The 2022 Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Panelists: Novelist and playwright Sheila Heti; novelist Jenny Offill; literary journalist for The New Yorker Jia Tolentino. Moderator: faculty member Benjamin Anastas.

“How to Be an Art Monster”

What if I’m not monster enough? In a viral essay for The Paris Review’s website in 2017, the writer Claire Dederer explored the sinking feeling that she and many of her creative peers shared that being mothers, partners and caretakers in their lives had robbed them of their chance to commit acts of genius. Like Roman Polanski had; like Sylvia Plath, even; maybe it was true that only a ‘scorched earth’ policy in life allowed an artist to be free. The narrator of Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, known only as “the wife,” has this to say about her younger ambitions:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

This colloquium brings together three of the most prominent, innovative, and influential writers working today—all “art monsters,” working in different modes and genres—for a discussion of that nagging fear for any ethically engaged artist (“what if I’m not monster enough?”) and the ways in which their work wrestles with the problem head on. Has the age of the lone genius, willing to sacrifice anything and everyone in their lives for their art, come to an end? Was it ever an accurate—or even a useful—model of how the best art is made? What other creative paradigms are available to the writer and the artist working today?

Panelists:

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Motherhood was chosen by the book critics at the New York Times as one of the top books of 2018, and New York magazine chose it as the Best Book of the year.

How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year in The New Yorker, and was cited by Time as "one of the most talked-about books of the year.” Heti’s latest novel, Pure Colour, was published this February by FSG in the U.S., Harvill Secker in the U.K., and Knopf Canada.

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award), and Dept. of Speculation, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award. Her most recent novel, Weather, was shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It was also longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and named by the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and other publications as one of the best books of 2020.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Formerly, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, received her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. In 2020, she received a Whiting Award as well as the Jeannette Haien Ballard Prize.

Trick Mirror, published in 2019, was an instant New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book and the PEN America Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. It was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, GQ, and The Paris Review.

Moderator:

Benjamin Anastas joined the literature faculty at Bennington in 2012, and he teaches both fiction and non-fiction on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. He is the author of the novels An Underachiever’s Diary (Dial Press) and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance (FSG). His memoir Too Good to Be True (Little A) was a national bestseller, and his short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and Yale Review, where it was awarded the annual Smart Family Prize for Fiction.

His journalism, essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Harper's, The Paris Review, Bookforum, the Oxford American, and The Best American Essays anthology.

The Colloquium will be open to the Bennington community and the public; it will also be livestreamed and recorded for the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA Program. A transcript will be published in a future issue of Bennington Review.

Bennington College Guest COVID Vaccination Protocol
Bennington College requires that all guests be vaccinated and have the appropriate vaccine booster. To enter into a building on campus, guests are asked to complete a visitor form—ideally 24 hours before their arrival. Visitors who have not completed this form will be asked to show their vaccination card before entering any campus buildings. Masking indoors is required in any shared spaces.