Autofiction is trendy. It's current technology. It's where a novel is autobiographical but also fictional, and where the two can't be pulled apart. (As if straight-up autobiography wasn't already fictional).

The Canadian author Sheila Heti tells us that "increasingly, I’m less interested in writing about fictional people because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story." Her new novel, Motherhood, seems to be based on her own life — it re-processes her life through the filter of literature.

Heti discusses and launches her new book, as well as the broader questions around the genre of autofiction today, with the artist and writer Ross Simonini.

P.S.: Some advance praise for Motherhood: "This inquiry into the modern woman’s moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response—finally—to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I’ve read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself." — Rachel Cusk

P.P.S.: One reviewer said that if you buy her books, your best friend will steal them. 

P.P.P.S.: Fuck Seth Price.

Sheila Heti is the author of seven books, including How Should a Person Be? (2012), which named one of the best novels of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, SF Chronicle, among others. She is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes, which features the voices of 639 women from around the world. She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine.

Ross Simonini is an artist, writer, and musician. His first novel, The Book of Formation, was published by Melville House Books in 2017. He is the Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine.

This event is co-presented with CCA's MFA Program in Creative Writing.

This is the ninth event in our year-long season about and around the work of Seth Price.

Seth Price Institute: Sheila Heti in conversation with Ross Simonini

Some of you, especially those of you who don't live in San Francisco, might not be familiar with the work of Dodie Bellamy.

She's a novelist, poet, and essayist who has been living and working here since the late 1970s, and has become a central member of the Bay Area’s avant-garde literary scene. She's interested in sex, death, and literature. Her material is language and narrative, which she twists and bends around different truths and untruths.

In her mind, a good essay always embarrasses its author, a bit.

Andrew Durbin, himself a poet and novelist, is an avid reader of Bellamy's work, along with the work of other writers from the New Narrative movement of the 1970s and 80s. Like them, he sees autobiography as something to use, but also to subvert, pervert, and perform. 

Durbin launches our 5th year-long research season with a new lecture on the writer Dodie Bellamy, giving an overview and sharing his perspective on her work and her words.

Andrew Durbin is an American poet and novelist, and currently serves as Senior Editor for the Americas at Frieze Magazine. With Ben Fama and Trisha Low, he co-founded Wonder and published books, pamphlets, and limited edition art prints from writers and artists such as Juliana Huxtable, Ariana Reines, and Jacolby Satterwhite. Nighboat Books published Mature Themes (2014), his collection of poems, and MacArthur Park (2017), his first full-length novel. 


This is the first event in our year-long season dedicated to the questions posed by the work of Dodie Bellamy and how they address art, culture, and society today.

Andrew Durbin on Dodie Bellamy

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to contemporary art. It was founded in 1998, at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

The Wattis Institute is a place for showing art and for thinking about art. We spend time with artists and pay close attention to their ideas.

We like to work with one artist at a time—one artist presents an exhibition in the gallery, one artist stays in the apartment on a residency, and one artist is the subject of a year-long research initiative. 

The Wattis Institute is a headquarters for contemporary art for everyone in the Bay Area, and runs an active event space (featuring an artist-designed bar) for discussions, performances, screenings, artworks, and drinks.

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