Bowen Ames, Lyric Essayist
Added on:
July 1, 2007
Location:
United States, New York, Brooklyn
Language:
n/a
Categories:
Creative Writing, Entertainment, Feminism, Journal, Linguistics, New Age, Performance Art, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing/Publishing
Rating:
Site Description:
"The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all of the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that 'none of this ever really happened' that a fiction writer daily wakes to. One can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that “it’s just fiction,” a vacuous but prevalent dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. The lyric essay is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from a reader at the outset. In fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it is apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know. The implied secret here is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then do whatever you very well please." -Ben Marcus, The Believer
