“Her writing shines.”—The New York Times Book Review
Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit.
Mary Cappello is the author of Night Bloom (1999) and is a professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
"A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with the insight of great cultural criticism and the emotional pull of memoir." -- Sarah Waters, author of The Night Watch
"At once comforting and startling,...It is a remarkable achievement." -- Adam Phillips, author of Going Sane
"Daring in both content and form, Awkward is a wonderfully unpredictable riff on the human predicament." -- Dawn Raffel, author of Carrying the Body
"Mary Cappello['s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort...[is] revelatory indeed." -- Mark Doty, author of Still Life with Oysters and Lemons
Mary Cappello, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, is a regular contributor to the world of literary nonfiction and experimental prose. Her four books include a memoir, a detour, an anti-chronicle (or "ritual in transfigured time"), and a lyric biography. She is the author of Night Bloom: An Italian/American Life (Beacon Press); Awkward: A Detour (a Los Angeles Times bestselling book-length essay on "awkwardness"); Called Back, and most recently, Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them.
Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, received a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Award (IPPY). "Getting the News," an excerpt from Called Back that appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of The Georgia Review, won a GAMMA Award for Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southeast. Called Back was also a Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and a Publishing Triangle Award, the judges for whom described the book this way:
"The narrative of cancer has become disconcertingly familiar to us. But Mary Cappello turns the story inside out, folds it up, and deftly re-opens it into something new and rather marvelous. This is someone who reads Proust on the gurney while waiting to be wheeled into surgery. She brings us along for the ride, and it's a dizzying, discursive delight. With a bracing combination of intellectual and emotional acuity, Cappello explores the inanities and indignities of the medical establishment, the solitude and camaraderie of illness, the politics and poetics of cancer culture. "Most essays are finished before they've begun," Cappello cautions her undergraduate writing students. Her book is an essay continually striking off into unexpected terrain with giddy courage and wonderment. Called back across that grim border, Cappello brings with her a luminous gift."
Some of Cappello's recent essaying addresses Gunther von Hagens' bodyworlds exhibits (in Salmagundi); sleep, sound and the silence of silent cinema (in Michigan Quarterly Review); the psychology of tears (in Water~stone Review); the uncanny dimensions of parapraxis and metalepsis (in Interim), and the aesthetics of the short form. Her experimental prose piece, "Objective Correlatives: a trialogue on love" appearing in Hotel Amerika was just nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work has enjoyed numerous Notable Essay of the Year citations in Best American Essays. A recipient of the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Cappello is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow, Russia) and currently Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island where she teaches courses in Creative Writing, Literature and Medicine, nineteenth century American literature and culture, Literary Acoustics, and more. Her latest book-length project on a single theme is a foray into sound and mood, tentatively titled In the Mood.
For media features (from the LA Times to the New York Times, from Salon.com to the Huffington Post, to radio appearances in Vancouver and Australia),a schedule of appearances, reviews, and projects relative to SWALLOW, please visit www.swallowthebook.com
Cappello is interested, along with a number of other contemporary nonfiction writers, in restoring the word "essay" to its verb form. For more information, including interviews with Julie Bolcer for HERE! TV, NPR affiliate Celest Quinn for "Afternoon Magazine,"and Jean Feraca for "Here on Earth," go to her website: www.awkwardness.org,
or read more on her Faculty Homepage: http://www.uri.edu/artsci/eng/Faculty/Cappello.html
or visit her youtube channel, where a series of visual meditations on awkwardness can be found.
This review is from: Awkward: A Detour (Paperback)
Awkward, A Detour by Mary Cappello is a brilliant, far-ranging meditation on the many aspects of awkwardness. Cappello takes the reader on journeys through Rome, Sicily, London, Moscow, and places in Canada and the United States as she explores the permutations of awkward. She delves deeply into her own past and present and that of her family and the impact of immigration on awkwardness. Cappello carefully explores the awkwardness found in the lives and literary works of Emily Dickinson and Henry James. Mary Cappello's book is poignant,moving, humorous, and heart and eye-opening.
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This review is from: Awkward: A Detour (Paperback)
At once easy and hard to put down. A rare gathering of thoughts, answers, and questions.
A favorite passage:
"And then one day it hits you - not all at once but in waves, and who knows why this particular day is to be a wave of succession or what led to it, but it hits you in a suffusing kind of way - of the time things take and of the need to live long enough to receive all the truths you weren't ready to receive, all in good time and at the right time, in readiness or shock, in openness or choosing now, marshaling your resources to throw some habit off its course; of the need to live long enough to face a desire, to make something happen and live with the happening's of the time it takes to learn about all that was good, and all the good you could do, or just to feel the ground beneath you as though it were strewn with bay leaves or egg crates, seashells, or shards; or the sense of a vanishing now at the site of what once was lush undergrowth and concrete, deep pockets of what-had-beens, a corner of the yard where a tap on the arm mingled with the smoky waft of a hot dog plumping on a grill and hydrangea was a face made of lacy stars pulling your own face toward it, or just to know it was there to hide behind, a placemarker at that juncture in the garden, like a doily dropped onto your head at church telling you you were there, you'd known this once, you'd been there before; to live long enough to become fully sentient."
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