[APPLAUSE]
Hey, y'all I apologize.
I'm a little winded.
I just biked over here, frankly.
But here I am.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, and I should also start
by saying that my first impression of Susan Steinberg's
work was through Spectacle, her most recent book.
And writing an intro for somebody that you've never met
but whose career you respect immensely
is a very strange predicament.
But anyway.
[LAUGHS]
Susan Steinberg is the author of three books, Spectacle,
Hydroplane, and The End of Free Love.
And she has been the recipient of the United States Artist
Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize.
She's a Professor of English at the University of San
Francisco.
And when I was reading Susan's most recent work, Spectacle,
for Ander Monson's course on collections,
Ander tasked me with creating what
he called a visual representation
of the structure of the book.
And to do so, I ended up creating
this really goofy chart with a bunch of boxes
and confusing arrows pointing everywhere.
And that represented where I thought
I saw links in the narrative style and the content
and the themes between the pieces in the book.
And I thought it was all right for course work, you know?
But later, Ander told me [LAUGHS]
that he sent the chart, my crappy chart,
to Susan Steinberg.
[LAUGHTER]
And I was mortified.
[LAUGHTER]
I hadn't even considered the possibility
that she might see it.
And now this very talented author whose work I adore
was seeing her complex and beautiful art
reduced to some boxes that read stuff like,
"misunderstanding the universe" and "death
of the father, parenthetical, literal, or figurative."
[LAUGHTER]
And for days, for days, I was haunted
by the idea that my bad chart was
the first impression Susan Steinberg would have of me
forever and that, worse--
much worse, like, way worse--
she would always think that chart was representative
of some population of readers that
viewed her work in such reductive terms.
But a funny thing happened.
And Ander said to me in an email,
and I quote, "I think she liked it a lot."
[LAUGHTER]
Which is funny to me.
And why this is funny is that Susan's work is often
labeled as experimental.
And for a long time, I don't think
I understood what that meant for her as an author.
But hearing that she saw my unfiltered and nearly tactless
summary of her work and allegedly enjoyed it [LAUGHS]
helped me to understand some of what makes works--
excuse me, what makes Susan's form of writing
so pleasurable to read.
And while Susan absolutely experiments
with form and presentation and voice--
for example, a story can be set in hundreds of single line
paragraphs.
To quote from Spectacle, "It doesn't matter.
All the kin-- all that matters was it was night.
And it was cold.
It was night.
And it was cold.
It was night.
And it was cold.
Just stop.
Outside the window now were stars.
And there were floods.
Excuse me, and there were lights below, as well.
The flight attendant was waiting for me.
She was waiting for me to be all right.
But I would never be what she needed.
So I had to perform."
I love those lines.
Yeah.
But also, I think Susan Steinberg experiments
with what it means to write something felt, something
tangible, and something that accesses the fundamentals
of what human experience is.
And how her audience reacts to that--
yeah.
So as I was reading Spectacle, I couldn't help but feel
this overwhelming sense of familiarity,
that I somehow knew this person who was speaking.
And that sense of familiarity, that closeness,
was so overpowering that I actually
find myself flipping the book over
to look at the author photo [LAUGHS]
and speaking aloud to an empty room.
Do I know this person?
I must.
[LAUGHTER]
Did I go to college with this person or something?
Am I going crazy?
And when discussing the book with friends,
many echoed the same uncanny feeling.
In fact, one friend of mine was so fully invested
that he was totally convinced that the book was a memoir
and later, after seeing the word "fiction" on the back cover,
he said, like, oh, man, I'm so happy it's not
a memoir, because I finished that book, and I was like,
damn, her life was so hard.
[LAUGHTER]
But the reason that I mentioned all these very loosely related
anecdotes is that they all led me to the realization that
while Susan is often questioned and even targeted in interviews
about the experimental nature of her work-- for example,
see the image of Susan at AWP that features her holding--
looking deadpan into the camera and holding a whiteboard that
reads "Did that really happen?"
[LAUGHTER]
That's kind of the idea.
That is the idea.
She experiments with what we're willing to accept
and what we're willing to see through
and what we're willing to suspend our disbelief for
and what we're willing to believe in.
And Susan Steinberg is an experimental writer
in that we become the control for her experiment.
Her writing becomes our experiment, likewise.
And what will we trust?
What will we feel?
And crucially, I think everyone learned something
about themselves in the process.
And that's really unique.
This is from "Spectator," a story
that only Susan could create, both in content and form.
To quote, "I was a girl and blank happened once;
and blank happened twice; and blank was said;
and blank was felt and blank would be dealt with eventually;
and then I would know my brilliance."
And so, introducing Susan Steinberg.
[APPLAUSE]