Rita Banerjee: Writing Towards Psychic Heat (July 2025)

Delivered in July 2025, Rita Banerjee’s opening talk raises the question, “When writing towards psychic heat, is the only way out through?” Given the kinds of social traumas a reader and writer may have experienced or witnessed in their lives, this talk offers four alternative craft techniques and strategies that allow writers to write towards significant moments of emotional and psychic tension within their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Some authors, studied in this talk, who offer an array of strategies to write towards psychic heat include Robert Frost, Brandon Taylor, Roxane Gay, Haruki Murakami, Arundhati Roy, Ocean Vuong, Patrick Rosal, Carmen Maria Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alokeranjan Dasgupta, Jibanananda Das, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Gillian Flynn, and Marcel Proust.