On March 20, the 5C community gathered at Rose Hills Theatre to hear from four novelists who once roamed the halls of the Claremont Colleges themselves. The panel featured Francesca Capossela PO ’18, author of “Trouble The Living,” David Connor PO ’15, author of “Oh God, The Sun Goes,” Julius Taranto PO ’12, author of “How I Won a Nobel Prize” and Tyriek White PZ ’13, author of “We Are a Haunting.”
The reading was organized by Jonathan Lethem, an English professor at Pomona College. Lethem convened the panel to show 5C creative writing students what it looks like to transform artistic practice into a professional career.
“I do hope that [the panel] makes people see what’s possible,” Lethem said. “[That it] connects [students’] practice as undergraduates to the development of their artistic practice in the real world, including publication.”
Each author, introduced by their former faculty mentor, read aloud a brief excerpt from their debut novel and then participated in a Q&A. The excerpts explored the complexities and sacrifices of familial relationships and the process of “seeking” in a chaotic world.
Pomona W.M. Keck Professor of English Kevin Dettmar introduced Capossela. Her reading featured two sections of her lyrical novel, “Trouble The Living,” told from the point of view of a mother in the 1990s in Northern Ireland and her daughter in 2016 in Southern California.
The mother recounts her childhood trip to the border of Northern Ireland.
“It was the first time I had seen a slice of it that was not swarming with Brits,” Copossela read. “This was the border’s naked underbelly, what it looked like without its armor. She was showing us its weak spots, the places where we could do damage.”
The daughter’s narrative includes a vivid account of her abortion, capturing her acute emotions and seeing them through as they give way to reflection.
“It was a quiet civil war, a fight for autonomy … It was recognizing my own body, my need to protect it, the love I had for it … Nobody could love me out of the pain or forgive me from the burden,” Copossela read. “In the end, I felt lucky … to be in control of my body … It was what we all wanted, to choose our own freedom, to choose our own pain.”
Connor was introduced by Brian Evenson, one of Connor’s professors at the California Institute of the Arts, who spoke on the counterintuitive and discerning nature of Connor’s writing.
“[Connor] strip[s] things down to their most basic components,” Evenson said. “And then somehow mak[es] those components resonate even more than they normally would.”
Connor’s novel follows a man searching for the sun, which has gone missing. Connor read an evocative and ethereal description of Sun City, Arizona, where the narrator travels on his quest and where he hopes to find Dr. Higley, who claims to know the Sun’s whereabouts.
“The bird’s vision taking in an aerial view of the scene, which reveals a town in the shape of a perfect O, a circle of houses surrounding a radial center and expanding out towards the desert and perfect symmetry,” Connor read. “A Sun City indeed, a town in the shape of a sun. If Sun City appeared in a dream, it would be a dream induced by the heat of the desert, or induced in a state of delusion brought on from driving too many miles.”
Taranto’s novel features a graduate student who follows her mentor to a university on an island for “canceled” artists and academics, tracing the ways this experience impacts her relationship with her partner. Much of the land was originally allocated for conservation.
“Moist morning light refracted off the great cliff, the rocky beaches, immaculate lawns, the little town was all white painted, clever black trim, gray shingles, city brick,” Taranto read. “[And] boats jostled and claimed in the marina.”
Pitzer College’s Professor of English and World Literature Laura Harris introduced White. White’s novel “We Are A Haunting” is a multigenerational saga about a Black family in Brooklyn that charts their interactions with the supernatural.
The excerpt White read featured Colly, the novel’s protagonist who recently lost his mother and whose father was rarely home. White described Colly’s piercing grief as he lies motionless listening to old music.
“Just a few of the verses in my hands, the shape of it on the page, the critical process that happens between writing a thing and saying it,” White said. “I saw your face clearer than the dead. It had been over a year but … I had never stopped crying. I just did it quietly.”
When asked about the most difficult part of the writing process, Connor emphasized finding balance between the solitude required for writing and the social demands of daily life.
“Figuring out how to live, at least for me, how to live in the world of my book and living in the world at the same time was maybe the hardest part,” he said.
The novelists advised current students to cherish their years in Claremont and to make an effort to connect with professors.
Attendee Ariana Makar PO ’24 said that the panel challenged her perception of what it means to be a career writer.
“I always think of writers as older individuals,” Makar said. “And to see people … who were in the same community as me … really brought it closer to me.”
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