MARY CAPONEGRO

February 26, 2004

Mary Caponegro is an experimental fiction writer whose collections include Tales from the Next Village, the Star Cafe, Five Doubts, and The Complexities of Intimacy. Her stories appear regularly in Conjunctions and in other periodicals. She was awarded the Rome Prize in Literature in 1992, and is also the recipient of The General Electric Award for Younger Writers, the Bruno Arcudi Prize, and the Charles Flint Kellog Award in Arts and Letters She has taught at Brown University, RISD, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Syracuse University. She is the Richard B. Fisher Family Professor of Writing and Literature at Bard College.

Introduction

I am truly pleased to welcome Mary Caponegro to Buffalo this evening. Mary is a prose stylist in the most serious sense of the word, a writer who dares her readers to gaze along with her in fascination at an isolate word or a single phrase as if it were not just a pause—a place for the mind to alight among so many others in a constellation of possible sentences—but as though each were a harbor all its own, a silent star within a milky way fertile with language. Like Proust, she suggests a "madeline" deserves volumes. And yet, Caponegro is not a novelist of sturdy door-stop tomes. Instead, in defiance of the mass marketing paradigms of a book publishing industry that over-easily equivocates "fiction" with "novel," she writes short fictions instead, and remains—to use a word one literary agent once posed to me—"committed" to the form, as though the short story were a kind of madness one ought to be cured from, not a genre full of as yet unexplored potentiality. Caponegro’s fictions carefully disregard these pressures, and instead present her readers with a honed, elegant and often eerie prose, so refined that one often has the sense of embracing the warm edginess of a striated stone cut from many different registers. She is quartz and shale in one sentence. Marsh sediment in others, as she coaches us along, compels us to follow her forward on a unique investigation.

"…You must develop the telescope within yourself your own inner eye," she cautions in "Tales from the Next Village," "to see the beauty of the chain it makes, its variegated texture of feather, skin, fur, slimy or smooth, wrapped tight to turn the earth with a motion too slow to measure on your most sophisticated instrument, not even eternity’s second hand." (3, TSC).

In Caponegro’s fictions, we require just such a new compass. The reader can’t help but stand agape as her stories carry us forward into situations we never expected nor even imagined. If, as Merleau-Ponty notes, "the writer is a kind of new idiom, constructing itself," then Caponegro’s fictions present a delicate clarity, a wanderer’s wandering eye view of the world, in which no object is too abject: she is a collector and an alchemist too, merging the reality we think we share with the mind of language itself. It is to our good fortune that she is our guide on the often strange journeys her fictions take us.