About: Mary Cappello

2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, Mary Cappello is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller, Awkward: A Detour;Called Back, a critical memoir on cancer that won a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; the memoir, Night Bloom; and most recently, Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them (www.swallowthebook.com). A recipient of the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, she is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) and currently a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence. For more information about the author: www.awkwardness.org

Posts by Mary Cappello:

Some Notes on My Sense of an Interior*

[A Paper presented on the panel: The Great Indoors: Gender, Writing and Re-envisioning Literary Merit, AWP 2011, Washington, DC]

I chose the train over the plane to travel to AWP this year because I like the gentle rocking, the bad hot chocolate and the sense of an interior.

That every (poetic) stanza is a stanza or a room is a truism I take seriously. The first stanza is a green room; the second is an antechamber; then, my favorite, the vestibule, also a part of the inner ear, a sense of balance is vestibular, suddenly a promontory, a curve into a cave and I’m there. It seems I never experience reading without entering a space, even if the writing juts, it alters the space I’m in, and in entering me, asks that I enter an interior. (more…)