Richard Deming, Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Creative Writing, will discuss his new book “This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity” with Karin Roffman, Associate Director of Public Humanities.
In “This Exquisite Loneliness,” Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Within the back stories to Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston’s literary and ethnographic writing, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans’s photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele’s revolutionary artwork and Rod Serling’s uncanny narratives in The Twilight Zone, Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century. This singular meditation on loneliness reveals how we might transform the pain of emotional isolation and become more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.
In addition to his roles at Yale, Richard Deming is a poet, critic, and essayist, is the author of six books, including Touch of Evil, Day for Night and Art of the Ordinary. His newest book is This Exquisite Loneliness.