renee Morales · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished this on the jankiest bus ever. This was really cool. 4.5/5. I’m new to experimental nonfiction so take everything I say here with a grain of salt. The word I would use today describe this book is CURIOUS. Gladman is so open to the world in Calamities in a way that is so refreshingly strange and discomforting. She has a way of curiositing over language, and yes, I’m using it as a verb here, that makes me feel like an imposter at my own chosen craft. I also love how anal she is about things, and how insanely relentless. She apologizes for this in the book, but if I took a shot the amount of times she said “drawing”, I might get alcohol poisoning. Onto quotes.

“One of my favorite words was in my mouth, and I was torn between chewing and swallowing it, so that it could become a part of me, another organ that processed or eliminated some material of my being, or spitting it out immediately, without doing any damage to its form, so that I could study the word in all its glory.”

I began the day in calamity, I end the day in revelation. Yes! Renee Gladman!

[hence]

i don't know how to feel about this book but i know how i feel about gladmans brain

[Madeline Altman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike any book I’ve ever read. I am reading this text for a class but for a solo project so I have yet to discuss with anyone!! So beautiful I love love love

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tweet I wrote upon finishing: Reading Renee Gladman write about writing makes me want to read and write about reading

Found this tough to get into as I was trying to make sense of it or find some linear trajectory, but it became so incredibly enjoyable to read once I let that feeling go

Gladman positions reading and writing as collapsible, flexible and malleable structures much like lines (a common motif throughout) that have the potential to become squiggles, scratches and marks, or what could be referred to as drawing.

It felt so nice to have a writer be honest about how difficult and confusing writing can be. To write with the purpose being not to fully grasp it. Writing is so porous !!!!

Got me thinking so much about architecture and thresholds and how these exist and operate in different contexts.

Fave quotes:

“Recently, i had found that to talk about something that was in essence everything was too exhausting, and that the only way around it was to talk about the question of the thing rather than the thing itself, since in the end, it would become both.” p. 6

“I began the day standing at a threshold of time - the beginning of something, the end of something.” p. 31

“Perhaps to read poetry was to read through a sieve.” p. 35

“I wanted a threshold to open that also would be like a question, something that asked me about my living in such a way that I could finally understand it.” p. 39

“I began the day wanting the language to describe a kind of writing that one could do that was not a physical act of producing marks on a page or computer screen but was a duration of thinking.” p. 81

“It seemed possible to say anything, especially if someone had said it before, and it was these words of that other person that we put in place of our voice.” p. 86

“I hoped to say “body” and see a change come over your face: inside your body, the edge of the body, your body split. (I split you.) p. 89

“One of my favourite words was in my mouth, and I was torn between chewing and swallowing it, so that it could become a part of me, another oran that processed or eliminate some material of my being, or spitting it out immediately, without doing any damage to its form, so that i could study the word in all its glory.” p. 95

[Eileen]

so good to get back to reading after a month of writing, and even better to do so with this particular book. i love everything i've read by renee gladman – there's a spareness, an attention, a kind of clarity that sits with convolution. calamities is about writing / not-writing & how language is always in some sense inadequate but also super-adequate in that it creates its own possibilities of / for being. much 2 think about.

"you wanted to write a whole book, where people were just seeing how you lived, and you did this for a long time. but then your living became a way of writing, and the events you wrote about, which were non-events in the crucial way that this was why you were writing of them in the first place – for much of the day nothing happens, nothing ever happens, you were trying to say – these events became structures for thinking: so you were walking and drinking coffee or not drinking coffee and your pattern of thought was changing. my sentences had changed somewhere between coffee and drawing, and then i was writing to try to catch up with the change but all the time making more change because to write was always to add to something that is going its own way."

[naviya · Rating 5 out of 5]

- a collection of memoir-y, poem-y one pagers
- about so many things! through the lens of writing and craft
- each entry begins with "i start the day by" and goes in many unexpected, yet fluid directions
- it felt very meditative, stimulating and peaceful
- i really, really enjoyed this book!!
- 4.5 stars!

~vibes~
sitting on my blue armchair, my body heavy with my pre-period mood, the sun is warm on my back and my apartment cool, i can see my shadow reading this book against the wall next to my bed

[Mark Popham · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible meditation or series of meditations on writing, drawing and the sort of Xeno’s Paradox of distance between what is meant and what is conveyed (I think!) with great digressions about family trips, academic politics and more. I followed maybe half of what was written and was simply gleeful about how much I didn’t get.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indescribable, brilliant; a book about writing that is also about writing itself.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

singular and perfect and brilliant and frustratingly opaque and emotional. knew i was going to love it because it was a kate zambreno recced book in this article that i found that had like such a frustratingly small font. but anyway i saw that kate zambreno loved this book so i got it from the library and i wish i had bought it. it is doing exactly what im trying to do with my own writing project in a lot of ways, traversing fiction/metafiction in a way that takes into account writing about writing and how that changes the way you write and also changes the way you live. like the living itself becomes a process of writing. the way she writes about her life felt both familiar but also different, i can definitely see the gail scott influence above all other new narrative/non adjacent writers, the opacity, the level of observance and abstracted introspection. renee gladman is also a visual artist and i could really tell that from the way she wrote this, not just because she goes into her writing/drawing exercise in the calamities se too but also because—and this was one of my favorite parts of the whole book—she conceptualizes writing in such a physical, geometric, architectural way that i’ve never heard or seen from anybody else. like writing is like constructing a building or a 3D shape. it was very cool and like interesting to me mathematically because i was thinking a lot about my impossible figure stuff and how i never really figured out how to connect that to writing but maybe this is a kind of useful model or jumping off point. anyway, i also really loved reading her thoughts about her more speculative work and the desire to make a city whose buildings are grown from the ground and also grown from language… hello my cities story… as sam would say i just think there are some writing energies renee gladman is tapped into that maybe i am as well or at least to the traces she left behind because obviously she’s doing it much better and more concisely and brilliantly than i could. anyway, im really glad i read this book

[Chris Kitchen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Horrible. This book was interesting maybe 15 percent of the time. I quite enjoyed her creative interpretations of day to day observations and her way of playing with and reimagining language. Especially when it was through little tasks like covertly giving strangers verbs written on paper in the hopes of it being found and acted upon. Or when her boss happened to say “slam dunk” while firing her from the university, prompting a full entry musing on the strangeness of that scenario. HOWEVER, the vast majority of this book is her absolutely incomprehensible ramblings about not writing, about “grids” and “lines” and “drawing”., and “folding” and “architecture”, etc. These were all so disjointed and convoluted that it was impossible to keep track of her intensely abstract, repetitive, vague, and contextless metaphors, describing phenomena she never bothers to explain in simple forms. Maybe it would be interesting if I had any inclination of what we’re actually talking about, but I’m left reading the pretentious ramblings of a woman who doesn’t seem to have anything remotely worth talking about. I’m so tired.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You wanted to write a whole book, where people were just seeing how you lived, and you did this for a long time. But then your living became a way of writing, and the events you wrote about, which were non-events in the crucial way that this was why you were writing of them in the first place-- for much of the day nothing happens, nothing ever happy, you were trying to say-- these events became structures for thinking: so you were walking and drinking coffee or not drinking coffee and your pattern of thought was changing."

[ju motter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um dos livros mais sensíveis que li nos últimos tempos.

“A cidade era um dos lugares em que eu tinha estado e simultaneamente era uma das coisas que eu fazia quando estava lá. Eu fiz o lugar onde estava, porque o lugar era todo ele mesmo, então estar nele era fazê-lo, e isso não era algo que acontecia a qualquer lugar que você fosse, e raramente fazer uma cidade era o mesmo que fazer prosa, como era o caso aqui, e ainda mais rara era a memória daquela feitura tornando-se a sala onde você estava”

[Makenzie Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’m not sure what to make of this. there were moments where i thought it brilliant and moments where i was praying for the essay (?) to end. i don’t think i was ready for how experimental this is, that or i just wasn’t into this experiment. really i’d give it two stars, but i’m rounding up for the fact that i think some people probably think it’s brilliant through, i just don’t get it. parts went over my head. i felt relief when finished with it- won’t be reading again

[em!! · Rating 4 out of 5]

woah

[laurie ♡︎ · Rating 2 out of 5]

not my cup of tea tbh

[Quinn Monette · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this website had a four favorites feature this would rocket to the top. Spatially doing something I haven't seen before. Transcendent (or its opposite).

[Isabella Wordsworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything makes sense once you get to the book at the end of the book. It’s a beautifully written meta fictional book. Part of it’s beauty lies in it’s ability to articulate complex feelings in a way that communicates so effortlessly. While personally I did not feel as deeply connected most of my rating is due to the clarity and beauty of language used

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began reading this is grad school, abandoned it, then picked it up on a flight from Denver to Seattle, which is a perfect place to read this book.

[Liliana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last thirty pages were perfectly bewildering, the rest was lush with words in the right places. Over my head to just the right degree — I don’t suspect bullshit, though I’m not hanging onto every word.

[Farah Farooq · Rating 1 out of 5]

my comprehension skills don’t extend to understanding anything written by gladman

[Laura Merlina]

a BITCH to imitate.