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Yes, we have seen the fire-seam
and how it fuels Jenny Boully's

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work, and how multi-headed
hydraosity keeps the Maggie

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Nelson hungry, and how
Lia Purpura's displacer

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beasting makes her impossible
to hit or track or tame.

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Yet every series has an end,
and thus we arrive tonight

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at our temporary terminus.

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I say temporary because, though
it's not officially blessed

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with the Hybrid Series
moniker, the Prose Series

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will be bringing in another pair
of hybrids in February, Arianne

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Zwartjes and Aisha
Sabatini Sloan,

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so I hope you'll return
for that in your Priuses.

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I would like to take
the opportunity also

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to thank Cybele Knowles,
whose dark arts have

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given much life to this series.

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So, please, a round of
applause for Cybele.

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So, tonight, maybe
the better question

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is not to ask what
makes a hybrid hybrid,

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but to ask what writer
of any worth is not?

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What does it mean to be a
poet, a novelist, and essayist?

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And which tools
are you not allowed

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to use when you're
forced to pick a team?

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Whose words are
you made of anyway?

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All to say that we hope that you
transcend the categories you've

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been saddled with and are more
magical and fierce than you

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think or know.

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But back to our game--

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of our smallish set
of four, Thalia Field

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seems to me the least
easy to metaphorize--

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metaphorize, I'm just
making this word up,

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I don't know if it's a word--

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to monsterize.

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You can certainly call our other
visitors essayists or poets,

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and they can live
successfully in a cage

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like that for a while.

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Let us not forget how genre
is a cage for the convenience

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of the marketer, the bookseller,
and occasionally the academy.

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But I don't have any idea how
to pen one like Thalia Field.

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From an interview
though, there's this--

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across her work,
she, quote, "attempts

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practices where hardened
concepts can be softened.

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These hardened
concepts-- objectivity,

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the unassailable
reality of the I,

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genre, conventional
understandings of story,

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sanctified syntaxes
and predictable forms."

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She reminds us that the
work we do in being,

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in naming and assuming,
is a paradox--

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that our sense of self,
however hard-fought,

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is like being afloat
with a little life

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vest that we call an I in
exceptionally stormy seas,

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except the vest itself
is dissolving as we move,

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are tossed, and as we
think about our situation.

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So there's an idea.

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So, in this case, we
have two great beasts

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from which to field.

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First, the rust monster,
which corrodes metal weapons

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and armor at a touch.

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I really wish it could be
so because I love the rust

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monster.

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But second, and I
think better, is maybe

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my favorite beast in all
of Dungeons and Dragons,

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the gelatinous cube--

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a slow-moving 10-foot motivated
chunk of powerful animal

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jello, always on the move,
sliding slowly toward you,

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unstoppable, more
translucent than transparent,

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so you can see through
it but at a slant.

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And if it touches you
first, it paralyzes,

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then it consumes, then it
digests you and your gear,

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rendering most of you a mush.

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The process is unpleasant
but illuminating--

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oh, these bloods, those
bones, here's who we loved

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and how and when until
we didn't anymore.

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There's those words,
the book that we wrote,

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that crappy cloak,
the paradox of I

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and being, part of and apart--

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these are our component parts
on which so much depends.

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Her work reframes questions
more often than offers answers.

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Reading a text by Thalia Field
is like losing our balance

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and falling into wonder.

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First, she is a re configurator,
a recombination machine,

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a questioner, and a dissident.

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She is perhaps a field of
haze, a cloud of gaze and birds

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that somehow constitute a
philosophy at a certain time

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of day each day.

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If held to the
light, her words seem

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a gauzy scrim through which
we can see-- but only partly,

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and what is seen is
transfigured by the filter.

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Strangeness and irreducibility--
isn't that what we ask of art?

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Well, instead, let's just ask
her collaborators tonight--

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Mike Coakley, Kendra
Mullison and Erin Zwiener.

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And let's just ask Thalia Field.

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And please welcome her.

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