WEBVTT

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Thank you, Susan.

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That was amazing.

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Can you guys hear me?

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OK.

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I had the immense
pleasure of hearing

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Lucy Corin read at The Magic
and The Intellect panel

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last weekend at AWP.

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Lucy read an excerpt
from her novel

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in progress, The Swank
Hotel, and the packed room

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buzzed with nervous energy.

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This wasn't your sometimes
typical snooze-worthy reading

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at AWP.

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Here are some of
the things I heard

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people saying after the panel
in regards to Lucy's fiction.

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I was having a response
to it, and wow, writing

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can be really relevant.

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[LAUGHTER]

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These were the
positive reactions.

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Others wanted to know what dead
babies had to do with anything

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magical or intellectual.

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Many people walked
out and didn't

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hesitate to verbally
express their disrespect.

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I wish I could say that
these kinds of reactions

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are uncommon, but the truth is
I've never been in a situation

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where I didn't have to defend
the uncanny and the surreal.

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Story is not grounded
in so-called reality.

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Ursula K. Le Guin says in her
still-relevant 1974 lecture,

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"Why are Americans
Afraid of Dragons?"

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the common reaction
to the surreal

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is to squelch it or sneer
at it or imply that it is

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childish or unmanly or untrue.

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Lucy Corin's odd, improbable,
and surreal landscapes

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are in no way
superficial or untrue.

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Her stories are wedded
to an emotional realism

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that, if you pay
close attention,

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will break down your
prejudices of what is banal

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and make everything begin to
feel strange and wondrous.

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Karen Russell, in her essay
"Engineering Impossible

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Architectures," calls
the relationship

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between the realistic
and the fantastic

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the Kansas-to-Oz
ratio and says if Oz

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is given solid life
through concrete detail,

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then Kansas can begin to
feel dreamlike and fragile.

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Certain bedrock
truths that we take

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for granted in our everyday
are loosened, speeded up,

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and re-examined.

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Lucy Corin's
stories have aliens,

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babies, dead babies, baskets,
birds, bodies, dead bodies,

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brains, cats, coins,
couches, dogs, eyes, girls,

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psychotic girls, cakes, meats,
mice, iron pots, math, mirrors,

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monsters, parrots, puppets,
purses, soldiers, and witches.

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Their strangeness cures
us of our blindness,

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our inability to see the
mystery in the everyday.

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They show us that, as
George Saunders says

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in an interview with The
Believer, "no work of fiction

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will ever, ever come
close to documenting life,

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so the purpose of it
must be otherwise."

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If you're looking for
someone to tell you

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what to believe, to
give you easy answers

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to the emotional, political,
and environmental wreckage

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of the world, you're
in the wrong place.

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If you think that, in
Lucy Corin's own words,

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"you lose so much more if you
start living for convention,"

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then brace yourself for your
own personal apocalypse.

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Lucy Corin is the author of
the short story collection

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The Entire Predicament and the
novel Everyday Psychokillers:

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A History for Girls.

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In 2013, McSweeney's Books
released her collection

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One Hundred Apocalypses
and Other Apocalypses.

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Her stories have appeared
in American Short Fiction,

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Conjunctions, Ploughshares,
Tin House, Fairy Tale Review,

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New Stories from the South:
The Year's Best, among others.

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She's an associate
professor at UC Davis.

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Friends, please join me in
warmly welcoming Lucy Corin.

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[APPLAUSE]