east Your Eyes, framed as the catalogue notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: “America’s Worst Mother, America’s Bravest Mother, America’s Worst Photographer, or America’s Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking.” After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school’s photo club, Lillian rejects her parents’ expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives, and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.
Tag: Fiction
Makenna Goodman discusses “The Shame” with Kathryn Scanlan
What if you could change your life? Would you do it? How would you do it?
Alma and her family live close to the land: they raise chickens and sheep, they make maple syrup. Every day Alma’s husband leaves for his job at a nearby college while she stays home with their young children, cleans, searches for secondhand goods online, and reads books by the women writers she adores. Then, one night, she abruptly leaves it all behind—speeding through the darkness, away from their Vermont homestead, bound for New York.
Write Left 2020: Lefthanded Poets Reading
Write Left 2020 features fourteen poets:
Steve Abee | Iris Berry | Zoe Blaq | Busstop Prophet | John Dorsey | Alexis Rhone Fancher | S.A. Griffin | Armond Kindard | Kuahmel | Ellyn Maybe | Teresa Mei Chuc | jerry the priest | Terry Robinson | Jeff Rogers
Created in 2019 by S.A. Griffin and Jeff Rogers, Write Left brings together left handed poets and writers in recognition and celebration of their strange place in our right handed world. Left handed people comprise only about 10 percent of the population of the United States, and in some countries, as little as 2-3 percent.
Catherine Lacey discusses “Pew” with Jonathan Lethem
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.
Akwaeke Emezi discusses “The Death of Vivek Oji”
August 12, 2020 @ 6:00 pm
One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings.
