Yes, we have seen the fire-seam and how it fuels Jenny Boully's
work, and how multi-headed hydraosity keeps the Maggie
Nelson hungry, and how Lia Purpura's displacer
beasting makes her impossible to hit or track or tame.
Yet every series has an end, and thus we arrive tonight
at our temporary terminus.
I say temporary because, though it's not officially blessed
with the Hybrid Series moniker, the Prose Series
will be bringing in another pair of hybrids in February, Arianne
Zwartjes and Aisha Sabatini Sloan,
so I hope you'll return for that in your Priuses.
I would like to take the opportunity also
to thank Cybele Knowles, whose dark arts have
given much life to this series.
So, please, a round of applause for Cybele.
So, tonight, maybe the better question
is not to ask what makes a hybrid hybrid,
but to ask what writer of any worth is not?
What does it mean to be a poet, a novelist, and essayist?
And which tools are you not allowed
to use when you're forced to pick a team?
Whose words are you made of anyway?
All to say that we hope that you transcend the categories you've
been saddled with and are more magical and fierce than you
think or know.
But back to our game--
of our smallish set of four, Thalia Field
seems to me the least easy to metaphorize--
metaphorize, I'm just making this word up,
I don't know if it's a word--
to monsterize.
You can certainly call our other visitors essayists or poets,
and they can live successfully in a cage
like that for a while.
Let us not forget how genre is a cage for the convenience
of the marketer, the bookseller, and occasionally the academy.
But I don't have any idea how to pen one like Thalia Field.
From an interview though, there's this--
across her work, she, quote, "attempts
practices where hardened concepts can be softened.
These hardened concepts-- objectivity,
the unassailable reality of the I,
genre, conventional understandings of story,
sanctified syntaxes and predictable forms."
She reminds us that the work we do in being,
in naming and assuming, is a paradox--
that our sense of self, however hard-fought,
is like being afloat with a little life
vest that we call an I in exceptionally stormy seas,
except the vest itself is dissolving as we move,
are tossed, and as we think about our situation.
So there's an idea.
So, in this case, we have two great beasts
from which to field.
First, the rust monster, which corrodes metal weapons
and armor at a touch.
I really wish it could be so because I love the rust
monster.
But second, and I think better, is maybe
my favorite beast in all of Dungeons and Dragons,
the gelatinous cube--
a slow-moving 10-foot motivated chunk of powerful animal
jello, always on the move, sliding slowly toward you,
unstoppable, more translucent than transparent,
so you can see through it but at a slant.
And if it touches you first, it paralyzes,
then it consumes, then it digests you and your gear,
rendering most of you a mush.
The process is unpleasant but illuminating--
oh, these bloods, those bones, here's who we loved
and how and when until we didn't anymore.
There's those words, the book that we wrote,
that crappy cloak, the paradox of I
and being, part of and apart--
these are our component parts on which so much depends.
Her work reframes questions more often than offers answers.
Reading a text by Thalia Field is like losing our balance
and falling into wonder.
First, she is a re configurator, a recombination machine,
a questioner, and a dissident.
She is perhaps a field of haze, a cloud of gaze and birds
that somehow constitute a philosophy at a certain time
of day each day.
If held to the light, her words seem
a gauzy scrim through which we can see-- but only partly,
and what is seen is transfigured by the filter.
Strangeness and irreducibility-- isn't that what we ask of art?
Well, instead, let's just ask her collaborators tonight--
Mike Coakley, Kendra Mullison and Erin Zwiener.
And let's just ask Thalia Field.
And please welcome her.