But the idea of transformation has always been something that I romanticize in a work. I’m cautious of it but I also need it to connect my thoughts with the process of making. That’s really important.
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Nari Ward
A Room with a View: Teresa Carmody & Sarah Gerard
An evening celebrating the launch of Teresa Carmody’s new novel, The Reconception of Marie
Part of the A Room with a View series.
A Room with a View features BOMB contributors past and present.
An evening held in celebration of Teresa Carmody’s new novel, The Reconception of Marie (Spuyten Duyvil). The event was hosted by the author of True Love (Harper), Sarah Gerard.
Sexually curious and intellectually adventurous, adolescent Marie begins journaling about her life in western Michigan’s Bible Belt during the rise of the Christian right. Over the span of many years, her writing becomes a meditation on the ways in which language makes, unmakes, and remakes us. In The Reconception of Marie, Marie’s many voices coalesce in a reimagined bildungsroman, where coming-of-age becomes coming-into-awareness, a spiritual quest navigated with humor, fervency, and the multivalency of queer grace.
Teresa Carmody’s writing includes fiction, creative nonfiction, and inter-arts collaborations, including the novella Maison Femme: A Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Collagist, LitHub, WHR, Two Serious Ladies, Diagram, St. Petersburg Review, Faultline, and was selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing and by Entropy for its Best Online Articles and Essays list of 2019. Carmody is co-founding editor of Les Figues Press, an imprint of The Los Angeles Review of Books, and director of Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Her debut novel, The Reconception of Marie, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil in November 2020.
Sarah Gerard is the author of the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, BOMB Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Baffler, The Believer, and anthologies including We Can’t Help It If We’re From Florida, One Small Blow Against Encroaching Totalitarianism, Erase the Patriarchy, and Tampa Bay Noir. Her novel True Love was released by Harper in July 2020.
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The writer on her new novel, creative partnerships, sex as communication, and tending to old drafts.