MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Winner Ben Lerner To Speak At WFU

A reading Tuesday night in Winston-Salem will likely examine and blur the lines between nonfiction and fiction, reality and art, the present and the future.

WFDD's Bethany Chafin spoke with Ben Lerner. He's a 2015 MacArthur 'Genius Grant' winner and will be reading at Wake Forest University as part of the Dillon Johnston Series.

Interview highlights:

On the title of his most recent novel 10:04:

"10:04 is the moment in Back to the Future, which was this crucial movie of my youth, as it was for many other people. 10:04 is the moment lightning strikes the clock tower that allows Marty's time-traveling DeLorean to go back to 1985... it's the moment in time that's also cast out of time because it's what powers him between epochs, and it raises the question of the difference between time as we experience it in art and time as we experience it in the world, which kind of gathers some of the formal concerns of the book."

On "shared experiences" throughout time and facilitated by art:

"I think that the really mundane facts of works of art and literature that are easy to forget are what make them so powerful. You can say 'you' in a poem or a novel and you can both mean one reader you're imagining, but whoever picks up the book and reads it kind of gets to participate in that pronoun in the present tense of reading. And that's really miraculous to me, you know, that you can be addressed by the dead, or you can address the unborn. And I don't have any illusions about my work being so important that it's going to endure, and I'm not even sure endurance is necessarily the goal, but I do think the possibility of community across time and space that's produced by language and pronouns and the shared history of looking is the basic miracle of what art and artifice is."

On his reaction to being named a MacArthur 'Genius Grant' recipient:

"I still feel like it's some kind of elaborate hoax, and that someone's going to call me back and say that they were just kidding. They call you out of the blue and they offer you this incredibly generous support. Maybe some people get the call and feel like, 'I really deserve this,' but I think for most people, you get it and you immediately feel both really grateful and totally like a fraud. The great thing about it is that it's a challenge to do your most ambitious work. Think of it as much as a challenge for future work as a recognition of what you've done. I feel both totally unworthy (but I'm also not giving it back) and really lucky and grateful." 

Ben Lerner will speak at the Porter Byrum Welcome Center on the campus of Wake Forest University. The event begins at 7:00pm. Hear the full interview below: