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Unmarked Trail: A Romance in stories and a guide to setting up a writing partnership By Laurie Stone and Richard Toon Recently, as contributors to Superstition Review, we gave a reading from our forthcoming book, Unmarked Trail: A Romance in stories and a guide to setting up a writing partnership. Superstition asked to publish our selections and in conjunction to comment on our practice. We are delighted to share our work. Anyone interested in more information about creating a writing partnership may contact us directly at: Laurie Stone Richard Toon Our book—both a literary narrative and a guide to setting up a writing partnership—grew out of a practice we devised. We met at the artist colony Yaddo, fell in love, and took the leap of joining our lives. Soon after meeting, we began to write in notebooks and to read the entries to each other. Sometimes we wrote to the same prompts. The results were remarkable both in generating texts and opening up our lives to each other. Our book teaches this practice to anyone curious to write in a team with the assurance of startling results. Most books that teach creative writing follow an expert-to-novice design; the established writer gets the newbe up and running. Seldom are we invited to see the author's own experiments. We present ours, and our entries, like jazz riffs, are often our goal—installments of an unfolding, collaborative art project. Our book challenges the notion that writing needs to be solitary. The practice takes place in a public space. You perform the day's exercise in front of a partner. The combination of writing and reading together amps connection and helps each writer, literally, discover a voice. What is a prompt? It's a hand reaching out of darkness, a smell wafted under your nose, a flirtatious smile, a wish almost uttered. Prompts are the itches and goads and flutters and whispers that get us out of bed, out the door, down the stairs, beyond the street, into the forest, into the traffic, onto a plane, up the stream, hanging from a cliff, reaching the crest of a hill. Prompts are what open a conversation. They are the flags and whistles that alert us to look, feel, contribute something to the salad, the mess, the weave, the flow. We write about the sounds, sights, and smells of our landscape—the Arizona desert. We write about snatches of overheard conversation and music playing in the café where we sit. The cue we took was to look outward—reveal ourselves by the way we observed something else. It was the advice of Spalding Gray, who in the preface to Sex and Death to the Age 14 describes how he taught himself to keep a notebook—watching people, recording dialogue, noting where objects sat in a room, becoming a sticky lizard tongue catching whatever passed, a tumbleweed floating along back roads and highways: “I felt the diary might be a way of taking full responsibility for my life, and also a more therapeutic way of splitting off a part of myself to observe another part. It was the development of a writer's consciousness. I tried to write mainly about detail of fact and action, rather than emotions. This report became like a Christmas tree, the structure upon which I could later hang my feelings, like ornaments. I kept this diary for seven years without missing a day. It was invaluable training for recording personal detail, but also seemed the perfect assurance against slipping into a life of regret. I could refer back to it and see a clear map of the consequences of my actions.” (p. xii, Vintage, 1986) Unmarked Trail includes 150 alternating entries from our notebooks—a smorgasbord of essays, memoirs, and fictional forays. Created spontaneously but selected for drama and variety, they tell the story of our relationship (by the way we talk about other things) and of the writing practice woven into it—its hums and static, its doubts, flights, and risks. We annotate our entries to explain how a prompt was sparked and in some cases became the starting point for a longer piece. We also look back and suggest how a write may be used as a model for others. For publication, we've cleaned up syntax and filled in sketchy sections—but we've maintained the style and energy of the originals. You can view the collaboration as a postmodern novel told in fragments. Each entry stands alone and meaning gathers, as in the film technique of montage, by the proximity of one piece to another. Our perspectives are sometimes at odds, and the separate versions aren't debated. The resulting whole isn't about truth but rather unknowableness. Along the way, Laurie learns about the class variables of England, where Richard grew up during the 1950s and 1960s, and Richard meets the garmentos of Laurie's striving New York Jewish clan. Richard weathers the end of a long marriage, though he still feels bound, by affection and responsibility, to his former mate, Suzanne. Laurie leaves Manhattan to live in Arizona with a man she is only beginning to know. She must learn to recognize the signs of high and low blood sugars, for Richard is an insulin-dependant diabetic. What does each think love is? Can people reinvent themselves in their fifties and after? Ours is an uncertain love story. The stakes are high: we have jettisoned our former lives, but can these dogs learn to leap? We had no idea when we started that a book would emerge from our desire to sit across a table and write in each other's presence. Each day, we are surprised by the scenes and images that show up, knowing they would not be summoned without our rendezvous. What follows are the alternating pieces we read on September 8, 2008.
Richard A day with sugar April 25, 07, Starbucks This is one of the first pieces I wrote about “my sugars,” as I refer to my blood sugar levels. Later I used the prompts to consciously explore the subject of diabetes, something that continually floated in and out of my thoughts. I have a chronic condition but I'm not ill. Who am I in the altered mental states of low and high sugars? Not myself or, indeed , myself? Diabetics think about sugar all the time—controlling, avoiding, and knowing its value. I bite into a sandwich or eat a spoonful of rice, and right there in my mouth the process begins and I'm absorbing sugar. Blood sugar too low and I'm sweating and can't think straight. Too high, and I'm feeling nauseous and peeing every few minutes. For a long while I've had great blood sugars: no more than 160 mg per deciliter and no less than 70. But today I yearned for sugar like I hadn't since I was a kid. I bought a glazed doughnut and wolfed it in my office like, well, a wolf in the wild tasting sugar for the first time. Years ago in England I had a green lizard. Somehow, sugar was spilt into his terrarium, just a teaspoonful scattered on a rock. He came rushing down from the tree limb he lived on and licked away furiously. After that he refused his regular food of wriggling mealworms, waiting for his next sugar fix that never came. Eventually, he died of his addiction, starving to death. I was that lizard today. The donut sent my sugar soaring. When it got to 300, I took a load of insulin, but I was tempted not to. I wanted to let the substance do whatever it wanted with me, to be out of control, not have to think. I wanted to have lizard thoughts: slink around and lick things and stare with wonder at mysterious shadows looming above me. High and low sugars take your brain hostage the way fantasy does, the fantasy, for example, that your pancreas produces beta cells and insulin, although your body, in fact, does not. I left the office and tested my blood in the car. The count was still over 200. I took more insulin, and then I was no longer the lizard, making a break for freedom from the inescapable. What happened in my body has played itself out in the West's hunger for sweetness, a bloody history mixed with slavery's past and our obese present. People have been willing to sacrifice their lives and take others into bondage to maintain the supply of sugar—this compound that delivers pleasure at the same time rotting our teeth, brains, and moral compasses. Can Splenda save us? I think Splenda is implicated in my donut fix. A month or so ago I took up Laurie's habit of putting artificial sweetener in my tea. I think it created the taste, and the taste created the desire for the donut, and the desire led to today. I blame Laurie, although the lizard does not.
Laurie I wrote these prompts in April, 2008, about my mother who died last February. We didn't like each other, though we did express love. I had to care for her a lot during the last three years of her life. Foremost, she was angry and funny. What follows are two sections from a piece I wrote about her death. The first is in my voice, the second in one I imagine for her. Each was generated in a single session. Chicken My mother appeared inside a chicken instead of a gizzard, a heart, and a liver. I smelled her garlic fingers as she slipped around the bend, catching a snatch of cheekbone in gold light. In her apartment, I threw away a dozen pairs of Easy Spirit shoes, character style, with a strap across the instep. She had a thing about kosher chicken, as if it could grant her a heart for courage and a liver to chop with a hockmesser I gave to a young man who admired her things. I told people it was a relief, her dying. They said they were sorry for my loss, but I had left it at camp, in the children's playground where I watched her tail lights disappear. My mother placed chicken in a wooden bowl with little pieces of green pepper, god knows why, and chopped them almost to a paste she laced with mayonnaise from the health food store, and she said to me on more than one occasion but not often that I should eat it, and I have to tell you it was tasty. She had a dimpled smile could tame a wildebeest, really a pretty woman who read books about Russia and tides. I slipped slivers of garlic into chicken flesh I stabbed, opening little mouths and the cruelty of the knife when my mother's chest was slit and wouldn't heal and she pointed to the stitched red gash with a cockeyed grin and said, “Like a chicken.” “Like a chicken,” I said, not wanting the cut to enter, although where else could it go? I'm sorry for your loss, people said, believing something of value had been snatched away like a brilliant diamond plunging in slow motion to the bottom of the sea. They thought I had lost my love as I watched her tail lights fade, and it seemed we had parted too long ago to remember the open mouths, hers and mine, thinking who are you, our lips curving into O shapes puffed from cigars, as a strange bird was offered on a platter, done with lemon and rosemary in the Italian style, far from Odessa but really not flown at all. If I am still losing her, then I haven't lost her, and so there is no reason to be sorry for my loss. Toby afloat (My mother had open heart surgery followed by a disabling stroke, but she died, finally, of fibrosis of the lung, meaning she suffocated in her own body fluids.) “I am in my bed, and it feels like a raft being pulled behind a boat. I am flying across waves churned up in the wake, and I am afraid, but that is the element I remember as my music. I have always been alone, like everyone, but I had to take it on faith we were spun glass and hard to sever fibers. Knowledge, I can't say I acquired it, and then there is the forgetting. A crest is rising, and it's the tide of my blood. I held Primrose's hand and said I think I'm afraid, and she thought I meant of death but I was talking about life as a pink ball rolling across the sidewalks of New York. I have flown, although I didn't enjoy being weightless and feathered and so I sneezed myself back to the ground. I was told I was beautiful, but I didn't know the difference between the mirror and a blank book. That was where I wanted to end up: in a house of unmeaning. I had to laugh at the white room my mind was becoming. What use is furniture when you no longer know how to sit but hover on the verge of being an unmarked page you are finally ready to write on? Needing things was like stripping off my clothes in front of a stranger. The walls you bounce off tell you the size of your ambitions and send you racing like a little salmon to the planet where you were born. As I lay dying, I remembered my mother's voice like the anthem of my first school. I said, ‘Mama, Mama,' as if I were rocking in her wake, as if I were calling the woman who couldn't tell the difference between our smells and whom I therefore had to leave. Even as a young girl, my eyebrows knit as if seeking each other in consolation. We don't know who we are. It isn't a human capacity, so you might as well wish for a golden beak to sprout from the parrot colored feathers on your face. I liked the earth and the earth liked me until I felt myself becoming liquid inside and out.” Richard Museum study Washington, D.C., July 8, 08 When I was twelve I gave my father a small paperback, Penguin book called A Pictorial History of Nazi Germany as a birthday present. It was an odd gift as I look back now, but the Eichmann trial was being broadcast daily on television and it had revived my father's memories of the war: his time with American forces in the Battle of Bulge; of finding American troops frozen to death in a clearing in the woods, the men waiting in death with fingers still on the triggers of their rifles; of the smell of human flesh as he approached a concentration camp in a place where all the trees had died. He didn't look at the photograph book much, but I did. The pictures mingled with his stories and became my memories, and in this museum here they are again. The elevator opens, and we step out in front of a large photograph showing the silhouette of an American soldier—I can tell by the distinctive outline of the helmet—and in the background a barbed wire fence and wooden huts. Are there bodies? I cannot make it out. So the story of the Holocaust begins at its resolution, with liberation from hell. Except this is no depiction of a supernatural nether-world; it is all too human a creation. How to experience this narrative? If you are Jewish, the suffering you look upon is your own suffering, if not by direct family connection to these events then by identification with the Jewish people and its sorry history of persecution. If you are not Jewish, you may attempt to identify with the victims or see yourself as a liberator, which in the iconography of the museum is the American soldier. And if not a liberator, perhaps then you are the guilty-feeling son or daughter of a persecutor. I doubt any surviving Nazis visit this place, but you never know. Identification is offered to all. On the inside cover of the card that each visitor is invited to take with them it says, “... the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust.” On the outside cover is a crest which features the American eagle clutching an olive branch in one set of talons and a quiver's worth of arrows in the other. Above the eagle's head is a Star of David comprised of thirteen small stars. What does this denote? The thirteen colonies? Perhaps the twelve tribes of Israel, plus the USA? I've no idea. The motto, “For the dead and the living we must bear witness” curves over the eagle. This is what this national museum, which is also a national memorial, is asking us to do: bear witness by our ritual enactment of the Holocaust story. We enter a long corridor jammed with people. On both sides of the narrow passage way are documents, text panels, photographs, and film clips recording the rise of Nazi Germany from the early 1930s. The sheets of glass they are behind are tilted out to make the visitor stand back a little away and they crowd the corridor even more, There is no color here, all is a blackness broken by the white of wall texts and the gray of images. The crowd, shuffling slowly forward like a line of refugees, attempts to read every panel, something I have rarely seen in other museums this dense in text. It is as if they are expressing through their slow deliberation the seriousness with which they are embracing their role as witness. Mothers tell their impatient children to be quiet. No one pushes through the crowd, except me. I am jittery, rebellious. I wonder if we are not moving in some odd parallel to the lines of people we see in the photographs that were made to wait for their precious papers and dwindling rations. I want to push on through and not wait my turn to read the next panel. It's hard to tell if we're being herded by the natural decorum of museum going or choreographed by this museum's design. The corridor opens into a display of artifacts from Kristallnacht, when, on a single night in 1938, 2,000 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses and homes ransacked. A clear Perspex case contains a pile of ruined Torah scrolls piled up as they might have been when first thrown into the streets by marauding Nazis. This part of the exhibit—marking the moment when Nazi prejudice and persecution progressed to open brutality and destruction—shows broken and shattered remnants: part of a shop's stained glass, a broken ark, gates from a Jewish cemetery that no longer exists, the desecrated Torahs. These rescued objects foreshadow “the final solution.” We know what this devastation portends, and because of this the hurt possessions move me as strongly as the photographs I next see of prisoners lined up in a town square moments before they are to be shot. I look into the eyes of one man in a photograph who stares directly at the camera. It is like looking into some kind of dreadful mirror. There is such fear in his eyes. What does your mind do when you experience this? Maybe you become lost in a dream, or think back to a happy moment in childhood, or maybe you simply cannot comprehend that death is coming. I imagine myself frozen to the spot and frozen in time, just as he is. Perhaps a piece of newspaper skitters like a spider across the cobbled square in a gust of wind and comes to rest before blowing around the boot of a soldier with a raised rifle, and this is the last image I see. I feel the exhibit working on me despite my resistance. I understand my father's reluctance to talk about feelings that so destabilized him he all the time afterward sought protection from risk for himself and his family—feelings of fear that stifled adventure, change, and openness to strangeness. Maybe the installation intends to stir feelings of resistance to it, as well as feelings about the futility of resistance, Maybe these emotions are part of any mental visit to a time and place of utter helplessness. Laurie Goats and Mushrooms New Paltz, November 22, 2006 After I left Yaddo, I stayed with my friend, Amy, an artist, in her house in New Paltz, New York. Richard and I spoke on the phone and emailed each other furiously, but on this day Amy and I sat down to write after a walk in the woods. Amy and I saw three goats. The youngest jumped up and put his legs on the fence. He had bright eyes and a twist of black fur on his crown. He stretched his head toward me. “He's the most aggressive,” Amy said. “He wants love,” I said and rubbed his forehead, looking into eyes that met mine. The fur under his chin was green from chomping grass, and I thought about the way my dog's head smelled from perfume where I kissed him. The other goats propped their legs on the fence, and Amy said they were a family. It was obvious, but I hadn't seen it. Gray fur threaded the coats of the parents. A horn on the male was broken and the other missing. What caused the damage? The female had tawny stripes along her face, and they all had long, soft rabbity ears that curtained their faces. If we had petted them forever, they would have stayed that long. Who wouldn't? We tramped through the woods, and Amy said, “I hope you can get us back. I have no sense of direction.” I didn't care if we went astray. I was already lost from falling in love with a man I didn't know, and anyway drifting was supposed to be the point. We were hunting for something to burn for a ritual we were staging to release us into the irrational. In her studio, Amy had shown me a painting she'd done of a bull, its legs rampant and eyes looking ahead. It was stretched out without a story on a pointillist pattern above a platform of flowers. “That's where I want to go,” she'd said . . .”to the irrational. I'm setting my mind to it.” Her fish-shaped eyes became slits as she laughed. Her black bangs shimmered like a hawk's wing. We were going to set fire to something and eat magic mushrooms. In the woods, we came to a stream. Amy wondered whether we should cross it. I thought we should stay on the side we were on because of a large house in the distance that looked like it needed investigating. We looked through the fence. Two men were talking, and there was a little boy called Marley and a golden retriever called Patty. Marley's father was exceedingly handsome with a tall, athletic body and dark curly hair that stuck out of his backwards baseball cap. We said hello through the fence, and he opened the gate and let us in. He said he was a builder and that he had designed his beautiful log cabin home. His son was named after Bob Marley and his wife, a teacher, spent her days in another town. I wondered how many other curious women found themselves at the gate of the dazzling, stay-at-home dad. When Amy and I were alone, I asked if he was the kind of man she would fall for. “I think men like that won't be attracted to me,” she said. I didn't know how she could think that. I believed that everyone was attracted to her because she is lithe and stylish, but maybe she imagines she has a broken horn. We tramped through more woods until we came upon a thicket of pods exploding on dead sticks. “This is what we should burn,” we said in unison. Silky white fluff was poking out of spiky brown husks. The pods were ugly and exquisite, dead and alive, grotesque and irresistible, as if some misshapen and not quite born things were trying to emerge. We gathered several stalks, feeling already unreasoning. In the car, Amy talked about a lover she'd stayed attracted to even after she saw his movies and thought, “You are a man I want to strangle.” The women in his films could have been exploding pods, for all the sense of them he had. I was glad I was with Richard, awaiting the jack-in-the-box he would turn out to be. After dinner, Amy presented the magic mushrooms. I'd seen them in her fridge and being pretty much a drug innocent had thought of throwing them into a soup. Amy wasn't sure how much we should eat. I remembered Richard saying he'd picked magic mushrooms on the Haworth moors and closely averted a brawl with a jealous friend. The two were drinking in the pub where Branwell Brontë, ne're-do-well brother of the genius sisters, had boozed himself to death. Why was Richard's friend jealous? Were they after the same girl? Or was it that Richard had gotten himself to university after years of no-hope jobs? Maybe the friend felt the way Branwell must have, knowing that his sisters, and not he, were going into the world. I thought that if I were in Amy's place and my friend was embarked on a new romance, I would have felt depressed. I called Richard who guessed an amount we should try, and Amy placed three dried caps and a few stems on the table and broke them into powdery bits. “Just eat them,” she said, sounding like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland . I popped an earthy-smelling morsel into my mouth without fear. Once I'd decided to jump off something, I usually followed through. The mushroom didn't taste bad. We divvied up the pile and ate our shares, licking dust from our fingers. Amy played a “Talking Heads” CD, and the stoned feeling came over us. We made a list of intentions to ignite along with the pods. We would be softer, welcome in more joy, offer more of ourselves to the world. “Fat chance,” I thought about myself. We placed the list and the pods in a ceramic bowl and put it on the floor of Amy's studio. She lit a match and as the pods flared up we danced around, Amy's taut, strong body twisting and jutting gracefully. I thought she was gorgeous, and I felt in love with everything. She said we needed to eat more mushrooms. She wanted colors to be more vivid, sounds more intense, her senses opened like awnings over shops. We ate a few more pieces and an hour later felt very high. Amy said that being with people was difficult and so was being alone. I agreed. She said her sadness was as old as her memories, or nearly so, and we looked into the crater of it standing at its lip. We were walking on the moon, and the crater turned into a sea lapped by wavelets, and we could see the earth in the water's reflection. White tailed deer drank at the edge and dead rocks grew a layer of velvety moss with the geometry of snow flakes. Larger growth spilled upwards from the land. Heavy trees arose entwined with glossy leaves that we could see ourselves in. I felt that the beautiful strangeness was rising off Amy. The next morning she cried cutting vegetables that she was taking to Thanksgiving dinner. I felt like a goat with my feet on a fence. While I was sleeping, she'd taken a yoga class and run into a former student who was an art teacher, now, herself. They'd embraced, and the student had said that two of her friends had just been remembering what a marvelous teacher Amy was and that, separately, they'd used the same words to describe her. “What did they say?” “I didn't ask,” Amy said, surprised, though whether at herself or my question I couldn't tell. “It would have been indiscrete. She would have told me if she'd wanted me to know.” How could she not ask? Richard My first America Starbucks, April, 2007 Inside me is a jazz record, a spinning disc of vinyl, the sound loose as a bead of mercury in a warm palm, slippy and jumping in America. Where is that? I don't know, only that it's where jazz comes from. It's 1955, and I am five. The war is ten years over, but there's still rationing of coal, and the objects that fill homes are more reminiscent of the 1920s and ‘30s than the new designs of the ‘50s. Just about every terraced house in Bury has a small front parlor where, in pride of place, stands a gramophone. Times are tight, so most of the players are wind up cabinets; only the posh can afford electric pickups. Uncle Freddie instructs me on how to crank the arm, place the heavy shellac disk on the green baize turntable, adjust the speed to “fast”—roughly 78 rpm—and gently lower the heavy-headed needle onto the record that is spinning crazily. It clunks into the groove, and then by a miracle of physics I don't understand music pours brightly into the stiff and dark room. I'm beside myself with pleasure. It's my first altered brain state, if you don't count trucking down the birth canal and I don't because it didn't have a sound track apart from my yowling. John Cage might have considered it music but I don't. At five I am all about jazz and jazz is about the mercury blob of my rhythms. I play each short song over and over. At the end, the needle skates around in the center of the disc, clicking impatiently to be changed. The music available to me is of two main types: Uncle Freddie's novelty songs and my dad's collection of mainly American big-band jazz. Many of Dad's records have been picked up during the war he's spent in Europe, including serving with Patton's US troops. The novelty tunes are sung by George Formby and Gracie Fields. George plays ukulele and sings comic ditties with a northern nasal twang, the songs punctuated with his famous catch phrase, “Turned out nice again.” Gracie sings “I'm a Lassie from Lancashire,” layering in high-soprano trills. But it's the jazz and swing records I dedicate myself to and that send me to a secret place inside myself I think of as America: Ellington's “Take the A train,” Basie's “One O'clock Jump,” Arty Shaw's “Deep Purple,” Glenn Miller's “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree.” I memorize the words without the slightest sense of their meaning. On the B-side of “Take the A Train,” is “At a Dixie Roadside Diner . ” I have no idea where Dixie is, what a diner is, or why it's on the roadside, but I love this place in America because it swings with cool and sophistication that beckon me. In order to liberate the house from my constant playing and to dispose of the gramophone cabinet which has developed a case of wood worm, Freddie places the guts of the contraption in a cardboard box and sets me up in the alley at the back of his terraced house. I stack the records in their deco-designed paper sleeves against the outhouse and proceed to play jazz to anyone who happens by, plus a few dogs that are sniffing about. Adults on the way to the pub smile and shake their heads, while the kids look on embarrassed for the child playing weird music for no conceivable reason. After a while, even the dogs shuffle off looking bored. And there I am in the back streets of Bury, Lancashire, playing Duke Ellington to an indifferent world. I drag the box from one end of Hulme Street to the other until the bottom frays away and Freddie comes by and says in that broad Lancashire dialect that will die with him, “Thy needs ‘tuther box our Bud.” And he brings me one and I play the songs day after day after day as long as the boxes last. AUTHOR BIOS LAURIE STONE Laurie Stone is author of the novel Starting with Serge (Doubleday), the memoir collection Close to the Bone (Grove), and Laughing in the Dark (Ecco), a collection of her writing on comic performance. A longtime writer for the Village Voice (1975-99), she has been theater critic for The Nation, critic-at-large on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, a member of The Bat Theater Company, and a regular writer for Ms., New York Woman, and Viva. She has received grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kittredge Foundation, Yaddo, MacDowell, Saltonstall, Djerassi, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Poets & Writers, and in 1996 she won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle. She has published numerous memoir essays in such publications as Ms., TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, Threepenny Review, Speakeasy, and Creative Nonfiction. Her short fiction and nonfiction appears in the anthologies The Other Woman (2007), Best New Writing of 2007, It's So You ( 2007), Full Frontal Fiction (Crown, 2000) and Money, Honey (Deutscher Tashenbuch Verlag, 2000). She has given readings in dozens of venues, including The 92nd Street Y, Dixon Place, The Poetry Project, Barnes & Noble, KGB, The National Arts Club, and The New School. She has served as writer-in-residence at Pratt Institute, Old Dominion University, Thurber House, and Muhlenberg College. She has been on the faculty and taught creative writing workshops at Fairleigh Dickinson, Chapman University, Antioch University, Sarah Lawrence, Ohio State University, Fordham University, Stonecoast Writers' Conference, The Paris Writers Workshop, and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has had short residencies at many other universities, including CalArts, Trinity College, The University of North Texas, ArtCenter in Pasadena, Mills College, Indiana University, University of Connecticut, Yale University, and School of the Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. She served on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle and in 2005 participated in "Novel: An Installation," living in a house designed by the architecture firm Salazar Davis and working on a novel in Flux Factory's gallery space. Last spring she was included in the "Living Writers Series" at Muhlenberg College. She is currently at work on My Life as an Animal, a Memoir in Stories and Unmarked Trail: a Romance in Stories and a Guide to Setting up a Writing Partnership in collaboration with Richard Toon. RICHARD TOON Richard was born in England in 1950 and has kept a notebook since he was fourteen when a teacher taught him to write poetry and to jot down thoughts and observations. He left school at fifteen with a poetry prize and held a variety of mind-numbing jobs before entering Leeds University at age twenty-six to study philosophy and religion. After marrying for the third time in 1984, he moved to Manhattan where he worked for the city on criminal justice issues. He moved to Phoenix in 1994 to work in an interactive science center and several years later earned a Ph.D. in museum studies from Leicester University. Since 2004, he has worked as a senior research analyst at The Morrison Institute, a social policy think tank at Arizona State University , producing original research on, among other topics, the public's understanding of science, domestic violence, and trust of the police. He has taught courses on museum studies, published several book chapters in the field, and written a number of journal articles about how meaning is constructed in museum galleries as well as how space is interpreted wherever there are signs—pointing out a mountain view or warning you not to tread on the grass. In 2006, he was awarded a residency at the artist colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he worked on Pictures at an Exhibition, an essay collection including stories of an English boyhood and meditations on jumping across classes and cultures. He is currently at work on My Life as an Animal, a Memoir in Stories and Unmarked Trail: a Romance in Stories and a Guide to Setting up a Writing Partnership in collaboration with Laurie Stone. |
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