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While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center,
Jenn SHAPLAND ENCOUNTERS THE LOVE LETTERS OF CARSON MCCULLERS AND A
WOMAN NAMED ANNEMARIE—letters that are tender, intimate, and
unabashed in their feelings. SHAPLAND RECOGNIZES HERSELF IN THE
LETTERS’ language—but does not see MCCULLERS AS HISTORY HAS
PORTRAYED HER.
And so, SHAPLAND IS COMPELLED TO UNDERTAKE A RECOVERY OF THE FULL
NARRATIVE AND LANGUAGE OF MCCULLERS’s life: she wades through
therapy transcripts; she stays at MCCULLERS’s childhood home, where
she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives
MCCULLERS’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As SHAPLAND RECKONS WITH THE
EXPANDING AND COLLAPSING DISTANCE BETWEEN HER AND MCCULLERS, she sees
the way MCCULLERS’s story has become a way to articulate something
about herself. The results reveal something entirely new not only
about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell
queer love stories.
In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn SHAPLAND INTERWEAVES HER OWN STORY
WITH CARSON MCCULLERS’s to create a vital new portrait of one of
America’s most beloved writers, and shows US how the writers we love
and the stories we tell about ourselves make US who we are. SHAPLAND
WILL BE JOINED BY THREE BLUE STOOP COMMUNITY MEMBERS WHO WILL READ
SHORT PASSAGES OF CARSON MCCULLERS’ work that has been meaningful to
them.
Jenn SHAPLAND IS A WRITER LIVING IN NEW MEXICO. Her nonfiction has
been published in Tin House, Outside, the Lifted Brow, Essay Daily,
and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art
journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart
Prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the Creative Writing department at
the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her first book, My
Autobiography of CARSON MCCULLERS, will be available from Tin House
Books in February 2020.
Jenn photo credit: Christian Michael Filardo
art
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19/02/2020 Last update