“It’s one thing to read [a book] and then it’s another thing to get a personal account of what it’s like writing it and what the actual experiences were like,” said Annie Norcia ’08, a creative writing student who attended both a luncheon and a reading given by author Gregory Bottoms on Thursday.
The English and art and art history departments invited Bottoms to campus to read from his work, speak about his latest piece, The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art, and discuss writing over lunch with the students in Professor Jennifer Brice’s nonfiction prose courses.
Brice, who was responsible for bringing Bottoms to campus, had both of her nonfiction writing classes read Bottoms’s memoir, Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent into Madness, prior to his visit. In this work, Bottoms begins with his older sibling’s first psychotic break — in which he, under the influence of LSD, sees God in his bedroom window — and follows with his brother’s violent spiral downward into schizophrenia.
Brice described the benefits of having students interact with the author of such a personal piece: “I think that students often don’t imagine that there’s a real person behind the text — a real person thinking about what choices to make and how to make a book. So when they see the real person talking to them over lunch or at a reading, this light bulb goes off… Oh, this is a human being, a fallible human being who wrote a book.”
Norcia agreed with Brice, saying, “He’s not someone who makes you feel ostracized by his intelligence or the things that he’s been through… It’s remarkable the way he’s able to articulate the feelings that he’s had and the way he’s channeled the experience he’s had.”
Bottoms, a professor at the University of Vermont, enjoyed the luncheon with the students.
“They asked really interesting questions… I certainly enjoy just talking about writing. It’s a great pleasure, and you have a captive audience with students.”
Bottoms has a new memoir, Twelve, due out next year.