Thursday in Residence with Catherine Lacey
Ekstasis & Enstasis
© Fondation Jan Michalski, Tonatiuh Ambrosetti
Event completed
Event in English
Free admission, upon reservation on line
Every first Thursday of each month, from 6.30 to 7.30 pm, a writer in residence opens a window on his or her work, universe and motives, in a free form of intervention. An hour of carte blanche to share, followed by a drink.
During this Thursday in Residence, the American writer Catherine Lacey will confront the notions of ekstasis and enstasis within the creative process. Ecstatic experiences are often the subject of fiction and poetry, especially when a writer’s goal is to transport readers outside of themselves. “Ecstasy” comes from the Ancient Greek word ekstasis, which means “to stand outside oneself,” yet that escape of the self — whether achieved through aesthetic, spiritual, sexual, or other means — is paradoxically the thing that most hinders clear writing about such material. Enstasis, the unpopular opposite of ekstasis, is a tool writers have often used, after the ecstasy has passed, to stand within oneself and translate an intense lived experience into a legible text.
Biography
Catherine Lacey is the author of four works of fiction, Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Certain American States, and Pew. Her honors include the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, and McSweeney’s Quarterly, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Her most recent book is entitled Biography of X (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023).