This Friday, the 31st, Maggie Nelson is giving a reading and an interview at The Little Church, a neat but rather small venue on Alberta. Seats are limited, but also free! It's a function of Tin House and the Portland State MFA Creative Writing program, who collaborate on a graduate seminar every year, focusing on a living, contemporary author of importance, such as the brilliant Maggie Nelson. Basically, this open reading and interview is a chance to dive into a couple of rather exclusive, rather enlightening educational experiences—the MFA program at PSU and Maggie Nelson talking about anything at all—for free.

If you haven't read Maggie Nelson, she's a poet and the author of non-fiction books like The Red Parts and Bluets, books that blend memoir, essay, criticism, philosophy, and the ear for language of a poet to create something powerful, challenging, and kind of harrowing, but comfortingly complete, or at least enclosed: like a warm, full bed made out of new ideas, but that you might have confusing dreams in... Or, you know, not like that. Here's a description of Bluets from the publisher, Wave Books:

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. ...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue, while folding in, and responding to, the divergent voices and preoccupations of such generative figures as Wittgenstein, Sei Shonagon, William Gass and Joan Mitchell. Bluets further confirms Maggie Nelson’s place within the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.

Last time I saw Maggie Nelson speak about writing, she was furiously trying to explain her process, using everything from a projected slide show to what looked like science-fair posterboards covered in Wittgenstein quotes and trails of sentence fragments, dropping in equal measure self-deprecating anecdotes and brilliant asides, seemingly having these ideas, each one as fascinating as the last, as by-products of her own intelligence working with and against her main argument.

It's an experience, is what I'm saying. Here's the reservation info. Get a seat now, while you still can.