Renee Gladman is a poet, novelist, essayist, and artist. She has published prose works including the Ravicka series of novels and the crime novel, Morelia; the poetry collection, Calamities; and a monograph of drawings, Prose Architectures.
Gladman has been the recipient of numerous literary prizes, fellowships, and awards, including a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant and a 2017 Lannan Foundation Writing Residency in Marfa, TX.
Genre and style
Though she is often simply described as a writer of "experimental prose," Gladman's work spans fiction and prose, personal essays, and books of poetry and visual art. She is very interested breaking down boundaries between genres. In an interview with Lucy Ives describing the differences between prose and fiction, Gladman described her desire to blur the two forms: "Fiction is interested in a certain kind of unfolding or sequence of events. Time is more intact in fiction. Prose, I think, introduces the element of the awareness of yourself in language as you are unfolding things in time and allowing yourself to be distracted or interrupted, allowing yourself to question the difficulty of what you’re doing and be stalled, not to move. I want more fiction to do this, because it changes the way we read and understand story. With fiction that repairs all doubt and interruption and experiment by being fluid, coherent; what we expect doesn’t leave much room for me as a reader. But I think the more you talk about these categories, their distinctions, the quicker they break down. Ultimately, what I want is for there to be a blur over everything." Gladman's Ravicka series, four interrelated fictional books taking place in the author's invented country of Ravicka, has been compared to the fiction of Samuel Beckett, Anne Carson, and Julio Cortázar. Zack Friedman of BOMB has characterized the Ravicka series as “social science fiction,” a label that Gladman herself prefers: “I definitely would prefer social science fiction to science fiction, as I really didn’t intend these books to ask deep questions about technology or bioengineering or inter-galaxy relations. Instead, they wonder about city living, architecture, language and communication, desire, and community—the same things I wonder about in my own life. For me, it needs to stay on this side of reality... and it needs to be pushing for physical space in this world.” Gladman has described the very short essays that comprise Calamities as "ditties" because "they feel less like they’re trying to travel; there is just one point that gets made in a quick circle. It’s funny to call them essays anyway, because they fail as essays. They don’t sustain an argument, they don’t go anywhere, they don’t conclude anything, and the half-paragraph ones seem even more so, kind of absurd." Gladman's 2017 book Prose Architectures develops Gladman's long-term interest in architecture and in the relationship between language and image in a set of drawings created through illegible script that are as visual as they are linguistic. Gladman has cited Youmna Chlala, who also both draws and writes poetry, as an inspiration.
