R.O. Kwon and Nona Caspers: March 20, 2019

The Poetry Center presents R.O Kwon and Nona Caspers, reading and in conversation. Nona Caspers introduces then reads excerpts from her recently published book The Fifth Woman (Sarabande Books, 2018). R.O. Kwon introduces at length then reads excerpts from her debut novel The Incendiaries (Riverhead Books, 2018). The reading is followed by a conversation with the audience, moderated by Carolina De Robertis, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. This program is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Originally Recorded By
DocFilm Institute
Location
The Poetry Center, SFSU
Date
03/20/2019
Total Run Time
01:26:02
Contributor
Elise Ficarra, Carolina De Robertis
Rights
©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu
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2159
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Nona Caspers (00:20:17)

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After an introduction by Elise Ficarra and Carolina De Robertis, Nona Caspers leads the audience in singing a love song that she sung while writing The Fifth Woman. She then reads, "Two Clean Things" and "The Horse," chapters from The Fifth Woman.

R.O. Kwon (00:16:49)

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After an introduction by Caroline De Robertis, R.O. Kwon speaks on the process of writing The Incendiaries, mentioning her personal loss of faith in Christianity that sparked inspiration for the book. She then reads, "1. Will," "2. John Leal," "3. Phoebe," and "4. Will," the opening sections from The Incendiaries.

Conversation (00:40:36)

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R.O Kwon and Nona Caspers take questions from the audience, moderated by Carolina De Robertis. Prompted by De Robertis, both authors discuss their shared Catholic upbringing, and reflect on how their respective departures from Catholicism have influenced their relationship to writing. R.O. Kwon speaks on her family's reaction to The Incendiaries, as well as the experience of working on the book for over a decade-long span of time. Both authors note their mutual interest in diction and semantic construction, and comment on their experiences of writing by hand. They discuss the possibility of creative "pureness" in regards to the originality of their work, to which Caspers speaks of her creative work as being part of a larger process of the digestion of other works. The conversation ends with both authors speaking of new work in development.

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