This Is Who We Are: Lars Horn

This Is Who We Are is a series featuring Columbia School of the Arts professors, covering careers, pedagogy, and art-making. Here, we talk with Lecturer in Discipline Lars Horn about his unconventional journey from language loss to writing, his teaching philosophy, and the value of embracing specificity.

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Lecturer in Discipline Lars Horn's formal entry into the writing world came through chance—and the promise of a free meal. 

"A friend, Alexi, said, 'Why don't you collect your essays and submit them for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize?'” Horn tells me over coffee. “At the time, I didn’t see the point, but Alexi said, 'I'll buy you dinner if you do it.' I thought, 'You're on.' I assumed that would be it, just a free meal.

That submission resulted in Horn winning the 2020 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize for an early manuscript of Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, a greatly expanded version of which was published by Graywolf in 2022 to critical acclaim. A circuitous and unexpected journey into writing, coupled with a foreign outlook on the American publishing industry, allows Horn to offer a refreshing perspective to his students.

Voice of the Fish, which also won the 2023 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, marked the end of a long journey of language recovery. Having experienced physical and personal trauma years ago, Horn had lost something most writers consider foundational: language itself. "I was assaulted, injured my back, and burned out from academic work and translating," Horn explains. "For some time I lost the ability to speak, read, and write. It was a psychosomatic response—but it caused a complete void in language."

Having studied French and Russian as an undergraduate, he had worked as a translator before his injury, but lost his access to foreign languages. "It took me a long time to recover language—I managed to recover English but lost huge swathes of French, which was at native level, and Russian, which was very serviceable."

Horn still prefers not to definitively call himself “a writer.” "I'm not somebody who knows for sure that writing is what I am and always was meant to do," Horn says. "I don't have that biblical knowledge of 'forever in the past, forever in the future.' I fell gradually into it."

Moving to Canada from the UK after recovery, Horn worked night shifts in Montreal warehouses, far from his previous academic life. The transition to creative writing came through necessity—a visa requirement led him to enroll in an MA program—but his distinct voice began to emerge while processing his experiences through writing.

"During the program, I started writing prose poems that used dreams, hallucinations, or visions to reframe the corporeal experience of illness as I understood it when I was bed-bound and struggling to speak," Horn says. "The work featured animals emerging from bodies or bodies in states of metamorphosis."

Horn expanded those early ideas into a full manuscript by interrogating the fundamental questions underlying the work, the same logic that informs his approach to teaching. Rather than focusing solely on craft mechanics, Horn guides writing students toward identifying what he calls "live questions"—unresolved intellectual and emotional inquiries that drive creative work. These aren't questions with straightforward answers, but rather fertile points of tension that are fundamentally unsolvable.

His approach in workshop involves mapping themes and motifs to help students discover what they’re exploring in their work. "I've seen phenomenal things come from students when they start to understand this, and realize that once they’re in dynamic tension with live questions without a single–if any–definitive answer, they can generate a lot of work and shape their essay." 

Another component of Horn’s personal philosophy is his belief that writing is only one aspect of a fulfilled life. Horn reminds students that they are people first, writers second. He expresses concern over the "write everything and everyone—writing comes first" mentality. Horn's counter-philosophy emphasizes human connection: "I am more concerned with the ancient question of how to lead a good life–one of care and compassion, perhaps even doubt, mystery, and faith–than how to write the totality of one’s life irrespective of power and ethics.” 

In his teaching, Horn brings diverse texts into the classroom, asking students to consider how poetry, fiction, and artworks might function as kinds of essay.  He points to Layli Long Soldier's Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017) as a form of “book-length essay," reflecting on how boundaries between what is considered poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, often relate to who gets to speak with authority, who lives in proximity to or at distance from power.

Horn observes that "many authors of color, native and indigenous authors, and trans authors are working primarily in poetry and fiction within American publishing, not in nonfiction, which is often predominantly cis-heteronormative, white, and, in recent centuries, entangled with eurocentric rationalism and colonial space-time geographies." He questions: "Who gets to speak? What discourses do we recognize as correlated to so-called fact or nonfiction? Who do we believe can speak about fact and truth?"

Ultimately, Horn is trying to embolden his students to write with true commitment and specificity. "A lot of superb work has come out of the particularity of somebody's time, place, and body, of how one’s body moves or is permitted to move through the world," he notes. "If you can see the richness and value in your own specificities of geography, time, language, body—both its advantages and violences, all its contradictions—if you can exist in that constellation of tension and friction and use that to inform how you write, both what you write and how you write it, great things can happen."

While doing so, though, Horn encourages students to maintain perspective about writing's place in their life. "I'm a quiet writer. I don't know that a big career is ahead of me, but if I can produce work that's meaningful to me, and that connects with readers in a substantial way–then I cannot ask for more."

This philosophy culminates in perhaps Horn's most memorable piece of wisdom: "I don't know that a work will ever love you back. People will."

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Lars Horn holds MAs from the University of Edinburgh, the École normale supérieure in Paris, Concordia University in Montreal, and an MFA from Randolph College. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub. Horn has received several prestigious fellowships and residencies, including from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.