Project Bookshelf: Spencer Trent

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My bookshelves are as much emblems of aspiration as accomplishment. They are an amalgam of things read and reread, things boldly started but never finished, and things that I imagine will make for good doorstops when I move into a new house someday with several hundred doors in need of propping open. They are gifts, fifty-cent steals, and occasionally regretted splurges. But always they surprise me in how quickly they accumulate, and I find myself again and again like a desperate Minnesotan shoveling snow in the bleak midwinter but knowing in my heart that I will never be able to keep up. It’s a wonderful feeling.

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I hate to play favorites, but there are a handful I return to over and over, among whose ranks I would count the following: a pocket-sized collection of poems by Wallace Stevens, from which I have been fruitlessly trying to remove the remnants of a pesky price sticker for years; a well-thumbed copy of Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph that I turn to when in need of some healthy bewilderment; and an indeterminately stained copy of Plastics as an Art Form which reminds me that ugly things can be pretty, too.

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Spencer Trent is a writer of fiction, poetry, and film criticism living in Knoxville, TN. He graduated from the University of Tennessee with degrees in Creative Writing and American Studies, and his work was recognized with the university’s Margaret Artley Woodruff Award for creative writing as well as the Knickerbocker Award for free and experimental verse. His writing has been featured in Arts Knoxville, Blank Newspaper, and the Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine. He makes a living working in television production and, when not hunched over a keyboard, can likely be spotted by the glow of the nearest cinema screen.

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