Let me begin with a beginning, the opening
to Karen Brennan's essay Headiness.
Imagine a squarish container inside of which
a little creature resides.
And here is the creature creeping toward the lid,
and here's the creature pushing the lid open
and sniffing the air.
Other creatures better behaved remain inside their boxes,
lids fastened.
They do their thing.
They never tire of their thing.
This creature, however, our little creature or creation--
I think of it as a tiny multi-headed serpent
with her curious nose-- slithers out of her enclosure,
and what does she encounter.
More enclosures, boxes inside boxes, or does
she encounter the sky as limit.
Most of us are accustomed to containers
to tightly labeled aisles in the library or the bookstore
to readings, and classes, and writers
assigned to one category or another.
To checklists that ask us to pick.
Fiction, poetry, or nonfiction.
In short, we are accustomed to living
under the tyranny of genre.
And to no surprise, it feels familiar.
It feels safe.
And if we don't look up too often,
we might never notice the heavy lidded sky.
But how do we get out of here?
To quote Brennan again.
How do we get at the depths beyond the slide clutches
of words and boxes of words assembled in orderly categories
we call genre?
How to avoid being caught and stunned
in another doomed category?
How to give shape to the wildness
and still keep moving, changing?
Karen Brennan has been blurring the boundaries
of genre enabling the tiny hydras of hybrid writing
to roam free since the beginning of her career.
And her latest aptly titled collection monsters
epitomizes this quest.
Her story swerve and pivot and surprise.
They move and they move us.
They ask again and again that we learn
to revel in the friction that occurs when
our expectations regarding writing, regarding
genre, regarding everyday reality
confront new shapes, new forms, new ambitions, new, but no less
real realities.
What to do, for instance, when we encounter
a headless man riding the bus?
Or what should we make of a choir of opera singing mice?
Or how do we reconcile the needs and desires of one human being
with those of another?
One who is just built differently
on different premises.
And how is it that a highway?
A plain old highway is just that.
Just a road with cows grazing alongside and shops
at either end and billboards dotting the way.
And also, the place where some college kids
flipped a car, where a girl was date
raped, where a child was abused by a man who
broke into his daycare center.
And also, a blank.
A blank as blank as any blank they
ask you to fill on a test that will
determine if you will be going forward or staying where
you are.
A highway so full and yet so blank.
Who knows where you will wind up?
I am delighted to announce I don't
know we're at the end of this evening we will wind up.
I cannot make you any promises, except that we will get there
in good hands.
It is my pleasure to introduce Karen Brennan, the author
of Monsters and six other books of varying hydra headed genres,
as well as Professor Emeritus of English
at the University of Utah, a faculty member at the Warren
Wilson MFA program for writers, and an alumna of the University
of Arizona, where she received her PhD.
She's also the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts
Award.
And her essays, stories, and poems
have appeared in anthologies from Graywolf, Norton, Penguin,
Spuyten Duyvil, Michigan, and Georgia, among others.
Please join me in giving Karen Brennan a warm welcome.