Heather McCalden wants me to write about my dead father because she wants every reader of The Observable Universe, her scattered, shrewd, and heartbreaking debut, to write about their dead parents.
His voice bends and gurns beneath their insuperable burden and yet can only articulate its ignominy since it finds furrowed in each caesura a clinamen: an irreducible chink in its cage that may turn its convulsions into a tarrying.
I have invented a form of thinking about literature - Hmmm & Bang -
which may appear playful (because it is) but which (make no mistake)
is a challenge to our dispositions, our ungainly knack for categories.
There is no middle ground, so ambiguous players must take sides.
The sometimes garrulous, sometimes insolent, sometimes exuberant New York School style that the beginning part of her career largely lived within was not her go-to poetic mode in the last decades of her life.
New Romanticism is attentive to those transcendent wants for things that will truly fulfill us regardless of time, place, or social circumstance.
Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences, it occurs to you that his readers are still catching up.
When my grandmother died, I too had this impulse to record everything she said, and everything said about her death.
Men in these books are under siege by a series of emasculating forces, which I have loosely narrowed down to an unholy trinity: cancellation, the body, and the father.
Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders. They write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room.
I now realized that for thirty years I'd had an imaginary Pietsch perched on my shoulder, and as I reworked sentences I kept (unconsciously) turning to him and asking, "How about now? Would you take it now?"
Queering the relationship between form and genre, troubling the notion of what makes a novel, working through questions of queerness and bodies and desire and space and language on the page.