There’s a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and for that reason my posts have been a little less regular. Even my badatsports writing has slowed down. That’s more or less because I’m getting married in June, but also because Devin and I are curating an art show, and compiling a catalogue, that (knock on wood) will be sent off to the printer’s today. Still, it’s been a really fantastic year and a lot of my work over the last 12 months is starting to emerge in the world. I recently finished an essay about The Pancantantra — an old, old, ancient collection of fables from India. It will be forthcoming in the next issue of Annobium along with some drawings of akrtoi/human-animal hybrids…I can’t wait!

Heather Mekkelson “Debris Field ellipsis,”2009 Dominican University O’Connor Art Gallery Mixed Media

Field Static : A Group Show

June 2nd – June 13th, 2012 at the Co-Prosperity Sphere .:. 3219 South Morgan Street  Chicago, IL 60608 .:. Gallery hours on Sunday (June 3rd & June 10th) from 1-4 pm & otherwise by appointment.* Opens on Saturday, June 2nd from 7-10 pm

Featuring the work of Ellen Rothenberg, Mark Booth, Stephen Lapthisophon, Heather Mekkelson, Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie, Carrie Gundersdorf, Justin Cabrillos, and Rebecca Mir.

Field Static examines the possibilities of objects as they engage with each other and thereby embody a network, or constellation of points. What begins to emerge is an ecology that blurs the lines between life forms and inanimate material bodies. In Field Static curators Caroline Picard and Devin King created an opportunity in which relations between objects might be highlighted such that the field created via the installation of artwork would accent one’s material engagement. Each object within the Co-Prosperity Sphere becomes focal point and periphery alike, suggesting both solitary histories and the peculiar synthesis of matter common to all things. Field Static rejects or, at least, torques art’s historically anthropocentric position — the poem is written by a human, the portrait is painted of a human — in favor of a more egalitarian engagement with objects. How are objects, human and non-human digested and reborn by the realization and decay of magnetisms? Part celebration, part lament for the passing of a moment, these artists have been invited to examine pan-psychic networks of affect and influence.

Field Static will open with an accompanying catalogue featuring essays by João Florêncio, Lin Hixson, Robert Jackson, Lily Robert-Foley, Peter O’Leary, Devin King & Caroline Picard.

*email dmeador@saic.edu or caroline@lanternprojects.com to schedule an appointment.

Additional programming includes a public seminar, Location/Location on Wednesday the 6th of June from 6-9 pm, during which 5 panelists will give 10-15 minute presentations followed by a longform discussion. This symposium was organized and will be moderated by Lily Robert-Foley. Panelists include Laura Goldstein, Gene Tanta, T. Siddle, AD Jameson and Meredith Kooi.

SYMPOSIUM: Location/Location

The English word location, /ləʊˈkeɪʃn/, translated into French gives endroit, lieu,
où se trouve [qqchose].  On the other hand, the french word location /lɔkasjɔ̃/, translated into English gives, renting, renting out, or rent (as in rent money), hire, reservation, or booking.  We call this homonymic condition—of looking the same but sounding and meaning differently—a faux ami, or false friend.

In what has now become the grand tradition of a poetic approach that seeks to treat

from the mistranslation of location/location:  of location as renting, or as renting as location; of endroit as location, of location as endroit.  To rent is the appropriation of something its user does not own, it’s the experience of a secondary usage, of a mistranslation of objects or space.  Location has many meanings, but may be summarily delimited as a kind of meeting place:  of subject and object, of objects and subjects with each other.  It is the place where the metaphysics of self and other rub together like thumb and index in the analogon for tender. This seminar is to be held at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in the context of a show curated by Caroline Picard and Devin King, Field Static, which reflects upon objects in space, and the way they relate to each other.  In this sense it likewise seeks to turn away from a self centered discourse of the subject towards a reflection on objects themselves. Proposals for articipation must therefore maintain a connection to a reflection on the interrelatedness of objects.  What is an object, and how does it mean?   What use or contextualization of an object be seen as a kind of translation?  At what point does an immaterial phenomenon become object?  Is there such a thing as object performance?   Do objects have consciousness (à la C.S. Peirce)?

Location/Location welcomes interdisciplinary proposals, in particular proposals located at the intersection of disciplines.  The seminar hopes to include a practice based criticism dimension in which proposals will not only reflect upon a question related to the topic, but will demonstrate active participation in its process of interrogation, artistic, scientific or otherwise.  This could include a report on a project already conceived or one to come, a performance, a reading, an academic paper or other:  location/location enthusiastically by a discussion.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

ARTISTS:

MARK BOOTH is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in an exploration of language, auditory phenomena and thought. Booth exhibited a number of language-based works in text, audio, video and drawing that explore the themes of slowness, duration and the quotidian. Booth has exhibited his visual art at Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii; Gahlberg Gallery, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL; Devening Editions, Chicago; and other venues. Selected audio artworks have been presented at the Overgaden Sound Art Festival, Copenhagen; Openport Festival, Chicago; Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chicago; Nova art fair, Chicago; and the Outer Ear Festival of Sound, Chicago. In addition, Booth has completed commissioned audio scores for Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak’s “My Name is a Blackbird,” Chicago, and Erik Pold’s “Success,” Copenhagen. Next fall, Booth will have a solo show at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. He currently teaches creative writing, painting, and sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

JUSTIN CABRILLOS is a choreographer, writer, and performance artist based in Chicago. Cabrillos received his MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a summer fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art, an IN>TIME Incubation Series artist-in-residence at the Chicago Cultural Center, and a 2011 LinkUP Artist at Links Hall. He was a recipient of a Greenhouse grant from the Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum and has collaborated with Every house has a door.

CARRIE GUNDERSDORF Carrie Gundersdorf is a Chicago based artist.  Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Julius Caesar (Chicago), Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago), and Gahlberg Gallery, College of Dupage, (Glen Ellyn, IL).  She has also exhibited in group shows at Loyola Museum of Art (Chicago), Regina Rex (Brooklyn), Marc Foxx Gallery (Los Angeles), Proof Gallery (Boston), Gallery 400, University of Illinois (Chicago), Tony Wight Gallery (Chicago) and SWINGR (Vienna), among others.  Her work has been discussed in Art Review, Chicago Tribune, Artforum.com, Artnet, Bad at Sports, Art on Paper, and Time Out Chicago.  Gundersdorf is the recipient of the Artadia Award and the Bingham Fellowship.

CHRISTIAN KURAS lives in the post-rural English countryside. His art practice involves painting, sculpture, writing and photography. He usually works in collaboration with other artists, which he finds is the perfect platform for the exploration of the confusions and conflicts inherent to individual personhood and its relationship to all forms of social entanglement. His work has been shown and published across Canada, the United States and Europe. He splits his time between his art practice and co-directing a successful design agency called Exploded View. He has been collaborating with Duncan MacKenzie since 2003.

STEPHEN LAPTHISOPHON is an American artist and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory, and disability studies. Lapthisophon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. His early work combined poetry, performance, sound art, and visual arts with postmodern philosophical concerns. He was also influenced by the legacy of the Situationists, who sought to make everyday life a focus of artistic activity. Lapthisophon has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and the University of Texas at Dallas. He currently teaches art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington.

DUNCAN MACKENZIE is an Artist, Pundit, Educator and a Founding Member/Producer of Bad at Sports. (badatsports.com) His works have appeared in galleries all over the world including Canada, Australia, The United States of America, New Zealand, Estonia and England. His work has been discussed in Flash Art, Art Forum, the New York Times, Time Out and many other venues. He is the author of over 250 interviews and has worked with such people as Rodney Graham, Kerry James Marshall, Francesco Bonami, Luc Tuymans, James Elkins, Julie Ault, Carol Becker, James Rondeau, Jeff Wall, and Gavin Turk. He currently enjoys a posting as an Assistant Professor in Art + Design at Columbia College Chicago.

HEATHER MEKKELSON lives in Chicago where she earned degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago and The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been seen in solo shows at threewalls (Chicago), Old Gold (Chicago), and STANDARD (Chicago) as well as in group shows at The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), The Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA), Raid Projects (L.A.), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). She has had her work featured in Art Journal and Broadsheet (The Contemporary Art Center of South Australia) and in the essay collection The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora published by Yale University Press and the Clark Institute.

REBECCA MIR is a Chicago based artist, by way of Alaska and Maine. When she was too little to walk, she was pulled around on a sled by a German shepherd called Namer. Her work is primarily concerned with the perplexing character of interactions with nature. Mir received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has exhibited around the country. Issue #3 of her zine SHE IS RESTLESS, focused on earthly phenomenon, was just released at Chicago Zine Fest 2012. Look for more of her work at rebeccamir.com.

ELLEN ROTHENBERG’S work is concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices.  Her installations and public projects often employ the iconography of social movements and their residual documents to interrogate contemporary political engagement and social dialogue. In her projects, we find familiar materials such as newspapers, protest placards, and public signage… often reformed, refashioned, and rewritten; drawing our attention to the assumptions that animate the world around us.  Her work has been presented in the US and Europe at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; the Royal Festival Hall, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and the Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen.  Recent exhibitions include Experimental Geography, curated by Nato Thompson and ICI, NYC.  Rothenberg is currently engaged in a cultural exchange project with the Brukenthal National Museum and the Astra National Museum Complex, Sibiu, Romania. Rothenberg continues to work as a co-organizer of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project.

JOÃO FLORÊNCIO is a Portuguese scholar based in London and researching on  Contemporary European Philosophy and Performance Studies. His academic background is Musicology with optional courses in Film Studies (B.A., Lisbon and Venice), and Media Arts Philosophy (M.A., Greenwich). He is also an associated researcher of ‘Performance Matters’ (www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk) and a Visiting Tutor in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he leads the “Modernities” seminar and laboratory series, both part of the BA History of Art.

LILY ROBERT-FOLEY was born in San Francisco in 1984. She writes poetic-criticism (sometimes bilingual), does language collage, (The North Georgia Gazette, Green Lantern Press, 2009; forthcoming from Corrupt Press, 2012), visual and sound poetry, and performance. She also invents reading and writing machines based on constraints (Graphemachines forthcoming from Atelier de l’Agneau, 2012). She is pursuing a doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Paris 8 where she is writing a thesis on self-translation. She currently teaches anglophone literature (also at Paris 8).

LIN HIXSON co-founded Goat Island in 1987, and Every house has a door in 2008. She is full Professor of Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received an honorary doctorate from Dartington College in 2007. Goat Island created nine performance works and toured extensively in the US, England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Croatia, Germany, and Canada. Her writing on directing and performance has been published in the journals P-Form, TDR, Frakcija, Performance Research, Women and Performance, and Whitewalls; and included in the anthologies Small Acts of Repair – Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island, Live Art and Performance, Theatre in Crisis?, and the textbook Place and Placelessness in Performance. Hixson has directed two films, Daynightly They re-school you The Bears-Polka and It’s Aching Like Birds, in collaboration with the artist Lucy Cash and Goat Island.

ROBERT JACKSON is an MPhil/PhD student at the University of Plymouth, an artist and a software developer in the UK. Entitled “Algorithm, Contingency and the Non-Human: Undecidability in Computational Art,” his research incorporates Computational Algorithmic Artworks, Art Formalism and Speculative Realist Philosophy, identifying an occluded history of computer art which operates as configurable units of necessity rather than networked systems of contingency. Robert is also an associate editor of the independent philosophical journal Speculations.

DEVIN KING is a writer, musician, and teacher working in Chicago. His work is primarily concerned with the interiority of the audience member and connects formal ideas from opera, modernism, minimalism, and pop music to theories of myth, the object, and the ghost. He received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently teaches in the Liberal Arts department. He curates performances, readings, lectures, and movies at The (New) Corpse. His long poem, CLOPS, is out from the Green Lantern Press where he is now an Associate Editor. A new chapbook, The Resonant Space, is out from Holon Press. His writing on music can be found at Make Magazine and The Boston Phoenix. He is part of the mighty Lady Rollins, a collaborative performance group with Jess Speer, Peter Speer, and Caroline Picard.

PETER O’LEARY Vocations to poetry and religion have committed Peter O’Leary to the pursuit of what St. Bonaventure named an itinerarium mentis in deum, or the journey of the mind to God, with particular attention devoted to the mystagogical-initiatic and the mytho-poetical. Luminous Epinoia, published by the Cultural Society, is his most recent book. He lives in Berwyn, Illinois and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and for the Committee on Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

CAROLINE PICARD is a Chicago-based artist, writer and curator. Integrating mediums of performance, text and visual ephemera as creative — and sometimes collaborative — platforms she investigates the figure in relation to systems of power. Her work has been exhibited around the United States, Asia and Romania and was discussed in Poets & Writers Magazine, Time Out Chicago, New City, Art21, Artforum.com, html giant and Punk Planet. In 2005, she founded the Green Lantern Press and has since released 22 slow-media titles ranging. She writes regularly for the badatsports and Art21 blogs, as well as Art ltd. and Proximity Magazines. Her first collection of short stories, Psycho Dream Factory, was published in 2011 by Holon Press. New work is forthcoming with Seven Stories Press, Anobium, and The Coming Envelope (Bookthug). She also performs regularly in collaboration as Lady Rollins.

SEMINAR PANELISTS:

LAURA GOLDSTEIN’s poetry and essays can be found in American Letters and Commentary, MAKE, jacket2, EAOGH, Requited, Little Red Leaves, and How2. Her chapbook Let Her came out from Dancing Girl Press in January 2012 and her newest chapbook, Inventory, will be released by Sona Books in June 2012. She currently co-curates the Red Rover reading series with Jennifer Karmin and teaches Writing and Literature at Loyola University.

A D JAMESON is the author of two books: the prose collection Amazing Adult Fantasy
(Mutable Sound, 2011), in which he tries to come to terms with having been raised on ’80s
pop culture, and the novel Giant Slugs (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011), an absurdist retelling
of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He has taught classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lake Forest College, DePaul University, Facets Multimedia, and StoryStudio Chicago. He is also the nonfiction / reviews editor of the online journal Requited. He recently started the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and contributing to HTMLGIANT.

MEREDITH KOOI is a doctoral student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and certificate student in Comparative Literature at Emory University where she organizes the salon series SENSORIUM for the Visual Scholarship Initiative. She received her MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in Environmental Studies from Denison University. She has been published in the DVD journal ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art and has a forthcoming essay in The Contemporary Visual Studies Reader edited by James Elkins (Routledge). Her visual and performance work has been shown in galleries and medical venues both nationally and internationally. Her dissertation work centers on the aesthetics of the autoimmune condition as a physiological phenomenon and structuring logic of selfhood, the social, and politics. She has a six-year-old mutt named Belle who was found wandering the Ohio countryside. Belle enjoys walking, chewing on bones, eating bananas, and generally being awesome.

TESSA SIDDLE is a film/video maker, installation/performance artist,
and founding curator of the MisALT Screening Series in San Francisco.
She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in
2010 and has since dedicated her work to questioning conventional
models of gender and other binary social constructions such as
Nature/Culture, Animal/Human, Autobiography/ Fiction, Physical/Mental,
and Intellectual/Emotional.

GENE TANTA was born in Timisoara, Romania and lived there until immigrated to the United States. Since then, he has lived in DeKalb, Iowa City, New York, Oaxaca City, Iasi, Milwaukee, and Chicago. He is a poet, visual artist, and translator of contemporary Romanian poetry. His first poetry book is called Unusual Woods (BlazeVOX, 2010). His second poetry book is called Pastoral Emergency.

Tanta earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop in 2000 and his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009 with literary specialization in twentieth-century American poetry and the European avant-garde. His poems, translations, and artwork work may be found in journals such as: EPOCH, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Cream City Review, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, and Drunken Boat. Tanta has had two collaborative poems with Reginald Shepherd anthologized in Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Most recently, he has chaired a panel at the 2010 AWP titled, Immigrant Poetry: Aesthetics of Displacement. Currently, he is teaching creative writing while working on a collection of short prose.

My book got a huge shout out yesterday on html giant and I’m still reeling. What an incredible it’s been/is being! Special thanks again to August Evans for taking such considerate time with my work. I had especially been wondering how the “Nip Slip” post card/poem would manifest to others and I’m happy that, at least in once instance, it worked! I’ve included an excerpt of the review below:

In line at the grocery store Shiloh perches in Angelina’s arms and Whitney Houston is dead. Celebrity eyelids: collated rainbows. All the flesh slick, like paper money.

      Celebrity

millions upon millions upon millions of images of Marilyn

                        Monroe:

 

 

 

her absence.

Psycho Dream Factory sat in a prominent area of my home for most of winter so I could see it because it’s beautiful.

One page is a glossy, hot pink. On it, Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism:

“If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork.”

One morning in December I took the book off the table and brought it down to the floor. On my knees I opened it. A slip of paper tumbled out: white postcard bleating sleek, black, hyper-large:

you can read the rest of the review by going here

Caroline Picard: At the end of the book, there is a small but striking note about the deteriorating relationship between humankind and animals. Something came into focus when I read that note —I suddenly realized how present other life forms were in the book, from the pets abandoned in Katrina, to monarch butterflies, to ctenephore (what in some ways feels to me like an A-list star of the book, though I suppose there are many stars). Can you talk a little bit about the presence of animals in The Brightest Thing in the World?

Matthew Goulish: When I go to the movies, I always sit through the credits until the very end. Sometimes a dedication appears and pauses on the screen before the fade out. I appreciate that the very last words one sees have a special place, and a particular role to play, as the threshold leading out of the work and back to the world – like an usher opening the door of the theater. Beyond that gesture, I find the last moment a charged one in the way it can, with a very small comment, re-inflect everything that has come before, as if to offer a revelation from the vantage of the retrospective view, and to invite a second reading with that end grace note in mind. The passage on the possibility of animals going away forever comes from Howard Norman, whose writing has been a longtime inspiration for me. Throughout his work, starting with his earliest translations of the Swampy Cree in Manitoba, one finds this attitude of respect for animals who “are people like us” although they have a skepticism of humanity. I remembered the quote as I was working on the Barbellion essay.  I wanted to introduce that kind of thinking into the essay, as it seemed to make explicit the implicit reverence with which Barbellion observed nature. I did not know what to do with it until I had the thought to drop it in at the end like that. Then when I selected these three essays to constitute this book, the quote guided my thinking in the way it might amplify that thread through all three of the essays, and do so after the fact if it appeared at the end of the book. I had in the back of my mind, for example, in the middle essay, that between the death of the monarch butterflies in Mexico in 2002 and the race riots of Tulsa in 1921, an equation exists that has to do with uncountable loss, and the ancient belief of the butterfly as psychopomp, the carrier of the human soul between lives. This was how I formulated my response to W. G. Sebald – as if to compress and Americanize his obsessive hysteria, his monologues that seem to be running to try to keep pace with accelerating disaster. But through the three essays this thread appears in a backgrounded way, the way animals might make their appearances in human life, anyway my life, rushed and crowded in an urban setting. As the bus approaches the bus stop, I see a Sandhill Crane flying over Division Street, possibly headed for the Humboldt Park lagoon. Or I’m leaving a friend’s house at the end of the night and I surprise a raccoon at the back porch. If I let it, that encounter, however fleeting, resets my thoughts about my behavior, my values, or anyway my day. I wanted to use the book’s last moment to draw attention to that unobtrusive thread – call it ecology.

Go here to read the rest of the interview.

The first 20 people to buy a book at to tonight's event will receive this accompanying broadside.

With the hopes of further whetting your appetite for this, and in the event that you might like to read more about Goulish, particularly this book, I thought I’d link up with two interviews; the first took place between Sarah Terez-Rosenblum on The Chicago Sun-Times blog and the second (what I’ll post a link to later on this afternoon) between Matthew and myself on Bad at Sports.

In honor of the Black Arts show at Roxaboxen, I made a book, called Arktoi. Still, it’s not exactly a book. I’ve been thinking and wrestling with how to negotiate the gallery space (in which once is less inclined to stay a read a whole book — I mean, at the very least there is no where to sit comfortably) and think about the book-as-art-object. In this particular case, I compiled a chapbook I’ve been working on for some time that details the lives of three sisters and their mother, focusing specifically on various strategies for healing. It’s definitely a witchy compilation and studies desperateness, kind of — the desire to speak to the dead through psychics, the need to feel power over one’s healing process by way of talismans, pendulums and faith surgeries. In particular the book describes the way this knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. The collection makes me feel gross in the best way, it’s dark and creepy and shows something about how humans exploit and use one another. Still, I didn’t want to present these stories as, simply, a book. So, I went back through the hand-bound text and obliterated the words (especially the consonants) with pen, ink and white out…was also thinking about alchemical texts, in which the author tries to hide the messages. But…what about that — creating a book which is somehow resistant or inaccessible….does that changes one’s desire to pause and relate to the object?

Black Arts opens tonight!

Modern Romance : an interview with Jac Jemc

by Mallory Gevaert

My Only Wife (Dzanc), the debut novel by Jac Jemc, is a chronicle of loneliness and loss by a man who can’t escape his past.  The narrator’s wife meant everything to him.  From the moment they met, the wife shaped the husband’s life around hers; she introduced him to adventure, whimsy, and heartbreak.  Now that she has gone away, the man searches through the memories of their marriage to reevaluate his own experience, unable to solve the mystery of her disappearance or find closure in her absence.  Along the way, he begins to think that his wife was never who he thought she was at all.  Jemc, a Chicago resident and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, offers some insights on My Only Wife and love narratives.

Mallory Gevaert: Where did the book begin? Do you have any relevant experiences that contributed to the narrative, or something that you couldn’t get out of your head?

Jac Jemc: The book began with a poem I was writing, where every line started with, “My
wife.” I was about 60 pages into an attempt at another novel-length story, and all I
wanted to do was work on this poem instead of that other thing, so I decided to turn the
poem into a novel. So the root is really that repetition of “My wife, my wife, my wife.”
I’ve never been married, but I have admired people, and then in hindsight realized what I
admired them for was not all that admirable. I think that’s relevant experience.

MG: I felt like My Only Wife was unusual in that it was a love story that focused on privacy/being with others, or on setting boundaries for the self.  A lot of romantic plots don’t have that aspect – what role do you think alone-ness has in My Only Wife?  Or the weight of expectations?

JJ: That’s an interesting point. I don’t know that I’ve thought about the story in those terms before, but yes, I think there’s a fair amount going on here about what it is to be in a relationship or marriage and still have privacy, and to be able to get emotional sustenance from something outside of that relationship, and two people that felt very different about what it was to be married. Ultimately, I think, no matter how closely connected you are to another person, you’re still autonomous human beings. That person you love and think you know, can still zag when you’re expecting them to zig. Everyone is full of anomalies that, when they show up, require your partner/companion/friend to refocus and reframe  you. I don’t know why this calls to mind the accusation, “You’ve changed!” Change should be an assumption, not an exception.

MG: I’m also interested in the role that storytelling plays in the novel (the wife’s “room”
story was amazing). How stories shape our sense of self, or the stories that others tell
about us. I’m not sure what the question is there but storytelling is fascinating and I
thought the focus on what storytelling means to different people in the novel was great.

JJ: I really love storytelling. I remember in college I had a professor try and convince me that younger people don’t tell stories anymore. They recount what’s happened or share something they’ve thought or seen or enjoyed, but they don’t format it in a story, and I couldn’t disagree more. I feel like storytelling is experiencing a real heyday right now, what with all the storytelling series like the Moth and Risk and This American Life and the growth in memoir sales. People love true stories, paced and formatted to keep your interest. I’m also really intrigued by the stories people make up out of the blue, like bedtime stories. It seems like those could easily be interpreted in the way dreams are, to try and get at some subconscious activity, or even something conscious that you’re hesitant to say in a straightforward way. I think fictional stories or stories with a bit of magic can often explain or evoke something that can’t really be gotten at with nonfiction or realism.

MG: What kind of work went into writing from a narrative perspective (the man’s) that
essentially fades into the background or becomes a sort of observing presence? Were
there any significant decisions that you made with your prose style to preserve his voice?  Did you feel like the wife was an enigma to you too?

JJ: I think there’s actually more of the husband in there now, than there was in the first
draft. He was always sort of the frame to me. He fades next to her bright light, but with
drafts I realized that he should realize how much he sacrificed of himself to worship her,
and I realized it was best to keep his voice pretty simple, like he was just relaying the
truths and facts he knew. Like he was trying not to let his opinions enter the story too
much. You know, I do think the wife is an enigma. She seems like a lot to take, but I
know in small doses that can be charming in a person. She’s obviously erratic, but some
people might call that impetuous or passionate.

MG: Speaking of the wife’s character, she sort of felt like the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”
stereotype turned on its head – did you have that sense while writing?

JJ: Something like that. One of those people that wants every breath she takes to feel
original and feels like those efforts make her more honest and present. She makes me
want to take a nap.

MG: Do you have any comments on the editorial/publication process?

JJ:  The awesome Matt Bell was my editor at Dzanc. He is one of my favorite writers,
so it was a true pleasure to work with him. He noticed some weird syntactical things I
was doing that I had become blind to that really helped me. Dzanc took the book in 2009,
so it’s been a bit of wait! But I’ve really enjoyed it actually. It let me keep working on
new stuff and watch what other people do when they put out books so I could figure out
how I wanted to approach things. I could imagine feeling really overwhelmed if I had
a book come out, and then I had to start from scratch on something new, but this time
has allowed me to have pulled together a couple more projects, and it feels nice to be
working on something I love while My Only Wife finds its place in the world.

MAY 02, 2012