Art is Long, Life is Short: The Writer’s Struggle to Create Something that Lasts
Deb Marquart
Wednesday, 23 Mar 2011 at 7:30 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union
Debra Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands in the seventies and eighties before her career took an academic turn. She is now a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone, draws from her experiences on the road. She continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm-and-blues project, The Bone People, with whom she has released two CDs. Marquart is the author of two poetry collections: Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She is currently working on a novel set in Greece titled A Formal Feeling Comes. College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean's Lecture Series.Hippocrates’ famous aphorism, "art is long, life is short," is designed to remind us that time is of the essence. Out of brief impressions and momentary scraps of life, artists try to create something that collects meaning - that moves, travels, and has a continuing life on the breath, imagination, and memory of others, perhaps even long after the artist is gone. In this lecture, Debra Marquart will read from her new work and discuss the problematic and fruitful tensions that lie between the ephemeral nature of all things and the artist’s desire to make something that lasts even against the decaying forces of time and forgetting.
Cosponsored By:
- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
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