Episode 6: "Claire Donato on on breaking, not making language in Sheldon Bach's 'On Being Forgotten and Forgetting Oneself'"

Writer, teacher, and psychoanalytic candidate Claire Donato joins Naomi for a discussion on the convergences between psychoanalytic process and writing, reading, editing, and teaching. They discuss the capacious rigors of a reading practice, the remixing and revising of our writing and the stories we tell about our lives, and the shock of a book project emerging from one's analysis.

Claire Donato is the author of three full-length books, most recently Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions). Her poetry chapbook, Woebegone (Theaphora), was released this year with an accompanying adventure-puzzle video game Donato co-wrote. Other recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Parapraxis, Soft Union, The Brooklyn Rail, The Chicago Review, The Car Crash Collective Anthology, and Forever, and she has contributed essays to anthologies included The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer and The Mystery of Perception: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman. She lives in Brooklyn and currently serves as Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she independently supervises MFA and BFA candidates and also teaches group courses including Autofiction, Poetry and Psychoanalysis, and The Oceanic Feeling. She is a first-year candidate in psychoanalysis at the Contemporary Freudian Society.

Bach's essay "On Being Forgotten and Forgetting Oneself" can be found in his book Chimeras and Other Writings: Selected Papers of Sheldon Bach. Claire and Naomi also discuss Jamieson Webster's book Conversion Disorder.

To pre-order Naomi's new title, Marginalia: an autobiography, from Autofocus Books, please click here.