“There is no great difference … between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality.”
— Samuel Beckett, Proust
“A perfume, like the timbre of a voice, can say something quite independent of the words actually spoken.”
— Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent
“Her imagination was her best feature.”
— Lynne Tillman, “The Substitute”
A bottle of perfume. An eloquently-woven kilim. A letter written in purple ink. A postcard depicting a place which no longer exists. Each of these things is ripe for narration. Each is eager to be lifted, examined, remembered, and imagined. In such cases, narrative may be a species of memory and affective associations. In this workshop, we will immerse ourselves in what Pierre-Auguste Renoir called the “sensualist” side of life. Goosebumps are good friends!
We will also tap into our own nostalgic associations to structure and narrate a short fiction. Learning from Iana Boukova’s use of a woven Bulgarian kilim to recover (and re-imagine) a family history from its images and traces, we will experiment with ways of structuring narrative time. “Wonder impales you suddenly on a shaft of beauty,” said Robert Dessaix, and the story bides its time. The story waits.
Prior reading (optional and available upon request:
“The Tale of Boyazid and His Companion”, an excerpt from Iana Boukova’s Traveling in the Director of the Shadow (NYRB, September 2026)
“Imagination Dead Imagine” by Samuel Beckett