Carole Maso is the author of seven novels--
Ghost Dance, the Art Lover, Ava, Aureole,
the American Woman in the Chinese Hat,
Defiance, and the just released Beauty
is Convulsive-- the Passion of Frida Kahlo.
She is also the author of a collection of essays--
"Break Every Rule," and "The Room Lit by Roses:
A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth."
Among her many awards are a literary fellowship
from the Lannan Foundation, a fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts,
a CAPS grant, and the Rose Fellowship from her alma mater,
Vassar College.
Maso is a professor of English in the creative writing
program at Brown University.
Each spring, she commutes to Provincetown from her home--
from her home in Germantown in the Hudson Valley of New York
State.
Maso is currently working on a new novel
called The Bay of Angels.
As she suggests by the title of her collection of essays,
Maso breaks every rule when she sits down to write.
What emerges from the rubble of traditional form
is a pattern of passion and ontological inquiry.
What does it mean to grieve?
What does it mean to love?
Her themes are lyric and so is her expression.
A mimetic representation of the fervor, the joy, the terror,
or rage that spearhead her artistic investigations.
For Maso, form is content.
Writer and scholar Karen Brennan
has referred to Maso's work as genre bending.
She writes toward that blur between what's real
and what's imagined.
Her work, both fiction and nonfiction,
is forged with a poet's eye and a poet's ear.
Maso has written that as a child she wanted to be a pianist.
As an adult she has become a composer.
She mines language for its musical possibilities,
syntactic pattern and variation, the bumps
and stresses of consonants and vowels,
the pervasive and ultimately unmitigatable silence.
She forges the metaphorical to the verge of metaphysical.
And what's forged is as close to candor as a soul can get.
As the speaker of the Art Lover, in conversation
with her dead father, interrogates
herself which leads to the question, who is the speaker?
The author, some emissary born of the author's mind,
a fictional construct?
In Maso, this line is indiscernible.
But as I was saying, as the speaker interrogates herself--
I'm going to write now.
It is a way of telling the truth or nearing
the truth, the absolute truth, the literal truth?
Well, yes.
Well, no.
But something of the whole.
Something of what it means to be alive.
Please help me to welcome Carol Maso in the flesh.