Vickie, that's awesome news.
This makes me very excited, almost as excited
as the piñata.
Close, but not quite.
So for every writer there is a moment
of permission, where she realizes
that the kind of story she wants to write
isn't what she's writing yet.
Maybe the leap is more obvious for a fiction writer who's
stuck in hand-me-down literary realism,
yet to make the leap into magic or strangeness, what
Kelly Link calls weird shit, for lack of a term that doesn't
auto classify a story into genre,
like fantasy or sci-fi on account
of the verisimilitude of a story's conceit.
I've always wanted to use the word verisimilitude and kickass
in an introduction.
Now I've done it.
Kick ass.
Perhaps it's the sleeplessness that gives some of us
permission.
The hypnagogic or hypnopompic states
that we slide into on either edge of sleep
tend to erode the ways in which daylight
and the usual attention can limit us.
Robert Owen Butler calls this compositional place,
the place from where you dream.
There are lots of ways to get there, including having a baby,
after which a great deal seems possible
and also beyond possibility.
Or perhaps some things just seem acceptable that did not before,
and others don't.
The world flips.
It's a little like that time that gravity
just stopped working.
Or writing upon waking is another option,
as Erin tells the Kenyon Review she did while commuting
to work in New York City.
Any insomniac could tell you that you
get into some strange layers of consciousness
going sleepless too.
Sometimes that permission can come in the form of advice
from a trusted mentor.
In Erin's case, Robin Black handing down some real truth,
asking her, why do you think you need to write like this?
"This" meaning normal/realist stories.
So a workshop followed that, encouraging her to go weirder.
Or sometimes permission is granted
by reading the right story at the right time,
as in William H. Gass's In the Heart
of the Heart of the Country, a story
that one of Erin's in her book writes back at.
Sex can do it too in how it transports and transcends,
at its rare best anyway, and there's
lots of sex in her stories, some of which
you'll probably hear tonight.
But one of the cool things about Erin's work
is that it's not just her stories that
give us permission to make it weird,
but her editorial work too.
With her husband Justin, she founded and edits the journal
Waxwing, which publishes stories about nude modeling
and telekinesis, though, unfortunately, not
yet in the same story.
[LAUGHTER]
Perhaps you'll take that as a challenge.
I would recommend that you do.
Those are both from the newest issue.
It's a really good magazine.
So clearly nude modeling and telekinesis
are your answer to getting published in Waxwing.
I don't know.
I'm writing this introduction after midnight
knowing I'll be up pretty early anyway,
using the last bit of what literary force remains
to me in the day.
This introduction isn't that weird, though, yet, is it?
But the fact that it's attached to a piñata kind of like adds
to that.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
I'm sure that Erin will show us now how to do it right.
Her first book And Yet It Moves is just out from Indiana
University Press.
She has some degrees, and is published well.
She's a good writer and an interesting person.
She teaches at Northern Arizona University.
Please welcome Erin Stalcup.
[APPLAUSE]