On Oct. 31, author Lucy Ives read from her recently released essay collection, “An Image of My Name Enters America,” at Sanborn Library. The event, which was attended by approximately 30 people, was the latest in the English Department’s Cleopatra Mathis Poetry & Prose Series.
Ives, the 2023-2025 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University, has published 15 books. In addition to her new collection, released on Oct. 15, she is also the author of “Anamnesis” (2009), “Impossible Views of the World” (2017), “Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet, Or, The Origin of the World” (2019) and “Life Is Everywhere” (2022).
The event consisted of an introductory conversation between Ives and English and creative writing professor Alexander Chee, a reading from the collection and a brief Q&A. The essays in “An Image of My Name Enters America” were inspired by the “aesthetic memories that you have as a kid,” experiences that span the spectrum of “oddity” and the “abstract impulse that’s related to memory and remembering,” Ives explained during her conversation with Chee.
“Each of [the essays] begins with something personal and a little bit incoherent and then turns into a mapping of that onto other things that are more familiar to us,” she said. “And so then it ends up tracing connections among familiar things that are somewhat eccentric and allows us to see them again in a new light through these unusual aspects, these eccentricities of my own memory.”
During the reading, Ives presented two passages from “The End” — the second-to-last essay in the collection, which describes her experiences with self-doubt and mental health struggles as a 19 and 20 year old. Structured as what Ives called an abecedarium — where the work is organized from A to Z — the essay also includes “weird songs in praise of each [alphabetical] letter” heading each of the essay’s 26 sections.
Through this format, Ives aimed to explore how letters could act as a vehicle for her thought process.
“We have these very strange personal associations with [letters] that are shifting all the time,” she said. “So I wanted to show that because it was also part of trying to show how my mind works and some of the things that I see or that are features of my mind — sort of how I think and how I perceive the world. When I get close to something very concrete, like a letter, I can really show how many different things it can turn into.”
After the 30-minute reading, audience members were invited to ask Ives questions.
During the Q&A, one audience member asked about Ives’s intentions with the collection. Ives responded that writing her essays helped her address feelings of fear that she found otherwise “difficult to look at directly.”
“When [an] essay was done, when this thing that I was trying to construct in front of me was complete, I found that I could turn around and look directly at the feeling and really see it,” she explained.
When asked about her experience writing essays as opposed to poems, Ives explained that she has taken many of the lessons learned from writing poetry and applied them to this recent collection.
“That was really very fun for me, because for some reason writing an essay … I had a little more freedom than I felt that I had in writing novels and other kinds of things,” she said. “I was able to … think more in the ways that I would think in the space of a poem [while writing this] essay, while also dealing with facts and stuff.”
In an interview with The Dartmouth, English department administrator Kate Gibbel, who organized and attended the event, praised Ives’s presentation and works.
“I thought Lucy Ives gave a wonderful presentation and I loved the way her essay thought about language and how we move through language in our lives,” Gibbel said.
Attendee Esther Feng ’27 said she not only enjoyed hearing about Ives’s ideas but also appreciated the presentation in Sanborn.
“I really like the slides, the reading and changing the letters and changing the pictures of the people that she mentions,” she said. “It really helps to create an experience where it’s more than words on paper … but a more immersive thing. It’s like an art performance.”
Chee, who invited Ives to speak at the College, said he hoped that bringing Ives and writers like her to campus will expand students’ idea of writing and the impact of writers in the world.
“I hope [the students] find something that surprises them,” he said. “That sounds maybe a little silly, but I think — and I hope — people will increasingly start to think of readings as portals of a kind, to possibility in themselves and in others. [The English Department is] trying to give students a chance to see what the rest of the writing world looks like.”
According to Feng, the event succeeded in this mission.
“My biggest takeaway is how creative writing and also how creative nonfiction can be,” she said. “Before I think I read more poems, novels, where I didn’t really focus on nonfiction … but this has really made me think about how … something that I thought could be more structured could be something that’s less structured and more free.”
The Cleopatra Mathis Poetry & Prose Series will continue on Feb. 6 with a reading from novelist Andre Dubus III.
