“Sounds touch me, and mood is the window of allowance, wide or narrow, to let sound in: my moods are equivalent to what I let myself touch, and be touched by in turn, but also what I have no choice in the matter of being encased in…”

Is it possible to create a poetics of atmosphere as antidote to post-election and post-Brexit airlessness, moodlessness, and disrepair? Mary Cappello performs” a multi-modal reading from her latest collection of essays and experimental prose, Life Breaks In (a mood almanack) with emphasis on sounds and voices as mood generators par excellence. Expect images, music, discussion and unnamed mood shifts. Books will be available for sale (cash only).

Free, book online at: https://moodalmanack.eventbrite.co.uk

PopSugar calls Life Breaks in one of 10 books to keep us centered post-election

Brit + Company places it among “3 books to set your imagination ablaze”

LARB describes it as“time spent in a language-made listening room, a stroll into shifting human emotive time”

Mary Cappello is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour (a Los Angeles Times bestseller); Swallow, based on the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum; and, the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, on NPR, in guest author blogs for Powells Books, and appears in such journals as Cabinet Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Salmagundi. She has performed her work in venues ranging from the Smithsonian Institution to the Velaslavasay Panorama, from Brooklyn’s Observatory and U/Penn's Grand Rounds in Otorhinolaryngology, to more recent collaboratively created “mood rooms.” A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, a recipient of the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, and the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Cappello is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow, Russia) and currently Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island.

 

Dr Sarah Chaney

Research Project Manager: Public Engagement

Part-time (Monday & Tuesday)

Living With Feeling: Emotional Health in History, Philosophy and Experience

Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions

http://projects.history.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/