I am a writer and a reader. I read mostly poetry, but one of my favorite reads this past summer was The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose. She combines fiction and nonfiction to write about the artist Marina Abramović, whose performance The Artist Is Present at New York’s MoMA is at the heart of the novel. In 2010, for 3 months Abramović sat in the gallery for 8 hours a day. Spectators could sit facing her and could stay as long as they wished as long as they kept their eyes on hers. Many wept. It is seldom we look into each other’s eyes. And the irony that I am writing this as an open learning instructor is not lost on me. A lack of human contact in contemporary culture, is one of the conditions that this performance commented on. The novel follows the stories of fictional characters who were moved by the performance, and were changed by it.