Fiction can encourage empathy without condoning violence. In this lecture, Marc Anthony Richardson will discuss humanizing "monsters" for strong creative writing and an honest understanding of ourselves, as well as read an excerpt from his forthcoming novel poem, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast. According to the Jungian concept of the shadow, "bad" qualities are often suppressed, and as Alan Watts stated, "To the degree that you condemn others, and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself." What are we pretending not to know? Labeling occurs out of confusion. But could the Sanskrit saying "tat tvam asi," or, that thou art, be true? In essence, could everyone be us? "The devil is the belief in duality," to quote Ernest Holmes, and, if this is the case, the monsters from Milton's Paradise Lost to Shelley's Frankenstein to the Gospel of Judas will continue to have something indispensable to teach us.
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia. Year of the Rat, his autobiographical novel, won an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Messiahs, a speculative novel, was a fiction finalist for the Big Other Book Award. The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, a novelistic poem, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Richardson also received an award from Creative Capital, grants from PEN America and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, a Hurston/Wright Foundation fellowship, and residencies from Art Omi and the Vermont Studio Center. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, and many others. He received his BFA from Antioch College and his MFA from Mills College at Northeastern University, and he has taught at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania. He was recently a 2022 Andrew W. Mellon Scholar-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and a 2024 Artistic Practitioner Fellow at Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
This event is colloquium credit eligible.