The project was to resuscitate the letter form, on the topic of how our first novels engage with the urban space of Paris, where we both live and work. The letters took on a life and direction of their own, as we found our way into a conversation about the writing life and the pleasures of making fiction out of spaces and encounters.

—Ayşegül Savaş and Amanda Dennis

Monday, February 22, 2021

Dear Ayşegül,

The sky had been leaden for weeks, so I started Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light with hopeful longing—also because I tend to love the books you recommend. Finishing it now makes me want to start a conversation we’ve been planning—an exchange about writing and place, and about how identity and memory can be explored topographically.

Territory of Light is like nothing I’ve read before. It’s tuned to the rhythms of a city (Tokyo) and a life in crisis, or a period of dramatic, painful change. In the novel, light is not the respite from the Paris winter I was craving. It’s so much more interesting, figuring for the emotional experience of transition, when we’re raw, not in control, becoming other than the selves we’ve been. When a pipe bursts, flooding the rooftop of the narrator’s building, she goes up thinking she’ll splash in the water with her daughter. But she finds the rooftop drained and coated with reflective, waterproof paint that burns the eyes “as if we were crossing a snowfield, or adrift at sea.” Both our debut novels seem to be about characters trembling at an edge, consumed by the rawness of change.

I loved Territory of Light for its gorgeous, troubling images, but also for the way it maps a period of becoming onto a certain space or territory. Walking on the Ceiling also follows a character through a period of change, and it’s in dialogue with a city. I think of Nunu sitting at a bistro watching the light “sweeping the tables inch by inch in dusty stripes,” knowing she’ll think of this time “as in a dream.”

If our novels share a preoccupation with identity, grief, and memory, they also map—in different ways—the negotiation of the self within a city. Paris is foreign to both our protagonists, who wash up there of their own volition. Fleeing from pasts they can’t accept or integrate, they find themselves in strange, suspended time. As the pandemic drags on this winter, I think we’re encountering a collective experience of this; the world is changing rapidly, and we can’t responsibly imagine what it will look like when it’s over. We’re also forced to explore the intricacies of our homes and neighborhoods; people are buying loaf pans, pets, plants. You’ve just moved, so maybe you’re thinking about mapping intimate space in a more practical way.

The sensitive quality of dilated time is captured so beautifully by Nunu’s childhood invention of a “white city” on the ceiling. There’s a subtle but present connection: suspended time is also the time of writing, when we’re in the world intensely but not entirely, hovering over it, dreaming. Both our protagonists seem to be gathering, slowly and painfully, what it takes to beat back loss, to find meaning in what’s shifting. Elena stitches together a stranger’s journal fragments; Nunu hones stories in the company of a famous writer. Both are doing the things that writers do: noticing, exploring, collecting, probing material objects for the pasts they carry with them.

The objects in your novel are so sensually specific—like the photograph with which the novel begins, which seems to haul the story of M out of the past. Objects in your novel seem arranged as if to slow the disappearance of things. You once mentioned—this has stayed with me—that every writer builds up over time a “treasure chest” of things noticed and remembered, a collection of trinkets from which to draw. What is important about the work of noticing and collecting for a writer? Is it connected to an impulse toward preservation in times of great change, personal and collective?

Wednesday, February 24

Dear Amanda,

I read Territory of Light during a work retreat outside of Verona. We were staying at a house on top of a hill, with a dark dining room crammed with furniture, where our hostess, who lived across the garden, left us plates of cookies on the oak cabinet.

I wrote in the garden, facing a hedge of iris bushes from which appeared the heads of green snakes. Sometimes, their quick, thin heads forced me back inside, where I read Tsushima on the fold-out bed.

I had just begun my second novel—what would become White on White—with only this image: an empty apartment, white washed walls, open windows from which the wind streamed in.

Territory of Light had lodged itself in my imagination, opened a window for light to stream in. I wanted to populate a fictional apartment of my own—like that feverish home of the mother and daughter in Tokyo.

I had a similar experience reading your novel—the pleasure of being in fictional space, the way you allow for place to guide the story: the bench in the gardens of the Palais Royal, the bar table in Elena’s Montmartre apartment, the art gallery with a spiral staircase, the thick journals of varying colors. This is how I might plot a map of your book.

My own desire to write is always a desire to create spaces, to walk around in them, see them in different lights of day. Whereas the greatest challenge to me in writing is to have to populate these spaces, with people and actions, and to eventually let them become mere background. While we can simply sit in a space and take it in, writing doesn’t allow for the same fixed meditation. The taking in has to happen in action, in time. This may be why the spaces of my writing are so dense with memory: because it is one way of creating a written still-life, as an x-ray of all the times that coexist in a single place.

We’ve now moved to our new apartment. This letter to you is the first time I’m sitting at my desk. From the window: the white building across the street, a squat medlar plum, green railings. In the last days of packing up our apartment—the place where I became a writer, wrote Walking on the Ceiling, where I lived longer than any other home and in any other city—I constantly tried to pin down the moment when the space would lose its household spirits and feel foreign. When the bookshelves were packed; when the dining table was sold; when the jade plant in the bathroom was gone, leaving behind a rim of dirt.

I suppose that these objects—the ones that breathe life into space—are also the ones that animate writing. My first novel was an attempt to inventory all the things—tangible and otherwise—I had gathered until then, with the eagerness of looking at the world with the intention to transcribe it into writing.

When did the household spirits take their leave from the old apartment? Actually, I don’t think they did. When we went back to hand our keys to our former landlord, earlier on that Sunday you and E came for drinks at the courtyard, the empty apartment—its white doors swung open, the wooden floors spreading like honey, the empty window sills—looked so appealing, so full of potential, like an unwritten story.

Thursday, May 6

Dear Ayşegül,

I love that you initiated your desk with a letter. Letters heighten the sense of a single, specific reader, which I find galvanizing. Sometimes, casting about for a certain energy in my writing, I scan a few of Beckett’s letters. I find his prose enlivened by solicitude, charged with the personal even as he crafts arresting literary images, testing them out, like warmup scales for a pianist.

When Beckett gets behind in his letter-writing, he says “forgive my remissness,” and I’ll borrow his line here because I let this go for far too long after the rush of publication. More than a month later and I’m still getting used to Her Here existing as a thing, belonging to readers. At the bookstore launch, you joked about not being able to walk off with a copy of Walking on the Ceiling; you have to pay for it if you want to take it home. Publication oddness. And joy.

It was wonderful to see your new apartment fitted out, to see you feeding the genius loci by opting for furniture with history, like that chest of drawers from the Vanves flea market that you cleaned and varnished. How many lives has that had? How many people have hidden letters in its drawers, under the linens? Once, when I was helping out at an artists’ retreat in the Languedoc, the owner told me how she’d found the sheets we were fitting onto beds in one of the region’s antique markets: linens made to last, handed down through generations, embroidered with initials.

I associate the 14e with Agnes Varda’s Rue Daguerre, and I still feel something of that time in the quiet peaceful streets of your new neighborhood.

Your letter has me thinking about how spaces can generate stories. Above my desk there is a map of Paris in 1630 (it came with the space, but I’ve added a print of Kandinsky’s Rudern). In your apartment, there’s a map of Aeneas’s journey. Epic heroes are so good at being thrown off course. Without wandering, where would we be, story-wise? In writing too, sometimes, you get blown off course in the middle of a morning, and you know those are the winds you need to follow. (I’m wondering now, as I push around pages of a second novel draft, whether it’s easier to get lost in those unpredictable winds when you’re just starting out.)

I love the digressive quality of works by wandering writers. It’s what draws me powerfully to Chris Marker’s films, which were important to me as I was writing Her Here. He has a deeply intuitive way of seeing that is caught up with the spontaneity of meaning; his camera eye seems to move because it is solicited by the things themselves. This is so close to what it means to me to create: the cooperation between you and the world, whether it’s experience that reemerges, transformed, in writing, or the way a path appears in the act of walking it. I have the sense, watching a film like Sans Soleil, that it’s showing the film coming into being through this paratactic way of seeing. Marker’s gaze sanctions wandering, giving equal importance to significant and insignificant, and the film stitches together these disparate objects. There’s a lot of this way of seeing in Walking on the Ceiling too, which dramatizes, quite knowingly, the weaving of stories from disparate materials, as Nunu and M go on their walks, collecting sights and watching serendipities emerge.

As we learn structure, “mapping,” does the innocent intensity, the digressive quality of our noticing change? I’m thinking of your story, “Future Selves,” which seems to emphasize a different kind of making, one focused on imagining, on projecting into a particular space a particular future. Failure to do this can be devastating, as the story shows us. In your New Yorker interview, you spoke of how the story is in implicit dialogue with the pandemic. There’s grief, a loss of economic stability, and we’ve suffered a collective blow to our ability to project forward with confidence. It’s meaningful to me that the narrator’s apartment hunt is spliced with her visit to a cousin at university, a life stage when we’re all dream and projection.

Wednesday, May 26

Dear Amanda,

I’m back from the morning market, in preparation for you and E’s visit this evening. You two are back from the south—that sun-drenched photo you sent of stone steps descending into the sea. I imagine you brimming with an impatience to write, with the new vision that being in a different landscape can bring about.

I should tell you about a conversation M and I had about you, when we first started spending time together! This was following that dinner of whole-stuffed squash with risotto. What surprised him about you, M said, what had been a switch of perspective from his initial “reading” was realizing how rooted you were in the sensory, how you paid attention to the tangible world, and how much your recounting of past events was based on smells and tastes and sights. Perhaps he found this surprising for a scholar and writer, having expected you to be living in an abstract space of ideas!

I thought of this while reading your short story “The Productions” a few weeks ago, set in a future where artists are kept in laboratories under strict regulations, whose cyclical “productions” are awaited with fervor. The artist is like a wild animal, all sensory experience: “We need only the most sensitive to be the eyes, the skins of our population… Everyone feels through her, you understand.”

I just read Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and Deborah Levy’s Real Estate. The first is about a second home built on the estate of a middle-aged female narrator. In this second place she hosts artists, both out of generosity, to give them space for their work, but also to give her own life meaning in a roundabout way. Levy’s book is about the fantasy of an ideal home, one with pomegranate trees and fountains, a fireplace, a river with boats. My current project—an expansion of the story “Future Selves”—is also about a young couple’s search for a home: a place that will give meaning to their lives, and structure to their identities.

What is this sudden interest in imaginary architecture, all this writing about houses, real and desired? I feel as if our current lives—so fragmented, so virtual—must be responsible, that we are yearning for a home, though the reality is that home is an illusion, unstable and shifting.

Perhaps this yearning has always been a foundation of literature. You mention the wandering of epic heroes; there is also the hero’s desire for a home. (Ithaca!)

And after all, isn’t writing a book always an architectural project—building a space of imagination, with many rooms, with hidden nooks and attics and basements, and yet with a logic that leads in and out of these rooms, that holds together the construction?

I heard Nicole Krauss talk about this during a reading in Paris: having grown up in many places, she said, she had no home to which she fully belonged. But every time she was writing a book, she felt as if she had a place to go, a house that would shelter her, if only for the period of writing. Then, once the book was finished, she would be homeless once more.

I’m looking forward to seeing you in just a bit, in real time and space!

Wednesday, June 9

Dear Ayşegül,

I’m writing from the train. It’s a brand-new Normandy train with unvarnished wood between the seat rows and the smell of a new car. Outside are scrap yards, rusty bodies of old trains, a sky of cotton clouds. Now there are gardens, plots of lettuce and leeks, now flashes of a canal where colorful boats are moored.

There’s so much to be mined in the relationship between writing and home—not just home as comfort and belonging, but as a space with solid walls. An environment that shapes you back. In The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes describes writing as a recourse for a feeling of not belonging anywhere. He asks if writing is his only homeland. The Istanbul apartment in Walking on the Ceiling is long and narrow, compared to a train: a family home hurtling somewhere, unstable, shifting.

I can relate to a feeling of homelessness between projects, when you’re still building the story world that will house you for a few years—or more. As a child I had a recurring dream of a building site, where a toy-like bulldozer dug out foundations in a plain of dark earth. It was all the help we had. Then it was up to my family to create the structure, lay the bricks, forage materials. Until we built our house we’d live exposed, in a vast desert of dirt.

Last fall, shortly after that risotto-squash dinner, I read Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for the first time. It captures that tension between itineracy, openness to the elements—a drifting life—and home as a bulwark against decay, a place strengthened by order and design. The scenes of the town flooding are so vivid, and I was riveted by the nonchalance of the more nomadic character as she sloshes in the watery kitchen, forgets to turn on lights, sleeps in her huge coat, and keeps saltines in her pockets.

This is part of why I love the image that inspired the photograph of stone steps descending into the sea. (There’s a similar image at the end of Her Here; it must be an archetype that haunts me.) I’m pulled in by the paradox: steps painstakingly carved in ancient rock leading into vastness, the Mediterranean, a lostness. Architecture ending in the depths.

In the south, E and I were visiting a friend who is trying to keep up a fourteenth-century mill in Opio. In his family for generations, the millhouse is falling into ruin among the orange and cypress trees, jasmine and roses; everywhere there’s a sense of how close beauty can be to rot, of how you want to let in chaos, but not too much. (A dead chicken was buried in the garden, its claw sticking out of the earth.) In the novel I’m working on now, my characters have fallen outside the social order. They’re building new structures, but they’re also made aware of how the old rules offered protection from what’s terrifying, unfathomable.

In our debut novels, Nunu and Elena discover the buried traumas around which their stories revolve when they’re far from home, in the most peripheral reaches of a foreign city: Nunu wanders the abandoned abattoirs beyond the 15e, and Elena follows Canal Saint-Denis above the 18e. Here, in these ex-centric spaces, they access something. They remember.

Do you remember telling me about the Torcello lunch scene in Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day? The characters dwell in suspended time, faces gilded by the afternoon light, aging undone in a moment of grace. It reminded me of the iconic dinner scene in To the Lighthouse, where candlelight flickers on the centerpiece, and shifts in perspective transform transient hurts and flatteries into a sense of ease with time passing. Such dinner party scenes may be, in the literary lexicon, signifiers of home—they afford stillness in the midst of change, eddies in the current of time hurtling forward. Their warmth reminds me of our dinner at yours, in the new but now lived-in house in the 14e with its books, flowers, and candles, filled with our talk and that carrot-mint salad and all the strawberries. I suppose as writers we must be very good at making homes and getting out of them.

Friday, July 2

Dear Amanda,

Your archetype of stairs descending into the sea, the itinerant and the domestic, reminds me of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and his discussion of open enclosures: the places of intimacy and immensity, like forest paths. This is one of the books that most formed me; made me want to write books that were spaces of wonder. Sometimes, when I’m hunting for inspiration, I’ll read the chapter headings like a poem: Drawers, Chests, Wardrobes, Nests, Shells…

I’m writing from a train, too, back to Paris from Provence. We rented a country house on the outskirts of the abandoned medieval village of Oppède le Vieux (ghost towns: another space for the imagination to roam!). The owner who showed us around the house on the first day was almost reluctant to hand us the keys. She kept explaining that the furniture was very old and had belonged to her grandparents. We were not to put anything wet on its surfaces. The mistral could rip open the shutters, she went on, the doors were delicate, the potted flowers in the garden needed watering… It was a beautiful place, so I could understand her worries. On our first day, until our sight grew accustomed, we kept marveling at the various “sights” the house offered, like pictures in frames: the mountains seen from the bedroom, the vines hanging halfway down the living room windows, the hammock in the garden framed by olives. I had a restless feeling to do something about it: my feeling of inspiration is never one of contentment!

But the reason I’m telling you about this house is not so much for its beauty. I’ve been talking about place in fiction mostly as landscapes and spaces that move me. As I said, this was my point of departure for White on White: the picture of an empty apartment with breeze moving the curtains. As the novel progresses, however, this space of possibility closes down, it becomes claustrophobic, teeters towards nightmare. As I wrote, it was as much the psychological trajectory of the space I followed as that of the characters.

One morning in Provence, I woke up to bites all over my body. As the day progressed, the bites began to swell. By the following day, they had doubled, then tripled. We didn’t know where the bites were coming from—something in the bedroom, the furniture, the garden, or out in the fields? There was nothing we could see. It could be anywhere, I thought, and the invisible menace cloaked the entire landscape: the rows of lavender in front, the cornflowers growing in a circle, the dark polished wood, all of it distorted out of shape.

Now, with the bites slowly fading, I am thinking of this house as the site of an entire inner journey. What was the point for you in Her Here when the landscape of Thailand began to shift from the initial spark of inspiration, to something darker and more tangled?

Tuesday, July 27

Dear Ayşegül,

Among mass emails and administrative requests, your letter brightens the workspace—affectively. It feels like an invitation. I’ve been thinking a lot about the body this month, after a small operation I had on Bastille Day; its fragility and power feel very much in focus for me.

For a body, space lacks objectivity; the same room is enchanting or oppressive depending on your mood. In Her Here, Ella’s space kaleidoscopes as she becomes unmoored. Her Thailand loses its magic and expansiveness, and the change surprises her, like finding rot in a ripe mango. Your question makes me think of how tightly psychic states are bound up with perceptions of space.

To show how Ella’s Thailand grew sinister—subjectively of course; the objective world held steady—I drew on my own experience of a time when space changed sharply for me.

In Chiangrai in the early 2000s, the cheapest and most reliable mode of transportation was a motorbike. I would drive to the university and back every day, a straight, easy ride along a country highway. During the monsoons I’d do as the locals did: cover myself with an oversized poncho and ride on. One day the road was particularly slippery, and as I shifted onto the shoulder of the highway, the bike slid out beneath me, scattering me across four lanes. I remember looking up from the asphalt, seeing cars far off, approaching. A man with a truck stopped and kindly delivered me and the motorbike home. I had been lucky. The only mark of my accident was a scratch the length of my spine. But my space narrowed; market stalls and temples turned sinister. The fluorescent lights of noodle-stands grew garish. Even the smells, the humid jasmine I’d loved, turned my stomach. After two weeks, my perception righted itself, but I continued to suspect an unsteadiness to appearances that had once sent my imagination in the wildest directions. This temporary shift became the basis for Ella’s nightmarish period in Chiangrai, when she imagines that the place is rejecting her, pushing her out.

It strikes me that Provence became sinister for you and Chiangrai transformed for me after experiences of bodily fragility. The body determines how space looks and feels to us. I believe this. It’s what I wrote my academic book about. Beckett and Embodiment draws on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception argues that our feeling of space is created in part by the energy and position of the body. At night, for example, our sense of space changes; objects and the body lose their sharp borders and things run together frighteningly. Bachelard’s phenomenology makes a version of this point too, and Bachelard is so wonderfully rooted in the physical world, a man of the earth.

I love your description of open enclosures and the confluence of domestic and wild spaces. In Cole Swenson’s Art in Time, there’s an essay on Rosa Bonheur (who had to apply for permission from the French police to wear trousers!). She kept lions as pets—five in all, though not at the same time. I imagine them “padding softly around the house and grounds, terrifying the guests.” It’s not hard to see how the domestic and the wild might be brought into relation, their interdependence revealed. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a “drift beyond the domestic” in White on White—whether its setting, its civilized apartment, opens onto wildness.

Tuesday, August 10

Dear Amanda,

The wild space of White on White remains a psychic one, within the civilized boundaries of the apartment. What shifts, perhaps, are these definitions of the space—whether they were civilized to begin with, or welcoming, just like your shifted perception of Chiangrai.

For me, writing fiction is always a navigation of space: take a location— mental or spatial— and study its various moods, its visible spaces and hidden corners, the different ways of traversing it. Take a location—mental or spatial—and reconsider its appearances, from the first tug of inspiration to the messy unraveling of all that was initially unseen.

Today is my last day of teaching—a novel workshop—before I leave for a writing retreat. It will be similar to the one I wrote you about, in the hills in Verona, when I began writing White on White. This time, as you know, I am writing a book about a young couple’s search for a home.

Several of the novels in this workshop were set in a future world of climate crisis, where the wild and urban geographies as we know them have perished. The characters of these strange, apocalyptical landscapes, with their new life forms and technologies are also moving through geographies of memory. Their memories are of the contemporary world—of beaches, picnics, coffee shops, parks, subways… I was so moved by this switch, the known world transformed into nostalgia, our mundanity made extinct.

Of course, the sinister underbelly of a beautiful place is more than ever looming in our consciousness; the precarity of our lives, our habitats, the whole planet. If “space is created in part by the energy and position of the body” as you write, then what becomes of fiction when the embodied self can no longer feel safe on the ground they step on?

I have told you about the book I’ve wanted to write for many years, set on the Aegean coast of Turkey. This place—not a specific town, but the entire blue and green and white geography of the northern Mediterranean—is where I feel most at home in the world. This is my own invented home, without any ancestral connection. I’ve lived, as you know, in many different cities and countries, and never spent more than four years in any single house during my childhood. But the constant landscape of my life has been this coast, which I’ve sailed with my family most summers of my life. Nor is “my family” a stable entity—there have been divorces and feuds, and every year it is a different configuration of “family” that embarks on the journey. What remains fixed is the landscape, its dryness and lushness, its bright and drowsy days, the pine and cicada and warm stone. I’m writing to you as this coast, from Bodrum to Marmaris, is on fire, surging out of control. For days, local municipalities have been trying to put out patches, here and there, while the government does nothing to help. The names of the bays that are destroyed are as intimate to me as the addresses of my autobiography, places that are like the bedrooms and windows of my own mind. It feels, as I write to you from Paris—rainy this afternoon, impossibly so, as if to demonstrate the helplessness I feel, my complete lack of autonomy—that my mind has been set on fire as well, that is to say my imagination, that animating force of life.

Monday, September 6

Dear Ayşegül,

It’s an important question—what happens to fiction when the places that spur imagination and support life are in danger?

The northeast of the US is flooding, even as particles from the California wildfires are detectable in the air. My father and I watched the hurricane gates close to protect Providence from Henri, and days ago news came of Ida’s remnants drowning people in their homes in New York City, pouring into subways, and sweeping tornados across New Jersey.

I’m writing to you from a place somewhat apart from the world, from a cabin named for the disappeared Guatemalan poet, Alaíde Foppa. She wrote this: “No one can live with a death inside: she has to choose between tossing it far away like a rotten fruit or keeping it and dying from contamination.” Foppa lived and wrote in exile in Mexico City. Then, in 1980, she went home to visit her mother and renew her passport. Her children never heard from her again and suspect she was abducted by Guatemalan security forces. I don’t feel sheltered from the world here, nor ignorant of it, but it’s a place where more feels possible.

When I got here, I thought the ghosts might be actual (we’re on the grounds of a nineteenth century mansion, with stagnant lakes named for the family’s dead children). A famous writer wrote about meeting a ghost in a tower room, and I entertained the idea of hauntings. But the pregnancy of the air here must be just the energy of the place, the faint sound of my musician neighbor composing; in another cabin, a woman is writing a memoir under an assumed name.

Some days I don’t write but watch the early autumn mist tear itself from the ground, making a haze over all it touches. There was the very first leaf of fall, red and strange, hanging against the September-blue sky. I grew up in this climate and know the seasons in my bones. That might be why it’s such a shock of support to write here. Woolf’s room of one’s own is important, but so is community, the openness and possibility of people living together.

I haven’t produced as many pages as I’d like, but I came to a breakthrough about my island. Going in, all I knew about the imagined space at the heart of my new novel was that it was a place where people made energy. It was uncomfortable not knowing what kind of a space it was: a space governed by mechanical laws? an actual space? a space whose flora and fauna corresponded to its latitude? I didn’t know how people would behave there. It’s hard to describe a work in progress—you can deflate it or articulate something before it’s actualized—but the island has become a space that is created collectively, and it changes with the presence of certain people in certain combinations. It responds to the desires and memories of its inhabitants, but it also resists them, flinging characters back on their material, bodily being. The island is part imagined, part alive, and no less actual for being so.

Today one of the artists had an open studio. We huddled into a dark room, which he’d turned into a camera obscura, taping up a washer and blacking out the windows. Outside, the sun shone hard on the pine trees, and the world appeared stretched around the studio walls upside down. We sent an artist to the center of the room, and the inverted world fanned across her right-side-up body. Then the maker of the camera obscura went outside. His body, bleached by the light, became part of the inverted world: “Walking on the Ceiling!”

I thought then that this might be a good metaphor for the space of literature: a world inside a dark room, a world in some ways sharper, but distorted, able to be visualized in a concentrated way. The opportunities for playfulness it afforded us were numerous.

Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels Walking on the Ceiling and White on White. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Originally from Istanbul, she lives in Paris.

Amanda Dennis is the author of the novel Her Here, and of a literary critical work, Beckett and Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency. She lives in Paris, where she is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris.

A Map the Size of the Territory: Letters on Space and Literature

Music & Literature: a humanities journal