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Carole Maso is the
author of seven novels--

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Ghost Dance, the Art
Lover, Ava, Aureole,

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the American Woman
in the Chinese Hat,

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Defiance, and the
just released Beauty

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is Convulsive-- the
Passion of Frida Kahlo.

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She is also the author of
a collection of essays--

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"Break Every Rule," and
"The Room Lit by Roses:

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A Journal of
Pregnancy and Birth."

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Among her many awards
are a literary fellowship

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from the Lannan
Foundation, a fellowship

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from the National
Endowment for the Arts,

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a CAPS grant, and the Rose
Fellowship from her alma mater,

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Vassar College.

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Maso is a professor of English
in the creative writing

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program at Brown University.

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Each spring, she commutes to
Provincetown from her home--

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from her home in Germantown in
the Hudson Valley of New York

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State.

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Maso is currently
working on a new novel

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called The Bay of Angels.

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As she suggests by the title
of her collection of essays,

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Maso breaks every rule when
she sits down to write.

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What emerges from the
rubble of traditional form

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is a pattern of passion
and ontological inquiry.

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What does it mean to grieve?

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What does it mean to love?

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Her themes are lyric and
so is her expression.

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A mimetic representation of the
fervor, the joy, the terror,

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or rage that spearhead her
artistic investigations.

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For Maso, form is content.

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Writer and scholar
Karen Brennan

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has referred to Maso's
work as genre bending.

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She writes toward that
blur between what's real

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and what's imagined.

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Her work, both fiction
and nonfiction,

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is forged with a poet's
eye and a poet's ear.

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Maso has written that as a child
she wanted to be a pianist.

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As an adult she has
become a composer.

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She mines language for
its musical possibilities,

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syntactic pattern and
variation, the bumps

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and stresses of
consonants and vowels,

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the pervasive and ultimately
unmitigatable silence.

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She forges the metaphorical
to the verge of metaphysical.

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And what's forged is as close
to candor as a soul can get.

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As the speaker of the Art
Lover, in conversation

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with her dead
father, interrogates

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herself which leads to the
question, who is the speaker?

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The author, some emissary
born of the author's mind,

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a fictional construct?

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In Maso, this line
is indiscernible.

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But as I was saying, as the
speaker interrogates herself--

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I'm going to write now.

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It is a way of telling
the truth or nearing

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the truth, the absolute
truth, the literal truth?

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Well, yes.

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Well, no.

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But something of the whole.

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Something of what it
means to be alive.

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Please help me to welcome
Carol Maso in the flesh.

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