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Christopher Campanioni, PhD
Lecturer, English

What is the central theme of your book?

The theme of VHS is hyper mediation. The narrator of the book is a writer who is trying to find out more about his parents’ pasts, though they rarely talk about their childhoods before coming to the United States. Instead of their own lives, they tell him about the stories of others. So, he sets off by turning these stories into memories and then tries to give the memories life, by recording his voice reading them. Then, he turns the audio recording into a series of photos, perhaps inspired by the audio. Finally, he tries to make the photos move again, to adapt the photographs into a series of moving images, or the videos that eventually constitute the novel’s chapters. It’s a heady premise—born of this displacement and this desire to reconstitute such omissions through the excess of form.

What inspired you to write this book?

My life. VHS is fiction but it is very much inspired and shaped by my childhood and the extant feeling of not being able to return to the two places I have come from. In this sense, I think the ever-elusive question of where/what is home, which is relevant to anyone, not just children of exiles, becomes central to the text.

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

VHS continues my exercising of the genre of autobiography and the larger field of life writing, formally and thematically, combining narrative and poetry on the page while converging the topics of migration and diaspora with media theory. In this way, VHS is a fictional sibling of my forthcoming monograph, Drift Net: The Aesthetics of Literature and Media in Migration (Lever Press, 2025).

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

There are so many encounters with students that found their way into VHS’s narrative, particularly the many writing exercises and prompts we practice together in the classroom. Because many of these assignments—like a proposal for Re-Writing Myth—are central to my own research and writing, they also become ingredients the narrator is stirring in the pot in an attempt to learn more about his past. One of the aspects of this book that challenges conventional behaviors of the novel is its tendency to relate details of its source code through narrative, an interest in process that also informs the narrator’s interest in the possibilities and limitations of translating experiences through different formats or sign systems.

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

While I was in Berlin, doing fieldwork for the study that would later become my monograph, I rented a car and finally drove to Poland, with my wife, to see the country where my mom was born. Though it turns out Szczecin (in German: Stettin), which is where we spent a beautiful afternoon walking along the Oder, wasn’t Poland when my mom was a child, but Germany. The city itself, like many other places past and present, kept changing hands as its borders were exploited by geopolitical actors.

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

Maybe that even the act of silencing may be reconstituted through other means, even non-verbal ones.

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

VHS is a fictional/fraternal twin of a creative nonfiction book called north by north/west, which will appear next month (May) from West Virginia University Press. Both books begin on the similar premise of trying to remake a film, to turn art (back) into life.

Fun facts:

When did you join Dyson College? 

I joined Dyson in the fall of 2015—almost a decade ago—but this is my first year as a full-time instructor in the English department.

What motivates you as a teacher?

My students and their energy and curiosity. As a teacher, I think of myself as a radio player, tasked with the responsibility to tune to the different frequencies of each student, each with their own needs, their own interests, their own lives within and without the shared space of our classroom. And my favorite part about the radio is what people call “interference”: the moments when you receive a signal you hadn’t intended or could have never planned. These unforeseen and unforeseeable moments in the classroom are often the most meaningful.

What do you do in your spare time; to relax/unwind? 

I wish I were better at unwinding, but I’ve always had trouble relaxing. In fact, I get most of my writing and research done when I’m at my busiest. I suppose when I’m not reading, writing, or caring for our toddler, Desi, I “unwind” by playing tennis. I fell in love with the sport again at the beginning of the pandemic, because it was one of the few activities that were still permitted during the strict sheltering guidelines. I love tennis because it’s a lot like writing, or reading, for that matter. There’s such a strenuous physical challenge in tennis but it’s also so intellectual; the scenario is changing on the fly, and the only way to respond is to attend to patterns and make inferences: immediacy, guesswork, risk, vulnerability.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished reading Daisuke Shen’s hypnotic short story collection, Vague Predictions & Prophecies. We’ll be in conversation on April 15 to celebrate the launch of VHS at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn.