RMP TO PUBLISH THE BEST OF BREVITY IN 2020
Brevity was my first real publication and now I get to be included in their first anthology — I’ve taught so many of these incredibile writers over the years. and I’m so proud to be among such talented writer neighbors
NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-SALE!
Welp, my little book is on pre-sale, and that means two things:
1) It's going for a reduced price.
2) Every time a book is purchased from the Black Lawrence Press website instead of from another retailer, their profit jumps by a factor somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5. When the order is placed with BLP, not only do they receive a much better profit, but they also get the funds right away (when you pre-order a book with Amazon, BLP may wait up to 6 months to receive those funds). This makes a big difference to a little press AND it's really helpful for the author, since a portion, a very little portion, of that profit goes to me, and is otherwise an incredibly nominal amount. The more copies bought now through BLP, the better it is for me, the writer, and the small press community at large.
This pre-sale ends on April 30th, the day before the official pub date, so if you want to purchase the book, now is the best time to do it! Many thanks for supporting indie writers and small presses.
creek collective: gallery opening + artist talk
So pleased to be an ongoing part of the Craigardan community and to join the artists reception with curator Lily Fein on August 31. Come check us out if you're in the Adirondacks...
“‘Creek Collective’ evolved through conversations at Craigardan about the common threads in many of these artists’ works which pour out of themselves in haptic, desirous, and a getting-closer-to-the-material kind of way. We are investigating what it means to touch – the land, our senses, where we meet. Interested in connection and connected through friendship, ‘Creek Collective’ shares well springs which hold the objects, photos and writings together in a cobweb that persists through time and location. Bound and loose, the makers relish in their individuality and the conversations that begin to form via the curves and crystals in their works.”
“To make proper sense is to yield, to concede, to compromise too early, to lose ourselves to what others would reduce us to be for the management of their own discomfort...”
“ I think of everything I am writing now as an essay. But I’m also interested in the space of fiction, the space of the speculative and ghostly.”
One of many beautiful writing/reading spots at my June residency at Craigardan, a sweet farm and hub of creative happenings in the Adirondacks. Reading Mark Doty, Sianne Ngai, Philp Roth, Kelly Schirmann... New book in progress. I think.
Black Lawrence Press has taken on my first book, I'm Trying to Tell You I'm Sorry, due out in 2019. Thanks for welcoming me to Author Land... http://www.blacklawrence.com/welcomeninab/
"Wendy Peffercorn, The Sandlot Boys, Sexual Agency, and Me: It's Still Complicated"
~ GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE ~
A digital literary zine about side characters, bit parts, cameos, and the rest of the supporting cast.
Me, On Strangers
One of the best things about working at The New School, apart from all the bathrooms I have access to around Union Square, is getting the chance to be a part of programs like New Talks. Was honored to read along with other academics on the theme of Strangers. Check out the livestream of "Strangers" here and read an excerpt from my talk below.
In her essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “…always to be understood would be intolerable.” And at first I did not believe her. Thought she must have meant the opposite. A facetious joke.
After all, who can resist the gooey indulgence of feeling understood? As if knowing were a kind of loving.
It was access to a kind of love that drew me to nonfiction in the first place. As a teenager I began obsessively recording observations of strangers and of those who for whatever reasons I’d deemed un-strange, because it filled me with empathy, both for myself and for others. I believed the act might illuminate some connective tissue, creating a net that could catch and include me in a world I felt mostly outside of, mostly alone in, curating to some degree what Mark Doty calls, “A collector’s catalogue, a record of the body’s travels…”
“How else will I know the world,” he asks, “if not by finding, in the bodies of my lovers and fellows, my coordinates?”
As an essayist I am fascinated by the constant negotiation between the world and the self, between watching and being watched, hiding and parading. As a woman I inevitably also consider the ways in which I, too, am observed, both IRL and on the page. I think of female poets and artists I admire, how they’ve exposed their abject, vulnerable properties on varied creative planes. Performance artist Marina Abromovic, for instance, literally uses her body as the vehicle of expression, even risking her life in the process of connecting with the audience, whom her curator considers, in effect, “a lover she needs like air to breathe.”
Perhaps this is what we can and want to do in autobiographical writing: at once risk our own lives while saving them. Like any stranger, readers are vessels for both real and imagined intimacy. Which is to say, a real and imagined sense of being seen and then—or still, or now—being loved. A Lacanian desire, driven by lack. As Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary, “If people could see through me, they could not stop loving me, forgive me.”
But in truth maybe I don’t actually want all that, at least not so completely. Maybe Woolf wasn’t messing around. Maybe we only look at the other to gauge the mileage, the outlines, the distance, finally unattainable in our separateness. And maybe there is power in that mystery, a power that seems to speak to the churning undercurrent of my female experience, my own sense of otherness, control, sexual identity, desire, loneliness, and fatigue.
Poet Paul Lisicky writes of Walt Whitman: “His listing, his habit of naming what he sees, high and low, monumental and minuscule, raw and cooked—isn’t he in fact inscribing boundaries in language? Isn’t he saying ‘you’re not me, and you’re not me, and finding delight in that? The exquisite loneliness of the poet striding down the sidewalk. How else could intimacy happen if we don’t carve boundaries between us?”
Had my Pushcart Prize nomination cherry popped today. Also, unrelated, contracted a UTI.
“Once the train pulls away the market is quiet for nearly an hour. I dust wine bottles and drink coffee alone. I hold a mug in both hands until my warmth takes all its warmth away. I think about the boy with the dead mother. I think about how we do that, how our bodies pull the heat from other objects until those objects are cold. The adiabatic cooling of touch, of a substance decreased as it does work on its surroundings. And imagine, how hot the liquid must feel to the air.
I bite my lips until they are hard and ridged on the inside like wet dunes at low tide.
And then there is my watch, and the wind, which I do and don’t ignore.”
