Arbitrary Creation: Renee Gladman’s Writing, or Lack Thereof, in Calamities Josie Reynolds College

In any creative pursuit, sometimes advice is given to put the project at hand down and revisit it later. In Calamities, despite struggling with writer’s block, Renee Gladman proves that she has no ability nor desire to construct boundaries in her creative process. In one of the sections in Renee Gladman’s Calamities, her commitment to the writing process ultimately underscores a compulsive tendency towards arbitrary creation as a means of distracting herself from her inadequacy as a writer.

Gladman’s musings on her work create an almost claustrophobic sense that her work is constantly reworked, never to be completed or put down. She starts this section writing, “I began the day wanting to fold the previous essay into this new one because I had learned after writing it that it was possible to make beautiful, complex structures with paper and you did not need to be an architect to do this” (56). Her sentence seems deliberately clunky, a departure from what tends to be common knowledge “good writing.” It creates the impression that Gladman prioritizes the process of writing and rewriting, this tortured experience that insists she become obsessive and removed from others, over the actual writing itself. Gladman states earlier that...