5/18/12

Lucy Corin - A world where characters behave normally in the most extreme situations and bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. Unpredictable and playful, Corin brilliantly dissects time, people, places, and things, truly rendering how it feels to be human


Lucy Corin, The Entire Predicament, Tin House, 2010.

Read it at Google Books


This is my day in the sun and I’ve got my arms in the air, my head tipped back like the hinged lid of a lighter. Contrary to popular belief, I am not alone. Everyone’s listening. All I see is the bulging gas above me and I’m shooting my mind at it. I’m as close to God as I’ll ever be. The people are tiny. They’re buckshot around my ankles. I could kneel and run my fingers through them. - from The Entire Predicament

“Sometimes quirkily funny, sometimes shading into menace or serious derangement, The Entire Predicament zigzags its way over the walls we tend to build between the serious, the absurd, the humorous, the off-kilter, and the mad.” - Brian Evenson

"A wide range of bizarre disquistions and turns of events marks Corin's debut collection. The narrator of 'Wizened' declares that she 'became crotchety' at age 24, wears housecoats and thick stockings, and spies on her neighbors for even the most minor signs of wrongdoing; with distinct Malthusian overtones, she declares that there are too many people, and that she only approves of the couple next door-whom she refers to as 'the homosexuals.' A similar preoccupation with an ominous future figures prominently in 'Airplane,' in which a woman explains a flight in every last detail, including the snap of the mesh bag attached to the seat, and 'My Favorite Dentist,' which juxtaposes the calm routine of a dental appointment with a rash of sniper attacks in Washington, D.C. At times, Corin digresses into an overly affected stream of consciousness ('Mice,' 'A Woman with a Gardener'), and some moments feel forced, as when a narrator refers to her knowledge that 'if she continues to speak, some recognition of difficulty will materialize, as if difficulty is produced from the interaction of her voice with the air it encounters.' At her best, however, Corin infuses ordinary situations with powerful and unexpected images, from which she deftly draws a dry, detached humor." - Publishers Weekly

"These short stories are as smart as pinpricks, magic tricks. They go off like a string of firecrackers." - Kelly Link

"Lucy Corin's Swiftian satires are brilliant — stunningly so — and entirely original." - Rikki Ducornet

"These stories are sharp, subtle, and surprising, rendering the truth of experience beautifully into fiction." Lynn Freed
"Lucy Corin's The Entire Predicament is a book of eyes and I's. Behold, wherever Corin's eye falls on this occluded world of ours, it is transformed in a twinkling — the scales come unhinged and we can't fail to see to see." - Michael Martone

"In Isaac Asimov's novelization of Fantastic Voyage, a miniaturized submarine navigates a dying body. When the oxygen supply is sabotaged, the crew members discover that they cannot harvest air from the lungs of their host, as the oxygen molecules are too large to absorb into their own tiny respiratory systems. That is what the world is like for Lucy Corin's characters in her first collection, The Entire Predicament: gargantuan, bludgeoning, unassimilable, vital.
Corin creates worlds with a kind of monstrous beauty: the external environment presses so close, insistent and invasive, that it begins to sound like the rubbing of hairs in the ear, to feel like the tips of the fingers, to taste like a tongue. The experience is too gigantic to digest, too mercurial to elude, for Corin's readers as well as her characters. These characters are hyper-sensitized, ultra-alert, compulsively descriptive, obsessively attentive. Many quail, agog, in the face of stimulus. Then, once experience has forced its way inside them, it grows towering and barbed, or ravishing and golden. They become echo chambers, magnifiers, amplifiers -- and are, understandably, anxious.
For the heroine of "Airplane," tremulous in the sky, anxiety is both a fear of flying and a perpetual, needling, nauseous expectation of intimacy. For the protagonist of "My Favorite Dentist," with her clean, metallic mouth sparkling, anxiety is a calm, measured pacing and repacing of the same mental space, a cruel elegance affirming control over fear at all costs. For the suburban anchorite of "Wizened," anxiety is a kind of murky rage: "You can smell my bitterness, it's so old." For the gentle, hirsute husband in "Mice," anxiety is wet, warm, saggy, almost comfortable.
When the narrator of "A Woman with a Gardener" first enters the story, she too is anxious, vague, overwhelmed, clumsy. A server at a resplendent dinner party, she is steamrolled by the munificence and magnificence of stimuli. But despite her fear of drowning in sumptuousness, she is like a goldfish in a fishbowl in a flood. As the waters of sensation rise, they bear her away, blissing out in a ravishing rhapsody broken with wry knobbly observations, little islands of selfhood poking out of a crystalline sea of communality:
I am one in a line of precisely undulating bodies from a long line of long lines...and I am balancing an enormous silver tray of twenty glasses of champagne as if the glasses and the liquid in them are suspended over my palm as weightless as any idea I've ever had....happy noises ring and hover, rumble and soar, and utensils punctuate, and behind me, Becky, or anyone, is slipping [the guests] pâté and crudité (what, did I pick this up in construction? did I learn it landscaping?) and golden bouncy bits of fish and vegetables. I've glided in figure eights so balanced I'm breathless, I'm elated.
That kind of passivity -- lying splayed open and wide-eyed as the world storms your senses -- is also the subject of the hilarious and devastating story "Baby in a Body Cast," though here Corin mostly leaves anxiety behind. The protagonist, a newborn infant encased in a full-body cast, is paralyzed, a complete receptor for sensation, but is also protectively enveloped in a kind of second womb. The degree to which Corin conveys the visceral nature of the baby's experience -- at once terrifyingly immediate and dizzyingly distant -- is stunning:
He didn't know what was wrong, yet. He could feel the insides of his head slosh. He was so tired from being immobilized and surprised at moving so quickly that he didn't cry. Inside the cast he jiggled, humid. His floating organs vibrated and shifted like raindrops on the window of a speedy car. ....................................
The baby didn't know that he heard as if underwater, all sounds surrounded, glaze over a dark cake. Still, sounds moved for him like heavy-headed flowers on a faintly jiggling earth.
The Entire Predicament is fiercely strange and written with keen control. You don't read these stories: you undergo them. They are an event that is lived, not an object that is scanned. Language here is a tangible sensation; Corin's words have weight, temperature, odor, texture, bite. Vision and noise invade you. You become anxious. Then you may find yourself pinching your nose, squeezing your eyes, so as not to let this world escape your body." -Micaela Morrissette


Lucy Corin, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, Fiction Collective 2, 2004.

Read it at Google Books


“Two girls look at the Venus de Milo. ‘Somebody has knocked off her arms,’ one girl says. ‘I could do that,’ says the other. Dismemberment is the basic fact of the world they grow up in, a world feeding on stories of rape, kidnapping, murder. But the book opens out from our pulp myths into older stories-like that of Osiris, murdered and dismembered. And in this larger, cyclic perspective, killer and killed, kinds of desire, birth and death fuse in the complex act of the telling through which we shape and in turn are shaped. You won’t easily forget this book.” - Rosmarie Waldrop

"In Everyday Psychokillers spectacular violence is the idiom of everyday life, a lurid extravaganza in which all those around the narrator seem vicarious participants. And at its center are the interchangeable young girls, thrilling to know themselves the object of so much desire and terror.
The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley's narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. What these preposterously commonplace figures all know is that murder is identity: "Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he's done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn't exist."
Everyday Psychokillers reaches to the edge of the psychoanalytical and jolts the reader back to daily life. The reader becomes the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face."

"Corin reinhabits American speech like a psychokiller dressed out in a victim's skin. Her splintered perspective cracks the glossy landscape of commodification to reveal an unsettling intimacy with danger. It seeps through bandages of history and myth like blood from the torn-apart body of the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, falling apart in the arms of his sister-wife Isis. Corin anatomizes the eternal embrace of what saves and what kills, refusing to compromise the complexity of experience and language. There is no escape-not even in irony. Hers is a fully awakened sensibility." - Patricia Eakins

"Corin's language is hot and pulsating....Superbly evocative." - Kirkus Reviews

Interweaving history, myth, rumor, and news, this first novel explores what it means to grow up as a girl in a culture of girl-killers."

"Everyday Psychokillers looks and sounds like a thriller: the cover (a portrait of a sliced-up face) promises an encounter with Ted Bundy, or the notorious “Nipple-digger”—or at least a neighborhood creep. But Lucy Corin’s debut reads less like Bret Easton Ellis than Annie Dillard—poetic, plotless, full of intricate descriptions of lizards and swamps. The book, which elegantly bobs along from one creepy anecdote to another, is not about psychokillers, but the boredom and desperation that makes them appealing. The nameless thirteen-year-old narrator lives in a Florida suburb that is “just more obviously bad than other places.” Like Dillard, who stares at birds for so long that she starts tweeting, the narrator thinks about her freaky culture so much that she begins wondering, casually, what it would be like to kill another girl." —Rachel Aviv
"Structurally this is a very sophisticated book with a first person narrator, a very young and unlearned girl, that merges into objective narration of more mature and reflective passages. In addition the characters enact similar messages that are tied together more by subtle implications than by temporal progression. In addition to titled and numbered chapters there are insertions of a page or two or of a paragraph that widen the universe of the story or bring some particular into sharper focus.
The girl is obsessed with killers of the psychotic sort as she grows up in a bleak community that is very loosely a part of Miami. The nature of Florida, not intended for habitation by modern man, fitly throws into relief the instinct towards inhumanity that underlies the grim dangers of the Ted Bundys and other, less well-known, killers. Her obsession becomes a kind of way of life for her and by its light she can perceive that her uncle Ted, with his useless collection of pinned insects, and the Indian that rode his horse to death and left its body to sink into a swamp are united in cruelty with a Bundy or a Dahmer.
The progress of her life is measured out in terms of the girls that she knows. Not all of these are either friends or enemies. The first girl that the narrator mentions is Rhonda. She follows Rhonda from class to class to save herself the chore of learning how to get to her classes in a new school. Many of these girls suffer. Rhonda, for example, dies a messy death, the victim of a hit-and-run driver.The novel has several levels and all of them work. The myth of Isis, Osiris and Set provides a core around which many of the novel’s implications attach themselves. The style is deceptively simple and erupts into sharply etched observations.
When you’re a kid, walking around in a world that’s nameless does not always seem like a problem. You’re used to things being mysterious. A lot of things just don’t matter. It’s sort of like being what they call carefree. But not really.”
“Joe was a big stupid man and he enjoyed familiar jokes. He was like a depiction of what he was.”
“It’s sort of ignorance-is-bliss, the state I’m describing, but only in retrospect, only with the kind of hindsight that creates foresight. If you know very much at all, everything gets really scary.”
As the novel nears its completion, there is some of the sentimental note that often makes a noise in first novels. It may ease resolution but it lowers credibility. But Everyday Psychokillers has so much in its favor that this not so much a criticism as a minor reservation. Corin’s skill propels the story and creates characters in ways that place her in the front ranks of highly talented writers. I very strongly recommend her book." - Bob Williams

"Lucy Corin's first novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, published by FC2, begins as a wild, unapologetic mess. The story of a young girl in southern Florida, Psychokillers reminded me initially of Lynda Barry's Cruddy, Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, or a number of other ragged, jagged narratives yanked out of confused teenaged women. It's messy in that way, in that essentially female way, and its zigs and zags are almost familiar to me, this unpredictable, non-linear tempo.
It's the kind of book that leads reviewers and jacket copy writers to create lists of disparate elements: a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. And the book is good in this way; it's inventive, fresh, out of control. You spend most of the first half asking yourself, "Where is she going with this?"
But ultimately what's interesting about the book is not the way it's fragmented. The story is told in mad, intense chunks, increasingly so disconnected from the central narrative of the young girl. We go from a fairly chronological account of a home life, a school life, of this main character, into digressions that start as anecdotes or asides from the character herself and evolve into separate stories -- stories of death and killers, murders, fear. That aspect of it is great, and Corin pulls together a very bold collage.
The interesting thing, though, is how it isn't fragmented, how the book spirals back on itself, revisiting ideas, images, and even sentence structures, so that while in some ways time, characters, and realities are fractured, the idea of the book spirals inward to a point, and comes together where the book blows apart. There are six or seven absolutely tight and monstrous pages toward the end that clearly express the book's central theme. I realized, reading them, the path I had to take to get there, to be told I am a killer, and that I am being killed, and that both are me. That realization is at the center of the spiral.
Looking at it from the top, a spiral moving outward looks the same as a spiral moving inward. It's not immediately obvious how Corin's book functions in this way, but the destination is worth the journey, and the investment in the book, you will find, sneaks up on you. Along the way, you'll find chapters that work as short stories, you'll see a dazzling slideshow of images you definitely have not seen before, and you'll find yourself falling into suspense over this character. Yes, in the middle of a novel built of formal experimentation, you'll be worried about this girl, and the question central to her psycho psyche -- will she kill or be killed?" - Lydia Netzer

"Like many practicing and publishing writers, you teach in a university. What about the university environment is most beneficial to creative writers?
- Well, I can't honestly answer this question without mentioning the changes that are happening in our current university system. When I was making choices about how to make my way as a writer, I saw the university as the closest thing in our culture to a place free from market concerns, where artists and thinkers were valued for the way they contributed to the history of making and thinking, rather than their ability to feed a proven desire for some product (ie making things that we already know people want to consume/buy). I was right in some ways and in some ways not. Personally I have benefited hugely from universities: I get money from them to live on and I get artistic and intellectual friends from them, I get my mind challenged from them, and I get access to people with more power than I have who are apt to be interested in what I care about and do. I still don't know of another way to support myself that also allows time and mental space to write. As research and education are privatized, this is less and less the case, and I think university jobs are increasingly filled by people who are supposed to draw attention/funding to the institution because they are successful in the marketplace or re-enforce existing trends. Certainly a lot of good art happens in and because of university support and community, but a lot happens regardless of it, and despite it. More and more I find myself interested in what is possible outside of the university, and I think the next generation of interesting artists is going to have to create structures to support what it does, as existing structures become less and less relevant to what they're doing.
What's the one novel not nearly enough writers have read, and why should they read it?
- Too many people read Beckett as a playwright and they should look at him as a novelist-- or better, as a *writer.* No one can show you the implications of uniting form and content as he does. It doesn't matter which book you read, which is most "successful" -- the point is the completeness of his approach, the way of doing narrative, work by work, and within that, line by line and word by word, taking nothing for granted. For a fiction writer, that radical option for conceiving of the point of telling a story, even a long story, on the page, is crucial. It says that you can write a novel by taking a sensibility that is true to you-- your mind, your experience--and following it through to a built (ie fictional, dramatized) space made of language, and that this is what creates meaning about the world.
As someone who frequently publishes work in anthologies and literary magazines, what's the best advice you would give a beginning writer when sending out their work for the first time?
- Don't ask a publication to like what you do if you don't do what they like." - Interview by Lance Olsen

"In Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, the main character comments on her friendships throughout the novel, saying, "Each time I took a girl to heart I could feel aspects of myself uncoiling from my personality, from the mass tangle of my little history. I heard her speak and watched her behave and I placed myself in her terms, so she might comprehend me..." As an author, do you share a similar relationship to your characters? To what extent are their voices independent of your voice in the narrative?
 - Yes, I think I do have this relationship with characters, though I don't think I ever thought of that line like that before. When I wrote that book, I don't remember thinking very metafictionally at all, but I certainly find myself reading for relationships like that. Just yesterday I was trying to think about the ways Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway is like a writer. She's "the perfect hostess" (a title Clarissa herself doesn't like), bringing people together and hoping they'll "talk" to each other. That seems very writerly to me, in a post-nineteenth-century/modern way. I think Peter, another character in the book, says something like, "One of the nice things about getting older is you can hold people up and turn them around in the light." That sense of perspective is also very writerly, but in a much more traditionally authoritative way. This idea of thinking of the world in "terms" of characters is very dear to me, and I sometimes think that all a character is is a more or less closed set of terms. As for voice, I have a hard time pretending that characters are anything outside of me, that there is any meaningful difference between my voice and a character's voice. It's all writing, and I'm the one writing it. I never say anything like "then the characters just took over." It's not that I think I control the narrative; I just don't think I'm a mother or a god when I write. I think more in terms of the uncontainability of words, how much they bring with them that has nothing to do with me at all. In writing, the element that's outside of me isn't so much character as language.
Given that you write about mass murder in Everyday Psychokillers and physical deformity, mental illness and homosexuality in The Entire Predicament, we're curious about the research that enabled you to create those characters and narrative voices.
- So, just to clarify, because I think this is a really interesting and complicated question, in EPK, while I do write about some mass killings (I think of mass murder as a bunch of people killed at once (either by an individual, like when someone "goes postal" and shoots into a crowd, or when the killing is done by something like an institutional force, as in war or genocide), I was mostly interested in serial killers—in particular, those who kill in a systemized, patterned, and often encoded one-after-another sort of way. So I did literal research. I read newspapers, popular accounts, and scholarly books. (Mark Seltzer's book Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture was really important to me as I went from early drafts to later drafts of the book.) But I connected to what I was learning about what serial killers do, or are said to do, through the idea of seriality, pattern-making, of things repeated, of ritualization, of the conscious production of a narrative. In other words, to the way that reading, writing, thinking—fantasizing and making my fantasies concrete—things I do every day—were related to what the psychokillers in my research were said to be doing. And what I think you really need to do when you write about something is to connect to it—and connecting to something isn't a given just because you experience it. It's always a deeply imaginative thing to do—to really connect to something.
It's interesting that you mention mental illness in the stories, because I am only now, in the stuff I'm working on, taking on the idea of "mental illness" in a direct way in my fiction. There are a lot of "unstable" people in my stories, but I think interesting things happen when people are feeling unstable (which I don't think is the same as being "mentally ill"—it's a complicated question and a fraught term, the meaning of which is under a lot of debate). I'm interested in emotional intensity, and almost always bored to pieces when I read anything that thinks it's depicting something "everyday" or "relatable" (possibly my least favorite word ever—if it even is a word!). First, I think lives are usually extreme and intense, at least to the people living them, and the idea of some "typical" way of life or kind of person is a total construct anyway, not to mention a culturally deadening/dehumanizing one. When it comes to people who are violent, I tend to write about them in a way that is focalized through an observer, often a female observer, but so far always a non-violent observer, a person who is wondering at what they are seeing, trying to access an understanding of it: it's mysterious behavior, but it's everywhere, and it affects me, so I need to contend with that in some way. And that's the way I think I depict it.
But different subjects demand different kinds of relationships because of the limits of what I know or have been able to learn or bothered to pay close attention to. I write about gay people, for instance, just because there are gay people in the world and in my life, so I think they should be in my stories. Plus I personally identify as gay. Or queer, actually, is the word I usually use. So I do feel like I have a different kind of access to the perspective of a queer person because I've spent a lot of time thinking about that perspective, from living my individual version of it, and from being interested in queer perspectives when I encounter them in my life or my reading. I don't want to give the impression that you can only take on the perspective of a person who is literally "like you" in some broad demographic way. But I do think that if you are going to represent someone who is "other" for you or that you expect will be "other" for your reader, you need to do it with integrity; you need to be intently tuned in to the social and political complexities of the world you're fooling with. I think integrity can be accomplished in any number of ways, and I do my best in each individual story, according to the narrative perspective of that story.
It was really fun for me to write from the perspective of a baby in a body cast, though, because it was entirely imaginary. No one gets to know what that's "really like," so I can just go for it, imaginatively, and work to be really true to the reality within the story. Anyhow, different conditions require different work for me to make the necessary connection. The important thing, and probably the hard thing, is to know what kind of work you have to do and be willing to do it.
To borrow a phrase from the narrator of Everyday Psychokillers, you often close the "safe distance" people place between themselves and those who are "other." The absence of that distance often made us, as readers, uncomfortable. For example, certain depictions of violence in both your novel and the short story "The Entire Predicament" were difficult for us to read. Yet, experiencing discomfort—and feeling, to some extent, implicated—eventually led us to a deeper understanding of these works and, perhaps, of the human "predicament."
- There have been times when I've been reading and thought violence, especially to animals, was an easy route to manipulating a reader's visceral response without taking responsibility for it. What that entails (and I really don't like the word "responsibility"—it's used so often to mean something like puritanical morality, which is not at all what I am after at here) is hard to put a finger on, but I think about it a lot. A mean thing to do to someone is to inflict something on her, or dare her to inflict it herself. I've sometimes reread my own stuff and wondered if I did something like that—depicting something awful just because I could or to revel in it or something. Though I think there's a place for titillation, too. I think titillation is an important and complex human experience. I'm really interested in atrocity and my ability to live safe from it. I find it astonishing that something can exist in the world and not affect me or, depending on your world view—like if you believe that everything is connected—not "seem" to affect me. I think of the imagination, guided by art or other media, as the link between distant or separated entities. Something like empathy, but with more tentacles. So I think my job as a writer, and what I am doing as I perform the act of writing, is to travel those distances as intently as possible, to track and record the vicissitudes along the way. Honestly, I'm sure I don't always maintain in my own work the integrity I ask of the things I read, but I am always striving for it. Certainly that delicate balance depends on who's reading at what moment in his life, too. So I do my best when I work on something to ask myself and my reader to take in difficult and complicated things, but I try to do it in a way that is about the complexities of making connections across difference. And yes, as you say, I think that's the human predicament. I think we are part of the things we witness, know, and imagine.
What writers have influenced your work? Do you find yourself frequently revisiting particular authors or stories?
- The first book that got me thinking about narrative shape in an abstract way was Günter Grass's Cat and Mouse, which I read when I was young, maybe twelve or thirteen. I'm only realizing now that so much of the way I write comes from there, particularly its opening pages. The short story that taught me most about writing short stories is O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." That, and Donald Barthelme's "The School." Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants changed everything for me with those square shapes on the page. Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground was very important, and led to a lot of my interest in the first person and various intense romps I love, like Invisible Man. I think of Lolita as a perfect novel. I think of Bolaño's 2666 as a book that isn't interested in being perfect and blows my mind in a million ways that make being perfect irrelevant. Rebecca Brown's The Dogs taught me that a fantasy doesn't have to be anything other than a person's fantasy in order to be profound and moving. Lydia Davis taught me that I can make a story out of anything and that to try to do it as quickly as possible is interesting. They both helped me understand why I love Kafka. I also got a lot of my sense of what it is to be a writer by reading the letters of Ezra Pound and the letters of Jane Bowles.
Your mention of Coover's "square shapes on the page" makes us think of your "Small Apocalypses," some of which appeared in West Branch 64. How does experimenting with structure and visual presentation of text change things for you?
- Well, I don't to a ton with visual shape, not the way poets do and not the way some fiction writers breaking down the edges of the genre do. (I'm thinking of, say, Carole Maso or Thalia Field.) I do think about the shape of the traditional physical form of fiction: sentences, paragraphs, scenes / space breaks, chapters. I was first drawn to the short story because of the way it tries to crystallize the world, the tidiness of it, the satisfying symmetries, the nothing-out-of-place. The story is a magical place where meaning is visible. I think a lot in terms of simple math and equations when I write. I'll make up rules for myself, like "if it comes up once it has to come up in two different ways by the end of the story (or paragraph, or sentence)" and if not I have to cut it. I think of compositional weight, like in a painting, but with the things in my stories—the characters, the settings, the number of scenes, the kinds of scenes, how dialogue is distributed, things like that. In the same way, I think of visual aspects of the text. If I don't want anything to jump out, I try to make the paragraphing "natural," that is, not anything you'd really notice. But making something look like something can have all kinds of effects—on pacing, for instance, or on tone. I even think of it on the level of words. For instance, it bothers me a lot that some magazines' usage standards call for numbers to be like 1000 instead of the words one thousand. It feels totally different to read a number than to read a word. They're like different words. I write practically no nonfiction, but I did write a little article called "Material" in The Writer's Notebook, a collection of craft essays at Tin House, about visual aspects of fiction.
What are you working on now? Will you continue to work in both short fiction and the novel?
- Yes—stories and novel. I recently finished a project called A Hundred Apocalypses, which is a hundred microfictions about the apocalypse and apocalyptic thinking. It's kind of my good-bye to American, or maybe particularly hipster American, self-importance. That's under submission to book publishers but parts of it are scattered around the web and in magazines like West Branch. I'm also working on a novel, which, formally, is very long and fluid, with hardly any paragraphs. It's about the brain. And I have a few stories that seem to be on their way to being part of another collection, down the road." - Interview by By Collin Berry and Kimberly Papa


Lucy Corin: THREE SMALL APOCALYPSES

Lucy Corin: Seven Small Apocalypses

Four Recent Apocalypses by Lucy Corin

Lucy Corin: THREE OF A HUNDRED APOCALYPSES

Three Different Apocalypses by Lucy Corin

CHOOSE YOUR APOCALYPSE by Lucy Corin

Five of a Hundred Apocalypses by Lucy Corin

Mice by Lucy Corin

A Woman with a Gardener byLucy Corin

Form and Emotion by Lucy Corin

Miracles by Lucy Corin

Lucy Corin: Baby

Eyes of Dogs by Lucy Corin

Words & Advice from Lucy Corin

Lucy Corin's web page




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