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Chris Campanioni, PhD
Lecturer, English

What is the central theme of your book?

The theme is collage and montage, both of which are used in the text to articulate a diasporic phenomenology. is creative nonfiction whose textual engine reads like plot: an unnamed narrator attempts to remake the 1959 Hitchcock film. Through sampling, overlaying, dubbing, and otherwise grafting his experience onto the audio and video tracks, the book calls into question the historical frames of periodization and essentialism to understand the transgenerational effects of the Cold War.

What inspired you to write this book?

I began writing north by north/west at the onset of the pandemic, in Brooklyn during lockdown, a period that nourished boredom and distraction alongside the ever-present danger of leaving 700 square foot living quarters. I had never seen North by Northwest and noticed that it was streaming (I can’t, even now, recall where). I clicked on the film’s icon and began watching, pausing every other moment, as early as the opening credits, to write down observations as they occurred to me. I often “write while doing other things” and this book is a good demonstration of that.

Why is this book important in your field? What does it contribute to the current body of knowledge on this topic?

One of my initial peer reviewers, later revealed to be Christine Hume, describes this book as “establishing a new genre for exiles and immigrants” and “a public conversation about ‘the post dictatorship generation’ of Cuban-American artists and writers.” I think the book is important in the field of migration and diaspora studies because it relates, particularly through its use of form, a condition of exile that can only be represented in pieces, in scraps, putting forth a productive tension between personal and familial memory and public or cultural history. There’s a growing field of critical creative writing (also called “critical experimental writing” and sometimes, with the emphasis of a hyphen, “creative-critical writing”) that this book contributes to. I hope the book will be especially useful in the classroom for folks who are interested in thinking about how to teach/how to turn scholarly research into public-facing narratives, rimming the edges of creative and critical writing. What's interesting, or what seems interesting to me, is the different approaches scholars might take to adapt their research for different audiences and in different formats—for example, I have a monograph (), which was originally my dissertation, coming from Lever Press this June, and much of what eventually found its way into north by north/west’s very wide narrative lens was cultivated from my notebooks that I kept while conducting fieldwork and research for what would become the monograph. More than a “B side,” north by north/west serves as a testament of scholarship that approaches its research and analyses through autoethnography, counter archival work, and lyrical prose, showing that it is possible to enact theory in the body and on the page.

Were students involved in any research related to your book? If so, please explain and name the student(s).

Like in my recent novel, north by north/west embeds a number of classroom activities and writing prompts and even seminar discussions in its narrative. Over the past decade here at Pace I’ve been fortunate to teach several different courses—from Feature Writing to Creative Writing to Transmedia Aesthetics to Latina/o Voices to Critical Writing and Writing Across the Disciplines—and I’ve likewise had many opportunities to test out or otherwise experiment with questions that feel so central and vital to my work.

Tell me about a particularly special moment in writing this book.

A good example of this “writing while doing other things” methodology is that one day, still in the dog days of the pandemic, I was reciting a passage I’d just written to my partner, Lilly, who was sitting beside me in the pool. And even that interaction, the recitation of words already read, made its way into the book.

What is the one thing you hope readers take away from your book?

I’ve already heard from some readers who have told me how much the book has made them want to write, which is kind of the best thing a writer might hope to hear: to give back to readers this desire to write while reading.

Is there anything else you would like to share about your book?

I wrote this book during a time of medical uncertainty; my body was undergoing various dysfunctions, and no one—none of the various specialists I was seeing—knew why or could predict when my symptoms would resolve. I realized when I opened the book for the first time, when it finally became a book, on May 1, and turned past the title page, that I hadn’t dedicated north by north/west to anyone, which is so rare—it’s the only time I’d forgotten to inscribe a dedication in any book-length publication. But now I think that it had nothing to do with forgetting; that I had actually dedicated the book to myself. For getting through whatever I was going through.

Fun Facts

What are you reading right now?

I just finished Richard Scott Larson’s similarly cinema-driven memoir The Long Hallway, which was published last year by University of Wisconsin Press. We’ll be in conversation at Taylor & Co. Books on May 9, alongside Marie Buck, who co-wrote (with Matthew Walker) Spoilers, another beautiful book about the agency engendered by watching and the wish fulfillment of witnessing, of what it means to relate the events of movies we’ve seen to our loved ones in real life.