Books: The Erotica Project, How to Travel with Your Demons
My long-form essay, Warsaw, is published in Eckleburg No. 22, a literary and arts journal that publishes both emerging and celebrated voices. Warsaw tells the intergenerational story of my grandmother and mother, who made unimaginable choices to survive post-war Germany
August 5 2023
Right before lockdown, in late January, I had a stalker, a disgruntled ex-lover, who said he’d remotely wipe out my computer and to keep an eye on my dog because “things can happen.” He texted me the above after I broke up with him. I’m educated. How could this happen? I wrote a paper in grad school analyzing Angela Carter’s The Bloody Tower through a Jungian feminist psychoanalytic lens. But this relationship had nothing to do with my brain.
You might want to make sure you’re sitting down while reading her.
AFLW East Coast Salon at KGB on May 30th.Writers: Jennifer Baker, Alison Kinney, Ysabel Y. Gonzalez, Michael J Seidlinger, Tobias Carroll, and Marnie Goodfriend. Also in attendance, Rosanna Arquette and friends.
EB: I love the brilliant and playful way your feminist deconstruction of A Streetcar Named Desire approaches these questions. What are your ways of thinking about autobiography versus fiction, “real” versus imaginary or invented? How do you use yourself in your work? How does your work change and shape your life?
She arrives after a twenty-five-year absence in our brother’s life; a seeker, a philosopher, convinced she can carry the weight of his impending death, that she could, in fact, be his angel of death. Like Charon, she has the gold piece for passage in her teeth at all times. She is both midwife and doula for the dying. Our first night together, at the all-night grocery store, Mark wears flannel pajama bottoms, white socks, flip-flops. His eye sockets are purple under the canopy of fluorescent lights. She’s Martha Stewart on crack.
Everything is green, too green. Even Demeter is dying. Here in Westchester, 20 years after the marriage ended, there’s a heat wave, and thunderheads in the still, blue sky. There’s a different kind of stink, not like the city, but still sweet. Things rot in this heat. Only yesterday, I finally took out the garbage, it was starting to ferment. This is the apotheosis of high summer. It is that space, where the wheel of the seasons is on the brink of shifting again. You can stand the heat, because the smell of things rotting is also the first sign of re-growth. Wallace Stevens wasn’t wrong, because the quiet death of all green things, in high summer, late July, is sweet.
Lillian Ann Slugocki 