introduction to Michael Cunningham
as a Kelly Writers House Fellow
February 11, 2002
by Dan Fishback, a student in the Kelly Writers House Fellows seminar

I signed up for this class in a kind of prideless, bumbling squirt -- I emailed Al, "Cunningham is my personal Jesus, you have to let me in, you have to, you have to." But then I calmed down, because I realized I'd be taking these books into the realm of other people -- and new perspectives seemed dangerous somehow. Just before I came to college, I read A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and The Hours; and they were like...vaccines. They were like concentrated, distilled domestic strife, youthful confusion, and aging grief, bound together with prose that just slid into my mind like a daydream. With these three books in my bloodstream, I kept life's flaws from consuming me, and its awesome joys from obliterating me entirely. They supplied me with a catalogue of images and apparent truths to dissolve the simple sadnesses in the satisfaction of being. My experience of having read these books was already perfect -- I felt duly enlightened in a very Cunningham way -- so I was petrified to bring all that to the table, to let someone -- God forbid -- disagree with me, to talk about these books with words like "modernism" and "diachronic narrative"-- an academic analysis seemed entirely out of sync with the spirit that flows through these words -- a spirit of simple, child-like awe. In The Hours, Clarissa Vaughn, "simply enjoys without reason the houses, the church, the man, and the dog. It's childish, she knows. It lacks edge. If she were to express it publicly (now, at her age), this love of hers would consign her to the realm of the duped and the simpleminded, Christians with acoustic guitars or wives who've agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep." But wives we're not -- we're students, so we whipped out the "modernism" and the "diachronic narrative" and the whole kitchen sink of English class jargon, and, to my grateful surprise, there was more here than a simple, indiscriminate love of everything. There was a keen, almost scientific perception of social force, of networks of power and domination -- a whole subterranean discourse on literature, on art, on conformism, on radicalism, and after every complexity was laid as bare as we could possibly lay it, and I walked home from class with the books in my arms, each and every infinitely particular insight... amounted back to Clarissa's simple, indiscriminate love -- a love that "feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself." In lieu of the thing, we have these books. And now, in addition to these books, we have Michael Cunningham -- right here. And it's my pleasure to welcome him to Writers House.