The Kelly Writers House held its second installment of this year’s Fellows program featuring Carmen Maria Machado, author of the bestselling memoir “In the Dream House.”
The conversation, which took place on April 1, was moderated by founder and faculty director of the KWH Al Filreis, who also teaches the KWH Fellows program, and attracted around 40 attendees. The talk spanned the entirety of Machado's memoir chronologically.
The conversation began with a discussion of a short story published in 2013, “Miss Laura’s School for Esquire Men,” which tackles gender and gender performance in the form of satiric media critique.
A common thread throughout Machado’s work is the use of surrealism as a method of personal expression. She described using forms and genres that deviate from reality in order to express various psychological states that she had experienced.
“I broke the stories down because I was breaking down," she said at the event. "That is the profound experience here in reading, writing.”
Machado continued by discussing her “pack rat” approach to fiction writing, which is how she describes the process of incorporating experiences and impressions from various areas and eras of her life into her stories. These stylistic features were demonstrated through readings from her works, such as “Endlings” or “In the Dream House.”
One of the surrealist methods mentioned was the usage of ellipses to show fragmentation in the psyche of the narrator. In order to demonstrate this stylistic device, Filreis called on a member of the audience to randomly generate page numbers. Machado read the first sentence on each of these pages from “In the Dream House,” creating a form of elliptical prose in the process.
The Kelly Writers House has deeply impacted a large number of students in attendance at the event. 2021 Penn graduate and Assistant to the Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Sophia DuRose, expressed her enthusiasm for the program, stating that she has been involved with the Kelly Writers House for over nine years.
As coordinator of the Fellows program and teaching assistant of the course, she is involved in the selection of the Fellows and the organization of the event.
College sophomore Xihluke Marhule, who works as a media assistant at the Kelly Writers House, described the deep impact Machado has had on their education, stating that Machado's novel, “Her Body and Other Parties,” was the “whole reason why [they’re] pursuing a gender studies minor.”
The discussion concluded with the profession that the ultimate theme of Machado’s work was love in a fully holistic sense, incorporating all forms and manifestations of the word.
In her explanation of this statement, Machado drew on a quote from Kelly Writers House Fellow Dorothy Allison, who described telling a story to the end as an act of love and that “arriving at the end, wherever that is, is how we create empathy for ourselves and each other.”
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