About the Book
Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. Literary Criticism. FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS: NEW NARRATIVE AS CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE offers the first comprehensive anthology of essays regarding New Narrative writing and community practices by a younger generation of practitioners and scholars. As editors Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw write in their introduction, "We are not interested in offering an 'authoritative' canon of New Narrative work, nor are we interested in consolidating an official version of New Narrative's history. Rather, we want to use this as an opportunity to foreground New Narrative as a movement that is still coming into focus, a more or less unstable object that doesn't want to be 'fixed, ' codified, or hardened into a limited & limiting list of names and works. One of our motivating questions is Why New Narrative now? Or, What are the stakes of New Narrative for our contemporary moment? In other words, while we remain committed to a set of past works that have been identified as 'New Narrative, ' we are equally committed to maintaining New Narrative as a dynamic and ongoing project, one with consequences for our present writing." Roomy in the collective vision that they manifest, the twenty-four contributions to FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS address the AIDS crisis, the politics of race, the structural impacts of neo-liberalism on urban space, and the movement across queer, straight and transgender subject positions. Other topics of investigation include the category of queer art, the importance of "feeling," the fiction of personality, the necessity of risk, the function of pedagogy, the strategy of appropriation, as well as scandal and gossip as these topics have been important to New Narrative and its expanded sphere of influence. Contributors include: Lindsey Boldt, Brandon Brown, David Buuck, Amanda Davidson, Robert Dewhurst, Thom Donovan, Joel Fares, Ariel Goldberg, Rob Halpern, Carla Harryman, Colin Herd, Kaplan Harris, Arnold J. Kemp, Trisha Low, Jason Morris, Trace Peterson, Ted Rees, Camille Roy, Kathy Lou Schultz, Eric Sneathen, Brian Teare, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Catherine Wagner, and Stephanie Young.
About the Author :
Rob Halpern lives between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Huron Valley Women's Prison. His books include COMMON PLACE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), MUSIC FOR PORN (Nightboat Books, 2012), Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2009), RUMORED PLACE (Krupskaya, 2006), and [ ] Placeholder (Enitharmon 2015). Touching Voids in Sense was recently published in the UK (Veer Books), and WEAK LINK is forthcoming (Atelos). Rob is currently completing his translations of Georges Perec's early essays on aesthetics and politics, while editing Bruce Boone Dismembered: Selected Poems, Stories, and Essays. His own essays appear in a range of journals, as well as in the recently edited volumes Against Value in the Arts and Education; Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field; and Conversations with One's Peers: 30 Years of the George Oppen Memorial Lectures.
Robin Tremblay-McGaw lives in San Francisco, writes about poetry and poetics, and teaches in the English Department of Santa Clara University and at Bard College as part of the Institute for Writing and in the Language & inking Program. Robin is the author of DEAR READER (Ithuriel's Spear, 2015) and the editor of xpoetics.blogspot.com. Robin's writing on Harryette Mullen, Joan Retallack, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Mike Amnasan, and others has appeared in Tripwire, MELUS, Aufgabe, Crayon, ON Contemporary Practice, Feminist Spaces 2.2, and elsewhere.
