Thank you, Susan.
That was amazing.
Can you guys hear me?
OK.
I had the immense pleasure of hearing
Lucy Corin read at The Magic and The Intellect panel
last weekend at AWP.
Lucy read an excerpt from her novel
in progress, The Swank Hotel, and the packed room
buzzed with nervous energy.
This wasn't your sometimes typical snooze-worthy reading
at AWP.
Here are some of the things I heard
people saying after the panel in regards to Lucy's fiction.
I was having a response to it, and wow, writing
can be really relevant.
[LAUGHTER]
These were the positive reactions.
Others wanted to know what dead babies had to do with anything
magical or intellectual.
Many people walked out and didn't
hesitate to verbally express their disrespect.
I wish I could say that these kinds of reactions
are uncommon, but the truth is I've never been in a situation
where I didn't have to defend the uncanny and the surreal.
Story is not grounded in so-called reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin says in her still-relevant 1974 lecture,
"Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?"
the common reaction to the surreal
is to squelch it or sneer at it or imply that it is
childish or unmanly or untrue.
Lucy Corin's odd, improbable, and surreal landscapes
are in no way superficial or untrue.
Her stories are wedded to an emotional realism
that, if you pay close attention,
will break down your prejudices of what is banal
and make everything begin to feel strange and wondrous.
Karen Russell, in her essay "Engineering Impossible
Architectures," calls the relationship
between the realistic and the fantastic
the Kansas-to-Oz ratio and says if Oz
is given solid life through concrete detail,
then Kansas can begin to feel dreamlike and fragile.
Certain bedrock truths that we take
for granted in our everyday are loosened, speeded up,
and re-examined.
Lucy Corin's stories have aliens,
babies, dead babies, baskets, birds, bodies, dead bodies,
brains, cats, coins, couches, dogs, eyes, girls,
psychotic girls, cakes, meats, mice, iron pots, math, mirrors,
monsters, parrots, puppets, purses, soldiers, and witches.
Their strangeness cures us of our blindness,
our inability to see the mystery in the everyday.
They show us that, as George Saunders says
in an interview with The Believer, "no work of fiction
will ever, ever come close to documenting life,
so the purpose of it must be otherwise."
If you're looking for someone to tell you
what to believe, to give you easy answers
to the emotional, political, and environmental wreckage
of the world, you're in the wrong place.
If you think that, in Lucy Corin's own words,
"you lose so much more if you start living for convention,"
then brace yourself for your own personal apocalypse.
Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection
The Entire Predicament and the novel Everyday Psychokillers:
A History for Girls.
In 2013, McSweeney's Books released her collection
One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses.
Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction,
Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review,
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, among others.
She's an associate professor at UC Davis.
Friends, please join me in warmly welcoming Lucy Corin.
[APPLAUSE]