MFA alum Cliff Watson Publishes New Media Work

Cliff Watson (MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics, ’21) recently published the piece Storage closet in Finnish web journal Nokturno, a longstanding venue for digital, experimental and cross-disciplinary literature. Watson’s video artwork includes a virtual and augmented-reality rendering of a scene from his MFA thesis manuscript, 6-foot Pine, a work of hybrid dramaturgy that tells the love story of Zach and Olivia, an office receptionist and accountant, who work on the same floor of an office building during a global pandemic that has intensely circumscribed human interaction. In part a reflection on love in the time of social distancing, the work is fundamentally an exploration of boundary-crossing, encompassing not only the boundaries, real and artificial, between people but also the bounds of mixed racial identity and cultural expectation.