URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

poetry as a side dish. She wanted to create a writing that could infuse art and scholarship. A few things happened to make that transition into what she now identifies as being a writer of literary nonfiction, or lyric essay. One was writing “My Mother Writes the Letter That I Dream,” an essay about her mother’s agoraphobia and her use of letter writing as a way of leaving the house. That led to her first book, Night Bloom. She presented at a scholarly conference — the MLA Convention — where members of the audience, several of whom happened to be in key editorial positions, conveyed a hunger for this new form of writing and encouraged her to write a book based on the piece. “I stopped writing strictly scholarly articles and never looked back,” Cappello says. “I was fully immersed in the writing of literary nonfiction.”

When she came to URI, she found an open atmosphere that allowed her to focus on the relationship between creative and critical thinking. “There’s an embrace of it, encouragement of it. If you want to branch into different directions, you are going to be supported. You can grow and change.” Her course offerings at URI are as varied as her books, and have included creative writing seminars and workshops in poetry and literary nonfiction; immigrant subjectivity and documentary discourse; and literature and medicine. And then there is the class called “literary acoustics,” which she says stemmed from her long-time interest in sound. At URI, she created “sound walks” for her students, a concept originally devised by a group in Canada. She has students chart a walk through known territory on campus with one rule: No talking, just listening. “Then we come back and discuss the heard world,” she says. “It was fascinating.” Students found themselves thinking–“is this the ideal environment for learning, or what it would be? People associate the history of learning with monkish alcoves and quiet, but a campus is a hum of generators and other noises.” “I encourage beginning writers to identify the forms that the culture gives us to write with, and to re-invent those. If you follow conventions, you produce cliché,” she says, talking about her diverse style of putting words on paper. “You’re not going to find the truth of your experience.”

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Spring | 2015 Page 41