The Arts & Trouble Literary Arts Lab, hosted by the University’s Creative Writing Department, was a two-day festival from October 19 to October 20. The festival featured poetry and fiction readings and faculty-moderated panel discussions with authors Jeffrey Yang, Daisy Hernandez, Antoine Wilson, and Chang-rae Lee.

On the first evening, professor Rachel DeWoskin moderated a discussion with Lee about his work at the David Rubenstein Forum. Lee read an excerpt from the novel he is currently working on, which he described as “a very different kind of novel for me…more autobiographical, with factoids of my life.”

Lee is the author of six novels and is this year’s Kestnbaum Writer-in-Residence, a program that connects the UChicago community with top contemporary writers. In an interview with The Maroon before his talk, Lee spoke about his enjoyment of the writing process. “It’s my practice. I don’t really associate it with whether I enjoy it or not. But it is something that kind of consumes you and you lose yourself in. And that is the best feeling,” he said.

When asked what he’d like UChicago students to know about his work, Lee acknowledged the great thematic variance between his books and described his work as “intellectual and emotional at the same time. Books that pull you in steadily and gradually.”

After reading excerpts from his novel, DeWoskin asked Lee to talk about his writing process. “Writing a novel is a bit like spelunking,” Lee said. “You kind of create the right path for yourself and there are many points when you think, ‘I’m absolutely going down the wrong hole here.’”

Lee characterized his writing style as something innate and personal, comparing it to the way an individual walks. “You can try walking like someone else but in the end, you have a walk of your own,” he said.

After the event, audience members enjoyed refreshments and had the opportunity to converse individually with Lee.

On the second day, events were hosted at the Experimental Station. Antoine Wilson read excerpts from Mouth to Mouth* his acclaimed 2022 novel. He then sat down to talk with Professor Vu Tran and shared insight into his processes and theories of writing, as well as jokes and life stories.

Following the discussion, Wilson mingled with students and faculty over catered pastries and confectionery, during which he shared his opinions on the value of art, the varieties of storytelling, and the creative process.

When asked about sublimity, Wilson told The Maroon that “it doesn’t feel sublime to write on the sentence level. Those sublime experiences of art, they’re for everyone but the artist.” Wilson encouraged young writers not to get carried away trying to write something sublime. Rather, he suggests starting at the most basic level of writing and not worrying about the audience. “You have to just write, and then after the editing stage, you hope in the end that the storytelling brings a powerful experience to the readers,” he said.

Sitting at the long table of food and spirited conversation, Wilson mentioned a moment from the day earlier in which Lee’s advice to Creative Writing students resonated with him. “When [Lee] was talking the other day about the innateness of writing style, I was thinking the same thing, how style is like the way you walk. It’s funny we use that same analogy,” Wilson said. “It’s a pretty good one.”