An audio excerpt from M. Allen Cunningham's talk "Reading, Seeing, and Self-Forgetting," delivered recently in an undergraduate creative writing course. Cunningham considers what a creative writing course can and cannot achieve, and explores the imaginative value of honing one's perceptions by "going beyond the edges" of one's own identity, perspectives, imagination, and discipline. One springboard for this lecture is Ali Smith's Artful, an assigned book for this course Other touchpoints include Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Cezanne, Harold Bloom, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Michael Oakeshott, and Lynda Barry. (NB: Cunningham's particular discussion of Rilke originates with Letters on Cezanne, edited by Joel Agee, and draws on the observations in Agee's introduction to that book.)

Visit www.MAllenCunningham.com to learn more about Cunningham's work as a writer, teacher, and publisher.

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