Vanessa Berry - Calendar

Calendar is an essay collection in the form of a daybook, written in real-time over a year. The book takes inspiration from writers who use experiments and constraints, such as Georges Perec/Oulipo and Bernadette Mayer, as well as autobiographical writers who use inventive structures, such as Christina Sharpe in Ordinary Notes, and Sheila Heti in Alphabetical Diaries. Calendar is based on the French Republican calendar of the late 18th century, in which every day was dedicated to an object, and applies this concept to objects of contemporary life. For a year Berry paid attention to her encounters with objects over the course of the day, and every night wrote an essay based on one object, and drew an illustration of it. Combining the narrative of a year and stories of the 365 objects themselves, Calendar is about tuning in to the unexpected, playful and solemn lives of the objects around us.