Hi, everybody.
Good morning.
So I'm Danielle Vogel and I don't
know if you've all seen my nests in the other space.
But if you walk in, they're right over to the left.
I wish I had a photo.
I haven't thought of that.
But I'm here to talk about my ceramic nest architecture
work in relation to the book.
So if you haven't seen my nest, if you can just
imagine if you've ever seen a mud swallow nest,
I make these mud swallow huts of ceramic
and I missed my manuscripts into their mouths.
So I'm going to write--
I mean I wrote to you all about that process.
I've been writing to you all in my sleep and now we are here.
I write many things there, in that hypnopompic space
before wakefulness.
Last night in my dreaming I was saying to you
all that there is a symbiotic relationship between sound
and skin.
I was saying that I wish I were covered in clay for you.
I wish I were a shinkling of nests.
Instead, I sit before you when I open my mouth, a living altar
space, a living nest.
Imagine my mouth open for you.
Pouring text down, debris, my body
nested and unnested here for you through these sentences.
I wish I were kneeling before you surrounded
by slabs of wet red mud.
I wish I were a kneeling architecture, architecture
in a text, a dwelling in clay.
I wish I had built a nest big enough
for us all to climb within, to sit-in
the hollow gully of its throat, to speak
with you all from there.
Instead, I do what I am able.
My nests are as much for you as they are for me.
They are in the other room, suspended.
And in this room here I will try to lineate the process.
The nests amplify the processes of writing,
the ritual of building nests and texts,
the ceremonial space before the page.
What can I tell you?
When I am alone in the ceramic studio, I sing to the clay.
I sing it words and chant sentences into the mouth
and against their sides as I beat them into shape,
as I cradle their weight, pressing my thumbs hard.
Maybe this has to do with imprinting, midwifery.
I've not been gentle with myself.
I've not been gentle with the clay or with my manuscripts.
I manipulate the clay into the tears.
I cinch it back together.
I blow in the muddy mouths of the nests
to fill them with air until they burst.
I roll my fingertips along their inside, their silty bellies,
until they almost rip, and while I do these things
I think about language.
I think about the body, how they perform together and apart.
I think about how hungry and terrified
I am for intimacies of all kinds.
And yet, I have been gentle.
I cup disparate sounds I hold the insides in.
What does it mean to write a book?
A writer writes and often we think only
of what happens on the other side of this, the finished
project of a bound manuscript, but writing
is a gathering into something that eventually takes shape.
And take is the wrong word here, because the shape
accumulates, sedimentary.
Sometimes sloughing off, sometimes not.
The mouth is a mollusk, washing sand
into sound, waste, and bone.
The weight of a text contracts and spirals
through the weight of its pre and afterlives.
What is the weight of a book as it is written, as it is read?
A book is an immeasurable animal geometry
that builds first within us.
And then an architectural translation
occurs in the outer sides of the body,
but before extension there is an internal spiraling,
through which the author meets herself again and again.
I wonder at the private invisible logics
of these architectures.
The many moments of translation between the author
and herself, these are solitary and often
lonely architectures of gestation, reaching
and regeneration, within which skins are built in sound.
The book becomes a breathing record
of this logic, an architecture of intimacy,
an archive of the author's internal dreaming.
The book is a hive for traveling through.
I'm interested in the muscle memories of the book, the logic
stored beneath the sentence.
Often the finished manuscript does not obviously
betray the history of its being written,
but within the finished text is another,
softer ballad, in which the author is whispering.