I posted a piece of flash fiction on Wattpad–a rumination on lookism and the fashion industry.
Dream Paralysis or the residue of nightmares
For the past month or so, I have had some vividly disturbing dreams, mostly due to a prescription drug that I am taking. The nightmarish atmosphere of this dreams appeals to my taste. One dream was about a movie starring Meryl Streep and Sally Field, who are ghosts watching over their husbands. Streep and Field both fall in love with each other. That is one of the more coherent dreams. Mostly, the dreams are collections of images that star people from my life, and are set in bizarre landscapes, such as a city of subterranean canals, or an Arctic tundra. It is a treat, to enter a world as rich and surreal as any film by Bunuel, Lynch or Peter Greenaway.
But there is a downside. These dreams are often full of suspense. Either something is chasing me (or my avatars), or there is a fight—mostly verbal, sometimes physical. At such junctures, I become acutely aware that I am dreaming, but I can’t wake up. It’s a kind of dream paralysis. The line between real and illusion is blurred. One time, I woke up and saw a boy-shaped shadow run right past my bed. Another time, the alien person I’d been watching turned to me and revealed his true, awesome appearance. He told me that he knew that I was watching him, and that I would never wake up. I did wake up, saying, “You’re real! You’re real!”
I will discuss this with my doctor. However, I must admit that I will be slightly disappointed if I have to discontinue the prescription.
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Screenshot of my presskit
My friend Michael Kirshner has designed a 2-page Presskit for me. It’s still a work in progress, but I thought I would share.
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BOOK REVIEW: In The Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss. Postmodern Gothic fairytales.
Since my colleague Theodora Goss announced a new ebook edition of her debut collection, In The Forest of Forgetting, I thought I’d share the review I did when the book was first released.
These delicately crafted, literary fantasies draw from Victorian morality stories and fairytales. The language is spare and considered, the tone dry spiked with mordant humor. Goss discreetly and elegantly updates the Gothic tale for postmodern times. Her “Emily Gray” stories concern a governess who grants children’s deepest wishes, at a terrible price. Three of the Emily Gray tales are here. The title story turns a breast cancer patient’s life into a magical fable. Other stories take place in Budapest, and have a flavor of Central European magical realism (“The Rapid Advance of Sorrow”), while “A Rose in Twelve Petals” fractures Sleeping Beauty into twelve different view points, including that of the spinning wheel that pricks the princess. Goss’s stories have dark themes, but she is too graceful a writer to be considered Gothic in the classic sense. Her painterly, humorous characters come alive, and her fantastical ideas are grounded in her character’s psyches.
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Craig’s Adventures at the OutWrite Book Festival 2013
I had a wonderful time at the OutWrite Book Festival this year. The festival took place in the Reeves Center at 14th and U Streets. I took a picture of the beautiful mobiles that hang over the main hall. I was on the Young Adult/New Adult panel with two other authors–Brian Centrone (pictured) and Brittany Fonte (pictured). I stuck around afterwards to listen to various readings and panels, and I bought a copy of Tom Cardamone’s new anthology, The Lavender Menace: Tales of Queer Villany (pictured). I got to meet author Richard McCann (pictured) and legendary Violet Quill author Andrew Holleran(pictured).
The best part? My 82-year old mother came to hear me read! How cool is that?
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BOOK REVIEW: Ice by Anna Kavan. Interior landscapes cast in ice.
Ice by Anna Kavan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Kafka cavorts with Plath in this post-apocalyptic novel by the late Anna Kavan. A thermonuclear device has been detonated, and the world slowly awaits its fate as the planet freezes. In this new Ice Age, a nameless narrator searches for the girl he loves. But this isn’t just another version of love among the ruins. The imminent destruction of the world has set in motion the erosion of civilization. Random acts of violence and mass hysteria take over the cities, as the icebergs creep closer. The tragicomic game of political conquest takes place, starting in Scandinavia, led by the vainglorious character called the Warden. The narrator must vie with the Warden for possession of the girl, whom the Warden has abducted. The relationship between the narrator and the girl is not healthy in the least. He views her contemptuously, as a born victim, and believes that only he has a right to brutalize her. The girl herself–with her white-blonde hair and fragility, is a study in passive-aggression. She can be downright cruel. Several times during the novel, the anti-hero leaves her, only to take up the search again. The two men fight over the girl, without actual care for her; she is merely a pretty prop on which hang their aggressions and neuroses. It mirrors the futility of the political games, where the various powers vie to gain power over a dying world. There is a Kafkaesque sense of absurdity, along with that author’s existential despair of humankind’s folly.
These psychodramas take place amid a surrealistic, nightmare landscape. Kavan’s images of the encroaching ice are beautiful and deadly. It’s reminiscent (and perhaps even inspired) the arctic cover art of Radiohead’s ‘Kid A.’ The hallucinatory intensity might be due to Kavan’s drug use. Born Helen Ferguson, Kavan legally changed her name to a
character in one of her novels. She suffered severe depression and self-medicated with heroin, eventually becoming an addict. Like Plath or Sexton, Kavan uses bouts of depression to create brutal, enigmatic images. Her characters in this book are forces of nature themselves. The eternal war between the sexes is illuminated unsparingly–at odds with her delicate, mannered prose. ICE appears to document Kavan’s
brilliant, if unsettling interior landscape.
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LISTEN: Hear me (Craig Gidney) reading from a work in progress–“Gone With The Dust.”
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BOOK REVIEW: Distortion by Stephen Beachy. Queer Surrealism.
Distortion by Stephen Beachy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The second novel by Stephen Beachy is a paradox: it’s a difficult novel that’s easy to read. A loosely structured, Altman-esque book, it follows the adventures of Reggie, a young, biracial, speed-addicted hustler, and the demimonde surrounding him. The novel follows him from L.A., where he becomes a huge MTV star-cipher, to Florida. Along the way, we drop into the lives of his friends and families, perennial flies on the wall. Most of the characters are disenfranchised in one way or another–gay, poor, or ethnic minorities; they are not the usual denizens of complex, experimental novels.
In this way, it recalls Samuel Delany’s epic novel Dhalgren. The quirky characters, which include a wandering punk-rock poet, a video-producer dying of AIDS, a woman who works with abandoned kids among others, are sharply delineated. The shifts in locale and points-of-view is often dizzying; it resembles both the frantic editing of a music video, and more encyclopedic activity of hypertext links. Woven into these densely interior vignettes are hallucinations and dreams sequences of the various narrators. At times, it’s impossible to see where the “real” fictive world end and thedrug-and-dream-induced imagined parts begin. Part ofit has to do with Beachy’s trademark drunken wordplay. The man is incapable of producing an uninteresting sentence. The imagery is always startling, the syntax and rhythms seductive. It is his verbal facility, more than anything, which provides the novel what structure it has. Somehow Beachy is able to create intense character-driven fiction, and rich phantasmorgia simultaneously. His authorial voices–at once hip, goofy, and scary–waxes philosophically about love, family, film and video theory, sexual abuse and race. This novel is not for everyone–the barrage of images can lean toward the extremely sexual and the disturbing. But those who opt to follow Reggie and his friends on their journeys will be moved. Imagine the trenchant social-realist fiction of Susan Straight or Jess Mowry thrown into a blender with the elegiac, drug-fueled fabulations of Philip K. Dick, and Distortion might be the product.
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EVENT REMINDER: I’ll be on the Young Adult Panel at the OutWrite Festival.
I’d love to see you there!
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Snapshot of my current work-in-progress!
Craig Laurance Gidney 
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