WEBVTT

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Hi, everybody.

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Good morning.

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So I'm Danielle
Vogel and I don't

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know if you've all seen my
nests in the other space.

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But if you walk in, they're
right over to the left.

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I wish I had a photo.

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I haven't thought of that.

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But I'm here to talk about
my ceramic nest architecture

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work in relation to the book.

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So if you haven't seen
my nest, if you can just

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imagine if you've ever
seen a mud swallow nest,

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I make these mud
swallow huts of ceramic

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and I missed my manuscripts
into their mouths.

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So I'm going to write--

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I mean I wrote to you
all about that process.

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I've been writing to you all in
my sleep and now we are here.

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I write many things there,
in that hypnopompic space

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before wakefulness.

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Last night in my dreaming
I was saying to you

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all that there is a symbiotic
relationship between sound

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and skin.

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I was saying that I wish I
were covered in clay for you.

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I wish I were a
shinkling of nests.

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Instead, I sit before you when
I open my mouth, a living altar

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space, a living nest.

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Imagine my mouth open for you.

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Pouring text down,
debris, my body

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nested and unnested here for
you through these sentences.

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I wish I were kneeling
before you surrounded

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by slabs of wet red mud.

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I wish I were a kneeling
architecture, architecture

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in a text, a dwelling in clay.

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I wish I had built
a nest big enough

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for us all to climb
within, to sit-in

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the hollow gully of
its throat, to speak

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with you all from there.

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Instead, I do what I am able.

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My nests are as much for
you as they are for me.

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They are in the other
room, suspended.

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And in this room here I will
try to lineate the process.

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The nests amplify the
processes of writing,

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the ritual of building
nests and texts,

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the ceremonial space
before the page.

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What can I tell you?

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When I am alone in the ceramic
studio, I sing to the clay.

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I sing it words and chant
sentences into the mouth

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and against their sides
as I beat them into shape,

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as I cradle their weight,
pressing my thumbs hard.

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Maybe this has to do with
imprinting, midwifery.

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I've not been
gentle with myself.

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I've not been gentle with the
clay or with my manuscripts.

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I manipulate the
clay into the tears.

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I cinch it back together.

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I blow in the muddy
mouths of the nests

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to fill them with
air until they burst.

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I roll my fingertips along their
inside, their silty bellies,

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until they almost rip, and
while I do these things

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I think about language.

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I think about the body, how
they perform together and apart.

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I think about how
hungry and terrified

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I am for intimacies
of all kinds.

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And yet, I have been gentle.

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I cup disparate sounds
I hold the insides in.

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What does it mean
to write a book?

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A writer writes and
often we think only

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of what happens on the other
side of this, the finished

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project of a bound
manuscript, but writing

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is a gathering into something
that eventually takes shape.

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And take is the wrong word
here, because the shape

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accumulates, sedimentary.

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Sometimes sloughing
off, sometimes not.

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The mouth is a
mollusk, washing sand

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into sound, waste, and bone.

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The weight of a text
contracts and spirals

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through the weight of
its pre and afterlives.

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What is the weight of a book as
it is written, as it is read?

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A book is an immeasurable
animal geometry

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that builds first within us.

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And then an
architectural translation

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occurs in the outer
sides of the body,

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but before extension there
is an internal spiraling,

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through which the author
meets herself again and again.

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I wonder at the private
invisible logics

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of these architectures.

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The many moments of
translation between the author

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and herself, these
are solitary and often

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lonely architectures
of gestation, reaching

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and regeneration, within which
skins are built in sound.

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The book becomes
a breathing record

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of this logic, an
architecture of intimacy,

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an archive of the author's
internal dreaming.

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The book is a hive
for traveling through.

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I'm interested in the muscle
memories of the book, the logic

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stored beneath the sentence.

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Often the finished
manuscript does not obviously

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betray the history
of its being written,

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but within the finished
text is another,

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softer ballad, in which
the author is whispering.

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