Thank you for coming out to our final reading in this year's
Prose Series.
Glad to see you all.
And we're delighted to have Monica Drake with us tonight.
Before I introduce her, I want to thank, again,
the Poetry Center for allowing us to use this wonderful space
for our readings and for hosting our guest authors.
So thank you, Gail Browne and Cybele Knowles,
and Annie, and all the rest of the Poetry Center staff.
Thanks also to the English department
for supporting the series and to our co-sponsors, Poets
and Writers in the College of Humanities.
And we hope you'll all come back next year in the fall
when we start the new series.
Monica Drake is the author of the critically acclaimed indie
novel, Clown Girl.
A new novel, The Stud Book is forthcoming from Crown.
Clown Girl has been optioned by Kristen Wiig of Saturday Night
Live and Bridesmaid fame.
Monica Drake's stories and essays
have appeared in the Northwest Review, Threepenny Review,
Beloit Fiction Journal, and many other publications
and anthologies.
She's the winner of numerous awards for her works
of literary fiction.
And currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art
in Portland.
In 1991, Monica Drake joined Tom Spanbowers Portland-based
workshop, Dangerous Writers.
Chuck Palahniuk, also a member of the group,
recalls that Monica Drake was the star,
her stories making everyone quote, "forget to breathe
and then break out in laughter so loud and honest
that to people passing on the sidewalk in the dark,
we might have been hooting or--" sorry,
I've got a little typo here--
"dogs barking.
No matter what you'd bring to read,
Monica would write something better, funnier,
more surprising, and sexy."
About that same time, back in the days
when we ran a three year master of fine arts program,
to our good fortune, Monica Drake
came to the University of Arizona.
She was part of a class of really distinguished writers.
Another one of her class members is here, Kevin Canty.
Still, her stories really stood out.
The story's cast, often characters living
on the fringe, was new.
And she introduced us to its members
with grace and a low key, yet devastating wit.
Her sensibility was all her own, tender-hearted and funny,
sometimes even wacky, but with a true undertow.
Hers were stories with consequences.
The writing was compassionate, but it did not bluff.
Every story earned its keep.
And nobody got off strictly for good behavior.
Monica Drake has held a lot of jobs, clown, lab technician,
mortgage lender, teacher, to name a few.
She is one of those rare souls who is always
absorbing how the world works.
And she's so, so smart that she continually
manages to bring both the small and large lessons
to bear in her writing.
Her fiction is shapely.
It is lyrical, yet comes straight at big issues,
genetic engineering, gender, class, population control,
you name it.
They would sink work less carefully wrought.
How carefully wrought?
Yesterday, Drake spoke to one of the graduate classes
about her work on the terrific Clown Girl.
Three years to get it right.
Then three years to fine-tune the humor.
Then three more years to make sure that every character was
rounded, and treated fairly.
That none of them was a straw dog.
We were lucky to have such a writer
in our midst for three years.
And we're lucky to have her back.
[APPLAUSE]