In Conversation with Alice Blackhurst and Brendan Dentino

Alice Blackhurst enjoys doing everything, everywhere, all at once. Reappraising Marie Antoinette’s style for Frieze Masters. Editing a virtual roundtable about The Lover, Marguerite Duras’ enduring 1984 novel. Examining Samuel Beckett’s legacy for the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI). Reading at literary events across Europe. And, this past month, bringing all her experience to bear as the 2025 Paris Writer in Residence. 

A partnership between The American University of Paris and CCI, the Paris Writer’s Residency provides accommodations at CCI, where contemporary artists showcase their work and immerse themselves in the literary history of the Latin Quarter. Residents also develop their ongoing projects while connecting with the AUP community.  

For Blackhurst, this includes a book about rereading The Lover, as well as a project inspired by her experience as a living organ donation, which she first wrote about for The Paris Review. She’s also working on a study of contemporary literary and artistic salons.  

On October 6, 2025, Blackhurst kicked off her residency with an event at AUP called “Uncanny Intimacies: Between Hosts and Guests.” In conversation with AUP Associate Professor Russell Williams, Blackhurst read from her latest work and discussed literary salons, sibling dynamics, and everything in between. As her residency at AUP came to a close, MFA student Brendan Dentino sat down with her for a conversation on her residency experience, the impact of an MFA in creative writing, and the Anglophone-Francophone literary tradition. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did the Paris Writer’s Residency get your attention? Why did you apply and decide to come to the residency? 

I knew that the British writer Sophie Mackintosh had done the residency [in 2021], and I admire her writing and her novels. That was my first way of knowing that the residency existed. I also thought that the partnership with the Centre Culturel Irlandais added an interesting dimension, particularly because CCI has, at any one time, other artists—not just novelists and memoirists and poets, but also visual artists and filmmakers. I liked that aspect, and one of my projects is very Paris-centric and rooted. It’s about this idea of the Parisian salon, the literary salon. I thought that it would be such a great opportunity to be walking those streets and being able to go to the primary sites and do a bit of cartography. 

What has been your impression of AUP? 

It's been great. It’s gone quickly but it's been so inspiring and stimulating. I think that starting with the public reading [at AUP] was a nice way of meeting a lot of students and professors in one place. It also had potential to be daunting, but it was actually a really nice, responsive environment. I received great questions, and I do get the impression of an engaged and motivated student body. 

It's been really interesting to meet some of the faculty and to get to know Amanda [Dennis] and Biswamit [Dwibedy], who are both brilliant. [Dennis and Dwibedy co-direct AUP’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.] I also feel lucky that it's the inaugural year of the MFA. I know the residency existed before, but the MFA added an interesting opportunity to teach and engage with writing students, who have all been very interested. I've really enjoyed talking to the students about their individual projects. 

How does the MFA program stand to impact the literary world? 

The two-year format really does give students the chance to emerge with a substantial body of work, which is exciting. And writing for or starting something like a literary journal or collection, I think, could be a cool thing for them to do. That's sort of how I got started with non-academic writing. I was a research fellow after my Ph.D. at King's College, Cambridge, and they had the King's Journal. The idea was that the journal was going to bridge academia and be more public-facing writing. That's where I wrote a couple of pieces of creative nonfiction. For the King’s Journal, I interviewed Patti Smith and the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, who's also very good at bridging creative and psychoanalytic modes of thought. 

I also recommend that students at AUP attend all the readings with invited writers. There’s a really strong Anglophone-Parisian cycle of readings. You can have a sense of the Anglophone literary world in Paris.  

How do you situate yourself in the Anglophone-Francophone literary tradition? 

I studied French literature as an undergraduate and did my Ph.D. in French literature, which was also partly in French contemporary visual art and film. I read Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Colette, and other French women writers, but also [writer and filmmaker] Georges Perec and Gilles Deleuze, who was a philosopher, but I see him really as a creative writer. I engaged with the French literary tradition before I engaged with the British modernist tradition, like with Virginia Woolf, who I now love and who's great, but that was secondary to the French route. I do think that that's had a deep influence on the way I write and think. 

What have you taken away from your time here, and what's next for you?  

You have a plan when you start a residency, and it almost never entirely corresponds to what happens and the work that gets done. And sometimes it changes paths, and you write something that's a result of an encounter or an exposure you've had. I think Paris is such a porous, dynamic and lively place. It has to be a key protagonist in this residency. I've tried to balance writing with seeing art, going to readings and talking to people, talking with students. That has generated, for example, an essay about Samuel Beckett out of CCI and the links there. That's cool. I didn't anticipate writing alongside the novel that I'm working on and alongside the nonfiction book [The Lover Reread] I’m working on as well. Afterwards, I'm going to go to the Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC), which holds most French writers’ papers. 

Do you enjoy that sort of research? 

I do. It's sort of part of my training. I came up as an academic and did a Ph.D. which required, for example, going to the Louise Bourgeois archives in Manhattan. It was quite moving and definitely humbling to be amongst [the work of] a writer who you revere. There are personal documents, papers and drafts, and you see that the polished final work had beginnings in ephemera and sort of false starts. So, I do like it, but I also think that scholarly research requires stamina. And my two projects aren't strictly scholarly or academic, per se. I'm taking a more, I suppose, creative approach. 

How do you balance your different writing projects? When you had the idea of writing something on Beckett, how did you decide, ‘This is new and interesting. I'll pursue this and put other projects on pause for now’? 

I will say it's never easy. You have to think, ‘Okay, if I take this amount of time to write that, is it going to take me away from my primary project?’ And I think it doesn't have to. In a way, you can enrich the primary project just by taking a detour. Writing about Beckett helped me think about writing about Duras, as well as the veneration of male artists versus women artists in France and questions of artistic legacy. 

It sounds a little vague, but I try and follow my most pressing desire on a given day. I think, ‘What am I feeling most drawn to and compelled by today?’ Because if you are writing one thing when you'd rather be writing another, that first thing is probably not going to be good. But we also have to manage deadlines. I see the shorter pieces and projects as more recreational, like something you're trying on for fun. That's sort of how the Beckett piece started. I thought ‘I'll just play around with this a little bit,’ and I did have something, I think. Not all pieces or projects start that way. 

Alice Blackhurst is a writer, critic, and the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image (2021), short-listed for the R Gapper Book Prize. Her essays and criticism have been published in The Paris Review, The Observer, The Guardian, The New Left Review, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement and Art Review.