My (slightly delayed) contribution to the Wreckage of Reason II blog tour is here. Backstory: I met Aimee Parkison at AWP this year. She put together a panel on experimental women’s writing and invited a handful of people from the anthology to take part. I’d written a paper about the slipperiness of defining “experiment,” and she wrote a fascinating piece that defined experimentalism against mass market/genre literary production. If you know me at all, you know that I disagree emphatically with the elision of those two terms. I believe that the devices used in so-called genre fiction are wildly useful, and not to be confused with market-based fiction (I agree with Brown’s distinction in this piece). I ended up throwing away half of my prepared remarks and speaking extemporaneously in response to Aimee’s piece. It was an invigorating Q & A session, and she was kind and forgiving of my spontaneous rant, and in the end she gave me a review copy of her book.
Backtracking a bit: I’d actually heard Aimee read the night before, as part of Starcherone’s offsite AWP reading (with Alissa Nutting, Brian Oliu, Cris Mazza, Andy Farkas, and a bunch of other authors whose work I follow). I’d very nearly bought her novel–picked it up, petted it covetously, set it back down sadly–but I’d already spent a horrifying amount of $ on books that day (much of it at the Starcherone table). So having a copy fall into my lap was…well, that’s the serendipity of AWP, which, for all its tradeshow pomp and circumstance, does have these fleeting bright moments of meeting other writers and expanding one’s reading list.
Five months and several rereads of Aimee’s book later, I have a sort of review/meditation on it up at Entropy, the new blog launched by Janice Lee and Megan Milks (among others). If you’re looking for an excellent new literature/film/SF/fantasy/gaming blog, they’re the place to go. Very pleased to have work up on their site.
GirlWonders 