Carolyn Bergonzo

A. is an artist and a friend of time. She sent me letters affixed with clock-face stamps, often fit with little gifts of images and extra texts, ephemera, during the time I lived in New Orleans. When you open a friend’s letter, she has arrived. You host her thinking in language. Friendship, so often about sharing a specific space, becomes temporalized. Or it is about space, too, but now within language, opening up to recollection of the spaces you once shared, descriptions of the cities you now live in, the rooms in which you write…

During the Affect & Inquiry symposium sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (March 27-29) here in Iowa City, Ann Cvetkovich spoke at Public Space One about her interest in making scholarship into a creative practice. In my writing project at PS1, I’ve been interested in exploring this site of scholarship and creative writing. I’m trying to bring together disparate strands of research, to learn how to trace—in language—an attention to the surface of an artwork as well as to the corrugated surface of a relationship over time.

Recently I’ve been working on the first essay in my project—about longing, the time of reading, the city of New Orleans, etc.—and thinking a lot about prose…

Hello, I’m Carolyn Bergonzo, the current writer-in-residence at Public Space One. I’ll be posting regularly here about the project I’m working on during my residency: a series of linked essays about alterations to time perception brought on by a variety of “temporal objects”: a novel, a move from one city to another (and then, another), an artwork, a relationship, a film piece, and a correspondence between friends.