Carol Mavor: “A Girl is Like the Earth: The Young Writing of Nanu del Cielo” | Department of English Co-Sponsored Lecture

Join us on Tuesday, March 24 at 5:15 p.m., in Fine Arts B (FAB 105), for the talk, “A Girl is Like the Earth: The Young Writing of Nanu del Cielo” by artist-historian, Carol Mavor.

“A Girl is Like the Earth: The Young Writing of Nanu del Cielo”

, covered in water . . .

the earth is like a girl. she has a dark soul . . .

~ Nanu del Cielo

Nanu del Cielo published “The Shallow End” in 1975, when she was only eighteen, giving rise to comparisons with Françoise Sagan, yet more useful is to link Nanu and Clarice Lispector, who also started a story with a comma, ended a book with a colon, and shocked us with a cockroach.

With Nanu del Cielo’s language on the tip of my tongue, I write distinctly of her Floridian youth: hydrological, colorful, epiphytic—fecund with manatees, motor boats, the Red River Lagoon, moon rockets, peacocks, pesticides, pink dragonfruits, mangoes, duck-and-cover drills, lubber grasshoppers, the Crystal River nuclear plant, Cape Canaveral, resurrection ferns. It is a landscape of life and death, giving rise to Nanu’s intense fear of annihilation, amplified by the environmental politics springing from Earthrise, the photograph taken in lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders—the most influential environmental picture ever taken.

“A Girl is Like the Earth” is highly-visual, ficto-criticism. Images appear like waves, sudden algae blooms, roseate spoonbills, communicating concepts like truths and lies.

Author’s Biography
Carol Mavor is an artist-historian, whose Alice Malice performances grew into girlish books, including her forthcoming “Forevering: Riding, Writing, Making, Loving, Grieving” (Duke University Press, 2027). As a writer who takes creative risks in form (literary and experimental) and political risks in content (sexuality, race in America, child-loving and the maternal), she has published widely. According to Geoffrey Batchen, Mavor’s recent “Serendipity: The Afterlife of Objects” reflects on the magical power of writing itself. She is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Manchester.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the UF School of Art and Art History.