Full text of Laura Mullen's Tapa Notebook [PDF: 8MB]
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has enjoyed residencies at The Karolyi Foundation, MacDowell, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, among other honors. She published a translation of Véronique Pittolo's HERO (Black Square Editions) in 2019. She is the Kenan Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, USA.
http://www.lauramullen.biz
American poet Laura Mullen was a visiting lecturer at the University of Auckland in August 2017. She read and talked to creative writing classes and performed at LOUNGE 57.
Laura writes:
I recall my visit to New Zealand with great pleasure and the honor of being asked to fill the tapa notebook is a special memory. About the process—it comes to me that I took the lovely book to Paris, to the Trelex residency…I recall keeping it in a certain envelope, and being so afraid I would lose it (making sure, at one point, to get copies made of certain pages, ducking into a little printing and copying shop and increasing my vocabulary…). And I believe—it comes back to me—that I used the unusual pressure to produce a record of process that was also a product to tilt me a little more firmly toward an understanding of the value of presence and the significance of the actual. I came to art, I could say I ran to art, to get away from life…which seemed to me mostly (for it was not a good childhood in my violent foolish country) to be disordered and ugly. Your gift of a notebook was a happy invitation to see art in life, to see the beauty in the actual, and I am endlessly grateful.
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