CCA MFA WRITING
San Francisco
Tom Comitta
Tom Comitta (they/them) is the author of The Nature Book (Coffee House Press), Patchwork (Coffee House Press, forthcoming 2025), ◯ (Ugly Ducking Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), SENT (Invisible Venue), First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of the 40 books he produced in four years. Their fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, Joyland, and Best American Experimental Writing 2020, with two poems in The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing, UK), an international anthology surveying the “rise of concrete poetry in the digital age.”
From 2011-12 Comitta composed and conducted nine operas with SF Guerrilla Opera, a roving ensemble that gave voice to found texts at numerous sites around the Bay Area including the Civic Center BART station and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2012 Comitta staged National Novel Writing Night Month (NaNoWriNiMo), a futurist improvement on the popular write-a-novel-in-a-month contest in which they wrote, designed and published novels written in a night. In 2015 The Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland exhibited Comitta’s solo show First Thought Worst Thought, an interactive archive containing the 40 books Comitta composed between 2011 and 2014 as well as accompanying works in video, drawing, digital printing, window decals, and an original computer program. In 2017 The Walker Art Center and The Southern Theater commissioned Comitta and the performance duo Fire Drill to stage Bill: The Musikill, an experimental musical, at Minneapolis’s Momentum Dance Festival.
Comitta has exhibited books, texts and videos at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles; LUMA Foundation, Zürich; swissnex, San Francisco; Reed College, Portland; Robert Berman/E6 Gallery, San Francisco and The Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. They were a 2017 recipient of an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art and a 2023 grant from the New York State Council for the Arts. Comitta has held residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Bay Area Video Coalition, Little Paper Planes/Minnesota Street Project, and San Francisco Arts Education Project, where they conducted multimedia writing workshops with San Francisco youth.
Why Did You Choose CCA?
I first thought of CCA because I wanted to study in San Francisco. Back in 2007, I traveled there with a friend and wrote a poem that later won two prizes at my undergrad. This success made me wonder if I had some mystical connection with the city, that I couldn’t write anywhere else. In retrospect, this seems simply supersticious—I’ve lived elsewhere since then and write just fine—but this young writer was convinced!
I also wanted to go to art school. At some point, I had decided that the way to become a writer was to approach language how a traditional painter learns to paint: to really get to know the materials, learn to mix pigments, stretch canvas, build frames, etc. With writing, the material is language, which has aural and visual qualities as well as qualities related to its presentation, be it the public reading, the book, etc. It seemed that at art school, I would have access to similar thinkers. At CCA, I took a lot of writing classes, but I was also able to take a book art workshop and immerse myself in the visual art and social practice communities, which were crucial to my development as a writer.
Advice for Current Students?
For good advice, I will refer you to two other artists:
Laurie Anderson, in an address to the New School, suggested that creative people shouldn’t wait for an invitation to present your work; you could be waiting forever. She talked about her first tour to Europe and how, without actually booking any tour dates, she made a press release that said “Laurie Anderson is going on tour” and sent it to every performance venue she could find. Because she asserted herself and put herself out there, venues booked her, and the tour came to fruition. I can count on one foot the times that anyone has solicited my work; I’ve gotten all of my successes by being persistent and learning to live with rejection. I don’t know how you get it done any other way.
John Waters, at a Brown commencement speech, talks about the importance of keeping track of your expenses for tax purposes. Even if you have a day job, if you bring in a little bit of money for your writing or are writing a book that might make money one day, you can expense the books you buy as well as movie, music, and museum tickets; streaming services; paying your friend to edit your manuscript; and more (a quick online search will give you the full list). It’s hard to make ends meet as a writer, and this is one of the few benefits.
What's Next for You?
My first novel, The Nature Book, made entirely out of nature descriptions collaged from 300 canonical novels, is about to come out from Coffee House Press.
Simultaneously, my agent and I are trying to place a two-book project I wrote in which I used the results of a public opinion poll—the kind used by marketers and politicians—as literary constraints. I asked a representative sample of the United States everything from their favorite genre to setting to characterization to verb tense and used the data to write two novels: The Most Wanted Novel and The Most Unwanted Novel. The Most Wanted is a 250-page traditional thriller told in the third person about a woman fighting a murderous spiritual leader with a quantum computer.
The Most Unwanted, but in my opinion better book, is a 500-page experimental epistolary novel that blends romance, horror, historical fiction, and classic literature and is told in the second person. Set on Mars on Christmas Eve after talking cats take over Earth (since people don’t want to read about talking animals and largely prefer dogs over cats—sorry cat lovers!), it is about elderly aristocratic tennis players searching for love, venturing down harrowing VR rabbit holes and into the darkest caverns of the macabre.
Hopefully we’ll be able to find a good place for this project. Like The Nature Book, it will be a hard sell, but I’m of the opinion that there’s an editor for every kind of book; you just need to find the right fit.