Theory for Moving Houses

You are asking me where I live and it's making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I'm a book, in space. So begins Renee Gladman's Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Her inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave's Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary it its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory(2010),The Ravickians(2011),Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge(2013) and Houses of Ravicka(2017)—as well as three collections of drawings:Prose Architectures(2017),One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and Plans for Sentences(2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared POETRY Magazine,The Paris Review,Gulf Coast,Granta,Harper's,BOMB magazine, e-flux and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction. She makes her home in New England with poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.