A class facilitated by Stephen Aubrey
Date: Tuesday, August 23
Time: 8 PM
Admission: free, but please donate $5 if you can!
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) is perhaps most famous for Lolita and Pale Fire, novels of startling linguistic and literary playfulness. But as his wife, Vera, wrote in a foreword to a collection of his poetry in 1979, the true watermark of Nabokov’s work is the concept of “potustoronnost” or otherwordliness. Though much of Nabokov’s work may seem straightforward and realist, lurking underneath his fiction is an entire pantheon of ghosts, shades, demons and devils that comprise the true world of Nabokov’s writings.

READING ASSIGNMENT

Please read the following short stories by Nabokov: “Signs and Symbols” and “The Vane Sisters.” They can be found here.

WRITING ASSIGNMENT

In his famous letter to Katharine A. White, the chief editor of The New Yorker, while explaining the intricate riddle‐like structure of “The Vane Sisters,” which had been rejected by the magazine, Nabokov mentioned that some of his stories are composed according to the same system “wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.” This second story was frequently mystical or supernatural making his stories a collaboration between this world and the next.

Try and write your own text (story, poem, dialogue) where the real and supernatural worlds collaborate.

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Stephen Aubrey descends from hardy New England stock. He is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, dramaturg, lecturer, storyteller and recovering medievalist. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Commonweal, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, Forté and The Outlet. He inexplicably holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Hollow Earth Society and is an instructor of English at Brooklyn College.

He is also a co-founder and the resident dramaturg and playwright of The Assembly Theater Company. His plays have been produced at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Flea Theater, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick Theater, Symphony Space, the Abingdon Theater Complex, UNDER St Marks, The Philly Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where his original play, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, was nominated for a 2006 Fringe First Award.

He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he received the Himan Brown Prize and the Ross Feld Writing Award and a BA with Honors from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University.

He is—for the record—not a Christian singer-songwriter. He does, however, hold the dubious distinction of having coined the word “playlistism” in 2003.