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WORK TITLE: Betwixt-and-Between
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/8/1976
WEBSITE: http://www.jennyboully.com/p/authors-bio.html
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 8, 1976, in Korat, Thailand; married; children: one daughter.
EDUCATION:Hollins University, B.A, M.A.; University of Notre Dame, M.F.A.; and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, essayist, and educator. Columbia College Chicago, creative writing instructor; Bennington College, creative writing instructor.
AWARDS:Best Book of New Poetry Published in 2006, Best Second Book award, and Best Book-Length Poem award, Coldfront magazine.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including The Next American Essay, 2003, The Best American Poetry, and Great American Prose Poems; From Poe to the Present, 2008, and Language for a New Century, 2008. Contributor to magazines and periodicals, including Conjunctions, Boston Review, Seneca Review, Puerto del Sol, and Tarpaulin Sky.
SIDELIGHTS
Jenny Boully is a writer, poet, essayist, and educator. She was born in Thailand, but grew up in Texas. She has contributed to journals and literary magazines such as Boston Review, Conjunctions, and Seneca review, and her work has been included in books such as The Best American Poetry and The Next American Essay. She is a creative writing instructor at Columbia College Chicago and at Bennington College. Boully holds a B.A. in English and philosophy and an M.A. in English criticism and writing from Hollins University, an M.F.A. with poetry concentration from the University of Notre dame, and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
In an interview with Mack Curry IV in the periodical Barely South Review, Boully offered some advice that would be applicable to writers at any stage in their creative pursuits. “I think we should always mean it. Always mean it. Don’t write it if you don’t mean it and if you won’t defend it. Know that you will defend it. Someday, someone, even if it’s just a peer in workshop, will want you to defend it. Mean it wholeheartedly, and write as if you were dying. Remind yourself that you are indeed dying. So waste no time in writing it down and meaning it wholeheartedly.”
The Body
“Boully’s work is known for its experimental verve . . . and hybrid status,” commented a writer on the Poetry Foundation website. The Body, Boully’s first book, was the volume that earned her reputation as a daring and experimental writer. Here, Boully “has invented an elaborately footnoted text on absence, love, ontology and identity—minus the text,” observed Arielle Greenberg, writing in Jacket. The entire work is presented in footnote form, with the text that the footnotes refers to conspicuously missing, leaving mostly blank pages. “Some of the most clever moments in the book are meta-manifestations of the missing text,” Greenberg noted.
A footnote that says someone always answered “no comment” to a particular question creates provocative meaning even as the reader wonders what the text may contain and what the question was. Greenberg further remarked, “This is a sustained, intricate project, concerned with profound issues and riddled with fine gems of language and insight.”
The Book of Beginnings and Endings
The Book of Beginnings and Endings lives up to its title, presenting the beginnings and endings of some thirty texts, put together in a way that makes their presentation look random. On each odd-numbered page the text begins, and on the next even-numbered page, the text ends. The texts cover disparate topics, from zoology to mathematical probability to a man’s retirement to an infestation of frogs.
The book “It resists all expectation—for the reader, the page, the editor, and all attempts to categorize, generalize or make a speech about it,” commented Diagram contributor Nicole Walker. The structure suggests to the reader that there is no consistency, no solidity, and that coping with all the beginnings and endings in one’s life takes an ability to fall without fear. Whole narratives, needing the middles, are built a piece at a time, until meaning and relevance are constructed.
Betwixt-and-Between
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life contains nineteen essays on multiple aspects of writing poetry, prose, and nonfiction. The styles are mixed: prose poetry, fragments, and essays, but they seek to instruct and inspire students while also seeking out the places where the personal makes it way into writing. The author finds space to talk about important emotional situations that can boost a writer’s work. She discusses her own background as a multiracial individual growing up in the United States. She considers the effects of falling in love and dealing with the devastation that comes after a breakup. She helps her students better understand genre and how genre will naturally have limits. She describes the inevitable tension between beginnings and endings. And, ultimately, she gives the reader new insight into writing and the role it can play in any life.
In Betwixt-and-Between, Boully “gracefully explores her personal and professional defiance of categorization,” remarked Newcity Lit contributor Kate Burns. “Fellow practitioners of literary nonfiction will find Boully’s writing relatable and charming,” noted a contributor to Publishers Weekly. A Kirkus Reviews writer called the work “Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.” Agnes Donnadieu, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, called Betwixt-and-Between a “powerful demonstration of writing as life, but of the ways that lived experiences can illuminate and transform writing.”
[one love affair]*
[one love affair]* is a collection of Boully’s prose poems, divided into three sections. “More than a series of discrete prose poems, Boully’s book feels like a novel in verse (in prose). Its project is ambitious,” commented Open Letters Monthly reviewer Elisa Gabbert. In a text that is interrupted frequently with asterisks, roman numerals, and other marks, Boully tells the story of the titular love affair while also working to “outline a theory of how we read and construct new texts from our readings, which parallels the way we learn to love and love again. Remarkably, Boully’s fluid, lyrical writing makes what could be a difficult, intimidating read instead a delightful one,” Gabbert stated. The three sections of the book involve the two participants in the affair, singly as “he,” “she,” “you,” and “I,” and follows the ways these impressions of self come together, exist, and then come apart.
“The individual pieces don’t necessarily connect to each other as they emerge from various sources and project Boully’s narratives into a multiplicity of directions. What ties the disparate narratives together is Boully’s unique prose style,” commented Craig Santos Perez on the Rattle website. “In Boully’s writing, there are no beginnings or endings; instead, we are presented with impressions, threads, and flashes of narrative,” Perez further commented.
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them
In not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them, “Boully blends the real and the imaginary to create her take on the Peter Pan story,” observed Erin Lyndal Martin in Coldfront. “The book is an explosion of formal experiments akin to Boully’s other works,” Martin continued.
Though the story is presented as a dark reinterpretation of the story of Peter Pan and Wendy, it more accurately “offers perspective on what the fairy tale ruins in Wendy and how the slippery perma-innocent Peter conquers his foe. No victory trumps forgetting, if one is remembered,” remarked Jacket2 website contributor Amy Wright.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life.
Los Angeles Times, December 23, j2007, Susan Salter Reynolds, “Discoveries,” review of The Book of Beginnings and Endings.
Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 13, 2018, Tobias Carroll, review of Betwixt-and-Between.
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of Betwixt-and-Between, p. 66.
ONLINE
Barely South Review, http://www.barelysouthreview.com/ (June 20, 2018), Mack Curry IV, “An Interview with Jenny Boully.”
Chicago Review of Books website, http://www.chireviewofbooks.com/ (May 14, 2018), Adam Morgan, “Jenny Boully Wrote a Book by Accident,” interview with Jenny Boully.
Coldfront, http://www.coldfrontmag.com/ (July 13, 2012), Erin Lyndal Martin, “Spotlight: Jenny Boully,” interview with Jenny Boully.
Diagram, http://www.thediagram.com/ (June 20, 2018), Nicole Walker, review of The Book of Beginnings and Endings.
Jacket, http://www/jacketmagazine.com/ (October 1, 2002), Arielle Greenberg, review of The Body.
Jacket2, https://www.jacket2.org. (January 20, 2012), Amy Wright, “Woo,” review of not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them.
Jenny Boully website, http://www.jennyboully.com (June 20, 2018).
Newcity Lit, https://lit.newcity.com/ (April 11, 2018 ), Kate Burns, review of Betwixt-and-Between.
Open Letters Monthly, https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (March 1, 2007), Elisa Gabbert, review of [one love affair]*.
Poetry Foundation website, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (June 20, 2018), biography of Jenny Boully.
Rattle, https://www.rattle.com/ (March 1, 2009), Craig Santos Perez, review of [one love affair]*.
Jenny Boully
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Jenny Boully (born 1976) is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books, 2007), The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions, 2002 and Essay Press, 2007), and [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in literary magazines such as Boston Review, Conjunctions, Puerto del Sol, Seneca Review, and Tarpaulin Sky and has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American Poetry, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. Born in Korat, Thailand and reared in San Antonio, Texas, she has studied at Hollins University and the University of Notre Dame and is currently working on her PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.[1] [2] [3]
Boully's first book, The Body, sold out of its first printing [4] and was re-issued by Essay Press [5] in 2007. A groundbreaking use of form, described by American poet and critic Arielle Greenberg as a "text on absence, love, ontology and identity—minus the text," the content of The Body is delivered only in footnotes, while the usual "body" of work is missing. Comparing it to Thalia Field's Point and Line, Greenberg praised The Body as "an invigorating new approach to the idea of a text, of fiction, of essay, of poetry collection," signaling a "courageous and thoughtful new voice in literature." [6]
[one love affair]*, Boully's second book, was nominated for five awards and won two (Best Book of New Poetry Published in 2006, and Best Second Book) from Coldfront Magazine.[7] "Through three sections rife with asterisks and superscript roman numerals," using a mixture of fiction, essay, prose poetry, and memoir,[8] [one love affair]* "challenges the ways in which we construct narratives and read texts," [9] as it "wends a story of broken relationships, deploying everything from mimosa trees and spring to nightclubs and crack-smoke,"[10] and explores " the way we learn to love and love again."[8]
Boully's third collection, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, "consists of beginnings and endings of more than 30 different texts, spliced together seemingly at random. The subject matter ranges wildly: invertebrate zoology, probability, the psychology of a scream, the retirement of an ice cream man, a plague of frogs. Slowly, the reader notices thematic connections and the shadow of a narrative arc."[11] As with Boully's previous collections, The Book of Beginnings and Endings accrues meaning and import through "use of association, rather than spelled-out narrative." It "resembles poetry. The texts themselves are essayistic, except that they are all fictional."[11] A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times focused on another shared element in all of Boully's books--love, the affair of love, its beginning and it ending: "Like Anaïs Nin, Boully believes exclusively in love; it's her religion." On the relationship between this author and her readers, the reviewer added: It's uncommonly good to read the work of a writer who believes so unabashedly in the miracle of writing—that some dimension, unlike any other, exists between the writer and the reader; that literature is an 'open system,' a 'living system.'"[12]
Works[edit]
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, Tarpaulin Sky Press; 1st paperback edition (June 15, 2011)
The Body: An Essay, Essay Press (March 1, 2007)
Moveable Types, Noemi Press; 1st edition (January 1, 2007)
The Book of Beginnings and Endings, Sarabande Books (November 1, 2007)
One Love Affair, Tarpaulin Sky Press; 1st paperback edition (April 24, 2006)
An Interview with Jenny Boully [Interview]
by Mack Curry IV
Question 1: What inspired you to do creative writing?
I think I have always had a tendency towards quiet. As a child I was extremely lonely and introverted. I can’t say that these qualities have sloughed off in my adult life. Writing was the way to make the inner world tangible. I was often overlooked and ignored and creative writing was a way to stand out and be unique even if there was no audience.
Question 2: I see that you’ve written poetry, fiction, and nonfiction work. Have you had any issues with writing in any of the three genres?
I think the only issue I’ve had with varying genres is knowing exactly how to pinpoint any piece of writing when it came to submission or publication time. Much of my work is a combination of all three of these genres, but I do have much work that can be clearly demarcated. For more than a decade now, I have mostly identified as an essayist, but I don’t think the literary world sees me as such. For most readers, I am considered a poet, and I suppose that’s fine. I just have had a difficult time teaching or relating to poetry lately. I write fiction mainly because it’s so freeing and I tend to embody personas rather obsessively. When it comes to writing, I tend to just surrender to whatever mode I’m embodying. Sometimes there is the need to explain or expound, sometimes to dream or imagine–whatever the need, I always strive to accomplish the work with poetic graces and let the language lead.
Question 3: Who are some of your influences?
I have loved deeply at one time or another or presently: Roland Barthes, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Kathy Acker, Lawrence Sterne, Emerson, Cervantes, J.M. Barrie, Nabokov, Susan Sontag, Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, Jeannette Winterson, Heraclitus, and many others.
Question 4: Since you received your MFA in poetry, what motivated you to write fiction and nonfiction work as well?
I attended Hollins University as an undergrad. We were encouraged to write in all genres, and our workshops weren’t demarcated. We were expected to be good critics of not only our main genre, but all literary genres. It was freeing and exciting. I tied myself mainly to poetry then, and I was quite intense about it. But towards the end of my MA year there, I began to write prose poetry. I then began work on my first book, The Body: An Essay, the summer before starting the MFA in poetry at the University of Notre Dame. Moving in an MFA was a strange experience to me, especially as I was already writing in prose by then but having that prose workshopped in a poetry MFA course. I just wasn’t interested in line breaks with the same intensity I had before. I wasn’t interested in the line anymore. I was on the trail of something else. That said, my experience learning poetry in an MFA program was amazing and heavily scholarly. I learned how to be a good student. It was great preparation for my Ph.D.
Question 5: What advice would you give to other poets who want to explore writing in different genres?
I would say that poetry could be sublimated into oneself. It should never be abandoned. Language should be the guide in whatever new literary foray one undertakes. Read: learn the pulse and rhythms and syntax of other minds.
Question 6: What advice would you give to up and coming creative writers as a whole?
I think we should always mean it. Always mean it. Don’t write it if you don’t mean it and if you won’t defend it. Know that you will defend it. Someday, someone, even if it’s just a peer in workshop, will want you to defend it. Mean it wholeheartedly, and write as if you were dying. Remind yourself that you are indeed dying. So waste no time in writing it down and meaning it wholeheartedly. Don’t think about some “reader.” Don’t think about people you know. Don’t go after perfection. That’s a dead-end, a trap. As Ruskin reminds, we’re meant to be imperfect, and that makes us beautiful.
***
Jenny Boully is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande), not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press). Born in Thailand and raised in Texas, she holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY-Graduate Center. She lives in Chicago with her family and teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.
Mack Curry IV is from Bowie, Maryland. He graduated from Hampton University in 2013 with a B.A. in English. Currently, Mack is first-year MFA student in poetry at ODU and he works as a Teacher Assistant at New Horizons Regional Education Centers in Newport News, VA.
Jenny Boully is the author of of two Tarpaulin Sky titles, [one love affair]* and not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, as well as of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon (Coconut Books), The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, first published by Slope Editions). Her chapbook of prose, Moveable Types, was released by Noemi Press. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Next American Essay, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and other places. Born in Thailand, Jenny was reared in Texas by parents who farm and fish. She attended Hollins University, where she double majored in English and philosophy and then went on to earn her MA in English Criticism and Writing. At the University of Notre Dame, she earned an MFA with a poetry concentration. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Jenny lives in Chicago, Illinois with her husband and daughter and teaches at Columbia College Chicago.
Jenny Boully is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande, 2007), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006), The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, 2007 and Slope Editions, 2002), and the chapbook Moveable Types (Noemi Press, 2007). Her work has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American Poetry, Language for a New Century, and Great American Prose Poems. Born in Thailand and reared in Texas, she teaches nonfiction and poetry at Columbia College Chicago.
Jenny Boully was born in Thailand and grew up in Texas. She earned a BA and an MA at Hollins University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Notre Dame, and a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of a prose chapbook, Moveable Types (2007), and her full-length collections of poetry include The Body: An Essay (2002, 2007); [one love affair]* (2006), which won the Best Book-Length Poem award from Coldfront; The Book of Beginnings and Endings (2007); and not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (2011). Boully’s work is known for its experimental verve—her first book was composed of footnotes but no body text—and hybrid status; her work frequently mixes elements of poetry, prose, fiction, and essay and has been anthologized in The Next American Essay (2003), Great American Prose Poems (2008), and Language for a New Century (2008). Boully teaches at Columbia College-Chicago and lives in Chicago with her family.
Jenny Boully is the author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life (Coffee House Press). Her previous books include not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky Press), The Books of Beginnings and Endings: Essays (Sarabande Books), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press), of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures (Coconut Books), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, first published by Slope Editions). Her chapbook of prose, Moveable Types, was released by Noemi Press. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The Next American Essay, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, and other places. Born in Thailand, she was reared in Texas. She attended Hollins University, where she double majored in English and philosophy and then went on to earn her MA in English Criticism and Writing. At the University of Notre Dame, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing with a poetry concentration. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and at Bennington College's MFA in Writing program.
Spotlight: Jenny Boully
features, interviews | Friday, July 13th, 2012
Interview by Erin Lyndal Martin
“If she lays out two spoons (two real spoons) and two forks (two real forks), will he come then to take part in a meal that is wholly imaginary? And so begins Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky Press). In this volume, Boully blends the real and the imaginary to create her take on the Peter Pan story. The book is an explosion of formal experiments akin to Boully’s other works, including The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande), [one love affair*] (Tarpaulin Sky) and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press). Boully has a book, of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon forthcoming from Coconut Books. She has also recently written an essay collection on ghosts, longing, love, and the afterlife entitled If you point to heaven, it begins. So too is not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them full of loss and ghosts—a loss of innocence, one J. M. Barrie would never have conceived of, permeates in a book of dizzying syntax and alternating minimalist and ornate language.
ELM: I want to ask you first about form since you’re someone who embraces so many varieties of representation. At what point does form enter your compositional process?
JB: I feel that form is somewhat of an afterthought. For me, the content is always in the foreground–it’s language, the glimmer of a scene, a suggestion of a sentence that comes first, but form does not linger too far behind. I was only twenty footnotes in before I dreamt up the form of the blank pages in The Body. Form and composition seem inseparable to me. Form, although an afterthought that lingers closely behind content, begins, once established, to propel the content. The form then becomes metaphorical, a trope that can be examined within and alongside the content. The implications begin to resound, and I find myself writing towards form.
ELM: On the subject of form, I have to ask about “The Home Under Ground.”
Did you write this along with the rest of the text, or did it come in at a different time. Also, how do you see the two as functioning (or dysfunctioning) together?
JB: For not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, I think I was only about five or so pages in before I began to envision the Home Under Ground as a textual place and not merely a place in J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy where the Lost Boys congregated. In my textual place, it became a place to meditate on Wendy’s impending adulthood and death. I like thinking about the main text and the Home Under Ground having a, as you suggest, “dysfunctional” relationship. The children want make-believe to last forever, but the bisected page creates a tension there. Make-believe does not last forever, the page says. There is something waiting to replace, to consume, to lay a cloak over the days of play and make-believe. The dreaming life will be eradicated. Wendy grows up and dies. A love story does not develop. Death and decay await. The playroom is revealed as a crypt, the love bed a coffin.
ELM: Do you feel like your text is an alternate telling of Barrie’s original or simply an alternate reading?
JB: I love to read too closely, to misread, to read between the lines, to leave myself open to generous interpretations of a text, to allow daydreaming and memory and thoughts to invade the text. My book [one love affair]* was an attempt to capture this type of “reading” that I do. I like to think of my book as this type of reading; so, yes, you could say that it is in some way the original reading of Barrie with the darker underside undone and revealed. But, as my own tidbits of memory and longing and digression do invade the text, it’s my own daydream more than anything.
ELM: To follow up on that question, did you write Wendy and Peter the way you see them when you think of the original text, or did you ask yourself to consider an alternate perception? How would you characterize your Wendy and your Peter?
JB: My writing process felt very incantatory, as if I were channeling. I know that sounds a little hocus-pocus-y, but, at the time, I felt as if I was doing very little of the work, as if the writing was streaming effortlessly out of me. So I didn’t really spend a lot of time trying to create characters or trying to mold Peter and Wendy into some idea I had of them. I did, however, spend a lot of time researching prior to writing the book. I read much criticism on Barrie’s works, several of Barrie’s earlier writings, and biographies. I think I internalized Barrie’s struggles with love and the dreaming life alongside my own struggles with love and the dreaming life. In the text, it is my story, more than Peter and Wendy’s that I wrote. Wendy wants to love, to be loved, to mother, to have children, to have the dream of domesticity–a baby, a good husband, knitting, a lit fireplace. For Wendy, love, in it’s uncomplicated and pure sense, that is, love that lasts a lifetime, is an adventure. For Peter, love is something that you can cast on and off, pick up and discard; Peter wants a domestic sphere, but he wants to leave it, too. He enjoys Wendy’s dreams only in so far as he can leave it when he sees fit.
ELM: The title comes from the original text, and it’s intriguing, but it was obviously a risky choice for a title. What other titles did you consider, and what ultimately led you to choose this one?
JB: I actually didn’t have any other ideas for a title: this was the one phrase in Barrie’s work that has always thrilled me and haunted me to no end. An unknown stalking toward children as the dark approaches–it’s sinister and rings true to me. Like Barrie, I mourn childhood and its magic and its endless days and dreaming and feel quite out of sorts in my adult life. So I knew this was the title, absolutely and completely.
ELM: Were there other myths or fairy tales that influenced your research?
JB: When I was writing the book, I was actually in the midst of doing research for and writing my Ph.D. dissertation, a dissertation that was ultimately titled “Enchantment and Entrapment: Nympholepsy and the Cult of the Girl Child.” Direct or no, my research at the time most likely found some entry into the book. In addition to Barrie’s Wendy Darling, I also wrote on Lewis Carroll’s Alice Liddell, Henry Darger’s Girls, and Nabokov’s Lolita. Ancient Greek nymph narratives were a factor that drove my research–trying to see the correlations between ancient Greek nymphs and nympholepsy as I saw it played out in more recent literatures. I wanted to draw a distinction, however controversial, between pedophilia and nympholepsy.
ELM: I want to talk about the voice and the language that you use. There are moments when the syntax seems intentionally awkward, and the language is more ornamented than sparse. To what end to these qualities work?
JB: I love disrupted or unexpected syntax. I love how a sentence delivers something expected as a result of this disruption or simply doesn’t deliver at all. Some early readers of my book suggested that I play down the repetitions, which infuse the text, but I decided not to, although I could see why such repetitions could become tiresome after a while. I love writing that is ornate, full of artifice, full of the unnecessary, existing solely because of its own joy. Because I was writing this type of book, that is, a book in which most of the writing is spoken through the thoughts of characters, this was my opportunity to thoroughly decorate and disrupt my prose.
ELM: There is a definite tension between the so-called make-believe and the so-called real throughout this book, one which naturally calls Marianne Moore’s real toads to mind. How much did you keep your finger on the pulse of that tension as you were writing?
JB: Everything in the book, for me, relates to something, however veiled, in my life. So, yes, that tension could be said to be the heartbeat of the book, the very reason for my bringing the book into existence. It would have been boring, I feel, to have written a book about my wanting to be married, to have a child, to pursue a life of domestic treasures, about my fear of death, of growing old, of wanting to maintain some childhood dream and bliss and promise. Writing these things as Wendy, however, was a delight and one that felt natural to me. In a way, I was a nympholept struck by my nymph Wendy. She was my muse who moved me to creative impulses. I think the reason why there is so much bawdiness in my work–pubic hair, sexual transgressions, transgressions of the girl child, exploration of the body, frankness of the body–is precisely because I was writing the real.
ELM: Were there story arcs that you considered and discarded?
JB: In writing, I discard very little. In that sense, I’m a hoarder; it’s difficult for me to let go. I mostly keep everything. It’s how I write and how I love, and I write how I love, especially when writing about love. Everything is witness, testimony, memorabilia, souvenir-worthy, a keepsake. Somehow, I feel that even a mistake was meant to be. I might have left out a block paragraph or two, but I honestly can’t remember doing so. I think I used everything. But that’s about writing that’s already been materialized. Were there ideas, imaginings that I dreamt of and then decided against? I can’t say for sure, but I want to say that again, I didn’t discard anything. The writing process for this book would have made it difficult to even discard these imaginings. I wrote only the in morning, first thing out of bed, and wrote until the dream cloud left me. This dispelling of the what I call the “dream cloud” often happened one page into the work. Then I would stop and not think about the book again until the next morning. I did this every morning until the book was done. Every intrusion, every thought seemed to make it into the text–even the incessant barking of a dog is found there. I think that sometimes, when I am very frank, I am embarrassed about what I have written, but I don’t delete, I don’t discard. I find a way to love what I have written. I find a way to see its use-value within the larger work.
Jenny Boully Wrote a Book By Accident
A conversation with the Chicago author of 'Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life.'
by Adam Morgan
May 14, 2018
Comments 0
Named after Margaret Anderson’s literary magazine founded in Chicago in 1914, The Little Interview asks Chicago poets and writers about their reading, writing, and relationship with Chicago.
A
s far as I can tell, Jenny Boully is the first Chicagoan (or at least one of the first) to write a book about the craft of writing itself. How odd, then, that it happened by accident. Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life is a series of essays that span her career thus far as a poet, hybrid fiction writer, and professor, “ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterize falling in love as well as the art of arranging words on a page.”
How did you wind up in Chicago?
Ten years ago, I was working on my Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center and on a fellowship that was about to end. So, I decided to go on the academic job market. I got an offer from Columbia College Chicago to teach creative writing, so here I am.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading a book with the most beautiful beginning that I should have read when I was fourteen, as the boy I was hopelessly crushing on was reading it. He loved it so much that he would steal all the copies in the libraries. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, is so entrancing—now I know why all the Plath fans crush so hard on her.
Of all the books you could have written, how and why did you settle on this one?
I have several books that I like to believe that I am writing presently and have attempted to write in the past and hope to write in the future, but it seems as if they aren’t quite getting written. This book, however, seems to have written itself. The essays in Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life materialized over the years quite without my having planned them as existing together in a book. They are the excesses, the refuse, the margins of my writing day to day, the anterior life of what I believed to have been my true writing—all along these essays were what I should have been focusing on. I just didn’t know it until I realized how many of them there were.
What is your all-time favorite book about (or set in) Chicago?
I adore The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. It has such a spectacular beginning: I am an American, Chicago born. Perhaps I’m partial, as I have a son named Augie who, coincidentally, was Chicago born. The book has a meandering trance-like narrative like Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers: it halts, bends over, and looks up every so often to zoom in on something utterly spectacular blooming in the forgotten background. It’s magical and mystical: I never cared what would happen or if there would be an adventure or not; it was the flourishes of the sentences that kept drawing me in.
What under-appreciated Chicago-based writer (past or present) do you wish everyone would read?
I wish that everyone could read Henry Darger. I believe more people might read his books if they were accessible and transcribed for the public; however, as it is, there is no transcription of his colossal In the Realms of the Unreal. When his writing is examined, in excerpts, critics often try to psychologize Darger; I would rather that we laude his literary genius, his experimental impulses, his postmodernist tendencies, his coiled up and tendriled sentences, the intense metafictive desires that would drive his plot, his ability to rift and weave through found literature, news stories, everyday happenings. I’m sure that if more readers were able to, they might read Darger, but I hope they would really read him and not merely engage with gawking.
Where do you usually write? Do you have any favorite public writing spaces in Chicago?
I’m not much of a public writer. I suppose I’m more like a den animal—I need the comfort of a carved out, quiet, semi-dark, closeted space. So, I spend time at my writing desk at home, or, if my husband needs to work at his writing desk (we share an office), I’ll work at our dining table, a huge wooden beauty that is always cluttered with the refuse of the mornings and my children’s things. When I was really straining, however, to push out this one particular rendition of Betwixt-and-Between, I found that I needed a focused, distraction-free environment, and that, for me, was a coffee and bagel joint. I was surprised by how much I accomplished in a public space. I don’t work there often, but when I do, I seem to have a great concentration and ability to get work done. The place is called Bagel Art, in Evanston. It’s not ever flooded with people, and there’s no cling-clack-clanking of the various espresso machines and overwhelming loud and vicious spoon banging and hollering that you get in most coffee places. It’s a place where I can actually think.
What forthcoming books from Chicago-based writers are you excited about?
Julia Fine had a fun and hauntingly delightful novel come out in May. I had the opportunity to hear her read an excerpt at an alum reading at Columbia College Chicago. I won’t ruin the surprise, but I will say that the novel has a spectacular premise that is beautifully executed. It’s quite magical.
NONFICTION – ESSAYS
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
By Jenny Boully
Coffee House Press
Published April 3, 2018
Jenny Boully is the author of The Body, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and other books. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas and holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing and literature at Columbia College Chicago.
Boully, Jenny: BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Boully, Jenny BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN Coffee House (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 4, 3 ISBN: 978-1-56689-510-1
A poet and essayist likens writing to witchcraft, love, and "the craft of getting someone to love me."
As a teacher, Boully (Creative Writing and Literature/Columbia Coll. Chicago; of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures, 2012, etc.) was visited by a textbook representative who offered her many books to help teach her students the craft of poetry or nonfiction writing. Horrified, she recalled the exercises she had encountered as an undergraduate, which resembled "therapy: confronting an experience with the goal of moving beyond it to free oneself from buried trauma." For Boully, the process is far different, rooted in a philosophical journey for meaning, sincerity, and, not least, love. "I expect my students to essay fiercely and obsessively," she writes. In her own work, an essay "may begin with a suspicion. I follow that suspicion until it gives me something I might have been searching for." The pieces in this captivating collection--versions of which were previously published in literary journals--reflect Boully's discomfort with genre: some are prose poems, some collages of fragments, bits of "veiled memoir," and evocative digressions. "It seems to me," she writes ruefully, "that the inability to accept a mixed piece of writing is akin to literary discrimination." The author's prose is reminiscent of Lydia Davis'--spare, elliptical, unexpected--and sometimes, in her rhythmic cadences, of Gertrude Stein's. In the literary world, Boully confesses, her genre-bending often causes consternation. "I may look like an essay, but I don't act like one," she writes. "I may look like prose, but I don't speak like it." She may look like a poet, too, or a fiction writer: "The need to write fictions," she offers, "arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another.
Graceful meditations on love, loneliness, and the magic of words.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Boully, Jenny: BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461681/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dcadfc11. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461681
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
Publishers Weekly. 265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p66.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
Jenny Boully. Coffee House, $16.95 trade paper (152p) ISBN 978-1-56689-510-1
This erudite, incisive collection of 19 essays from creative writing professor Boully (Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them) blends the personal with the instructive. While discussing the writing process, Boully opens the door to more intimate topics, such as growing up with a multiracial background, falling in love, and coping with post-breakup heartbreak. Interested in the limits of genre, she writes that she is "sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet," suggesting that such classifications are inadequate to describe a writer or her process. Throughout, she exposes the mind of a writer at work, capturing moments both of inspiration and of gnawing doubt. In "On Writing and Witchcraft," Boully compares her teenage fascination with witchcraft to her present craft, which can demand psyching herself up into a mindset that makes her feel creative: "staging a certain sacredness before the sacredness can start." In "On Beginnings and Endings" she writes about her love for beginnings and her fear of endings, both in literature and in life, stating, "the importance of the beginning is to make possible the love affair; the importance of the ending is to make impossible the love affair." Fellow practitioners of literary nonfiction will find Boully's writing relatable and charming. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357555/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3055ef9e. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357555
Unique Blossoms: Reviews of Jenny Boully’s “Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life” and Del and Sofia Samatar’s “Monster Portraits”
April 11, 2018 at 3:08 pm by Kate Burns
The variety of the essay form is its beauty—prose, poetry or pictures, words or film, lyrical or narrative among so many other untidy options. It’s the category for otherness. Jenny Boully, Columbia College professor of creative writing and literature, gracefully explores her personal and professional defiance of categorization in her new collection “Betwixt-And-Between: Essays on the Writing Life.” Of Thai and Cherokee heritage, Boully grew up in Texas, not fitting neatly into any of the boxes on the identity portion of an SAT test. With topics from poetry to junior-high boyfriends to astrophysics, some selections start as a set of instructions for how to write but meld into examinations of otherness, hope, failed relationships or yearning for children, connection and eternity. She captures trains of thought like breezes through her fingers, which she has a rare gift for taming long enough to lie still and be regarded. Boully writes for the same reason that she loves: “to make it so that I truly exist.” She encourages student writers to persevere with promises that “there will be a heavenly castle; there is a holy grail; there did fall golden apples.” I can’t help but believe her.
Another new work that defies classification is “Monster Portraits” by siblings Del and Sofia Samatar, who have Somali-American heritage. This cabinet of curiosities is a hybrid of text and comic-book-style pictures. It creates a fantastical mythology of beasts, some who appear in real, sometimes tragic places—the Rwandan genocide, a tube station in London. In each short portrait, Sofia’s imaginative prose mixes fantasy with autobiography to examine the relationship between monster and witness. Which is which? The monster is always the other, a result of the instance where “the normal has failed to occur”—and that depends largely on context. The monster (e.g. refugee, person of color, underling, woman) doesn’t belong in the realm in which it finds itself a foreigner, without power. Be careful not to quickly choose which to fear: the monster or the cataloguer. (Kate Burns)
“Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life”
By Jenny Boully
Coffee House Press, 152 pages, $16.95
“Monster Portraits”
By Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar
Rose Metal Press, 78 pages, $14.95
Jenny Boully launches her book on April 13 at 7:30pm and Sofia Samatar and Chris Abani will be in conversation about memoir and the speculative on May 17 at 7:30pm at Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark, (773)769-9299.
Discoveries
December 23, 2007|Susan Salter Reynolds
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The Book of Beginnings
and Endings
Essays
Jenny Boully
Sarabande Books: 58 pp., $14.95 paper
"IF you develop an instrument that is highly sensitive," poet Jenny Boully writes, and she is not talking about fiber-optics here, "you can locate almost anything. I am not portrayed as the last survivor of a rare orchid species, nor am I a legendary cowslip possessing miraculous medicinal properties; rather, I am a leaf-cutter ant that, although oblivious to its object at the end of the trail, follows nevertheless with faith that it is being led to something somewhere."
Boully, born in Thailand and raised in Texas, displays in these miniaturist essays a passionate sensitivity of the kind that makes us fear for our adolescent children. Its absence in our own lives may well make our children fear for us as well.
"It occurred to me that there ought to exist some sort of machinery that could record accurately the thoughts and epiphanies, the visions and idealizations of the user," Boully writes, in a piece bravely titled "The Realization of the Infinite." "What image of beauty we hold exists so brilliantly, so beautifully in our minds, and the sad task is then to somehow transcribe this image so that it becomes viewable by others. If I think of a visual image, the machine would then be able to reproduce perfectly this image in the form of a painting. If I were full of a sudden poetic frenzy, then the machine would be able to write out the lines in pristine prose or poetry."
It's uncommonly good to read the work of a writer who believes so unabashedly in the miracle of writing -- that some dimension, unlike any other, exists between the writer and the reader; that literature is an "open system," a "living system."
Like Anais Nin, Boully believes exclusively in love; it's her religion. "She loved him; she loved him as if he were full of false hope and blue canaries. In the beginning, the universe exploded with the ferocity of a waking child, enough to burst forth infinite galaxies. She loved him as if a coal-miner. She loved him as if a pulsing quasar."
In love, we create the ceremonies that carry us from the particular to the whole. All those particulars -- the "daily rearrangements of bed sheets," the 14 cats, the "clogged plumbing," the "rotting fruit," the bus stops, the shared meals -- make her a superstitious writer: If the fire doesn't start, the love affair will fail. It's a bit like tea with the dormouse -- doors open on interpretations after every phrase. It's artifice -- a little needy now and then, but fine and wanton nonetheless.
--
Labors of the Heart
Stories
Claire Davis
Picador: 240 pp., $14 paper
MARRIAGE, custody, adultery, love. Marriage, custody, adultery, love. People tell you stories; sometimes these stories help; sometimes it's hard to believe the teller speaks the same language you do.
Novelist Claire Davis ("Season of the Snake," "Winter Range") is a dead-on sort of writer. In her debut short story collection, she confronts these words with an arsenal of specifics: gestures, reactions, needs, vices.
In these 10 stories, set in the small-town and rural American Northwest (Davis lives and works in Idaho), the author is fashioning human beings from an airy nothingness. They stand up on these pages, and they bump into you on the street: Joe and his self-righteous feelings about his mother's love affair; Bradley's inability to say and do the things that will save his marriage or at least win him child custody; and the protagonist of the title story, Clarence John Softitch, also known as Pinky, a morbidly obese man in his 40s who falls in love for the first time -- and deeply. ("For he is virginal, a moderate embarrassment at his age, having come to terms, he believes, with the reality that no one loves a fat man.")
These characters and others make a reader want to muck in and help, put her shoulder to the wheel, figure out how to navigate this life. Happiness, it would seem, is not the goal in these stories, it's getting out from under, a little clarity, a little less loneliness.
--
susan.reynolds@latimes.com
REVIEW x 2
Nicole Walker
Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, Sarabande Books, 2007
Jenny Boully, Moveable Types, Noemi Press, 2007
[Review Guidelines]
on THE BOOK OF BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
This book is not a treatise on how best to live your life.
This book is not even a treatise on how to write your life.
This book is not a plot or a poem.
It's not a method or a symptom.
This book is not nonfiction.
This book is not redemption.
This book is not rock climbing.
This book is not a blue print.
This book is not a building.
This book is not a conglomeration of facts: it is fact undone and unwoven. It resists all expectation—for the reader, the page, the editor, and all attempts to categorize, generalize or make a speech about it. Each odd-numbered page is a beginning and each even-numbered page is an ending. And not the beginning and ending to one story. The stories do not omit one shared middle. Instead the beginnings and endings are in distinct modes, even genres with only lapses in common.
When I read, I need to find a handhold or a foothold from which then the author can shove me into acrobatic reading. This book does provide a handhold. And then the hold disintegrates in your hand. Don't climb sandstone, it seems to say. It is in the falling, the absence of something to hold onto, the clawing against grinding rock that one begins to relax a little and delight in the fall. She warned us from the beginning "I am thinking of a number from one to ten and you are rowing a boat further and further from shore. If there were false surmises, it was I who embedded them into the locks, the open windows, the space of ajar"(3). Such steep falling was forewarned. There is a lot of space here she suggests. Gravity is one way to think of space. But space is another way to think about space—lapses, aeration, negation, void.
The narrator, it turns out, isn't so much the one disintegrating the handholds as much as the one falling with you. She empathizes: "I am at my parent's house, outside reading, and hummingbirds flit about the red hibiscus, while you are on the other side of the scaffolding, refusing to break through" (5). It is this recognition that we are on the outside (of) reading, that convention, genre, expectation, once set up, is not so much a climbable rock face as it is a barrier between the narrator and the reader. By taking those conventions away—not letting us typify what genre this is or where the character development might lie or that inevitable nonfiction question "is it true," we are left with the words whose meaning is not codified. The meaning changes at every reading, moving the reader forcibly, as a mass acted upon. It is not the plot that moves the reader. It is not the line break. It is the sentences, grains of sand themselves, plain and dear that impact the reader—bit by bit. It is the reader who moves as well as the story. The ones that seem to talk about how we're reading while we're reading gain the most force:
"When the flock of doves flies forth from the magician's breast pocket, they do not enter our world to perch on random branches of earthbound trees—we only see them briefly and for the sake of the trick" (8).
"On one side, there were lines of poetry; on the other, a message that can, at best, be described as half cryptic, half love letter" (15).
"I am a leaf-cutter ant, that, although oblivious to its object at the end of the trail, follows nevertheless with faith that it is being led to something somewhere" (16).
"The negative of all wishes is somehow still the need to proceed" (26).
"You see, it is not so much that things are seen, but that if you were superhuman, if you had indeed been born with the natural ability to see things more clearly, you may or may not be the beholder of epiphanies" (37).
"and I remember being in a maze, embodying a bit dot that would have to eat an infinite number of smaller dots—an organic being eating an infinite amount of smaller beings" (44).
It's as if you and the narrator are falling through dust and pointing out to each other, oooh look, there's a good piece of sand. There's another. I see how this sand is made. In fact, by seeing this piece of sand, I can see how all this sand is made. And these rocks. And these hand-holds. This book, then, is not about climbing rocks or building skyscrapers. It's about building rocks one granule of sand at a time.
Arielle Greenberg reviews
The Body by Jenny Boully
Slope Editions, $12.95
For better (what a challenge!) or for worse (what the hell?), the form The Body takes brings up a number of questions about itself before one begins to read a word. In this, her first book, Jenny Boully has invented an elaborately footnoted text on absence, love, ontology and identity — minus the text. Thus, the majority of each page is blank; the body is missing. Confronted with such a puzzle, the smart reader will begin to make demands: how am I to read this book? Is this book going to poke a hole in my idea of a book? What will it do besides poking a hole in that idea? What will it do besides commenting on poking a hole in that idea? And finally, are footnotes enough?
To the last question first: yes and no: an appropriately ambiguous answer for an ambiguous, but admirably ambitious, project. The footnotes are frustrating at first, partly because one can’t envision what the ‘body’ text of the invisible book would be — trying to ‘fill in the blanks’ is a futile exercise, as the footnotes range in style and substance from stage directions to diary excerpts to notes like no. 148: ‘Ibid., conclusion.’ With the work already so fragmented and concerned in marking things absent, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that one could fully imagine a text for which these annotations might be appropriate, but even the genre of ‘the real book’ is unclear. Interesting, perhaps, but since the footnotes themselves are already complex and various, an anchoring sense of center, of foundation, would be helpful. Although The Body is clearly not about solidity, the lack of presence — even erased presence — winds up feeling a bit sloppy rather than mysterious.
The footnotes themselves are similarly scattered: some in the perfunctory style of an editor (no. 34: ‘This was corrected in the second edition by the author. In the original, she wrote: ‘Prayer is merely a hopeful form of apostrophe.’’), some are in the first person of the author (no. 33: ‘All the same, how strange and sad that I, Jenny Boully, should be the sign of a signifier. . .’), still others in the voice of an omniscient commentator who somehow knows the inner life of every character in the drama (no. 68: ‘Actually, what she most desired was someone who would pay close attention to details. . .’). What book would have footnotes from such disparate sources? Again, this may be part of the fun, of the experiment, but it’s also somewhat misleading, and further lends the book its patch-worked quality.
Which is not to say that The Body is unfocused. This is a sustained, intricate project, concerned with profound issues and riddled with fine gems of language and insight. Boully is able to subtly draw fascinating connections betweens species of absent bodies, from former lovers to heroes mythical and personal, and she has woven the book from compelling notions of other lacks, from the simulacra of films, theater and dreams to the falsities of irony. The Body demands that we rethink the implications of evocation — what happens when something stands in place of something else, whether that thing be a mentor, a monument, or a missive? The entire book is an alias to itself. Footnote no. 156: ‘The essence behind the curtain, i.e., the stage, is composed of the yearning to determine what may be seen and what will remain unseen. This should be understood in the definition of ‘staging.’’
Some of the most clever moments in the book are meta-manifestations of the missing text, as in the many footnotes which read as a kind of miscommuniqué between unknown partners, as in no. 62: ‘To this particular question, she always answered, ‘No comment.’’ The message becomes more wonderfully empty here:
79 She wrote about this particular postcard in her journal:
. . .Why should I be the one responsible for explanations? [illegible] accused me of speaking in cryptic codes and waxing poetic. But why should I waste language, which has never done [illegible] and I any good? Why should I waste language, when one sentence says all that needs to be said, says where I’ve been, whom I’ve seen, what I’m doing, whom I’m missing, and whom I wish were there?. . .
The many layers are delightful: a puff pastry of undone meaning.
In other places, however, the work feels bogged down in academic rhetoric, too beholden to semiotics and cinema studies and overdressed in references to Joyce, Dante, and Derrida. There is also exactly one blank page with no footnotes or text whatsoever, and exactly one blank footnote — these moves felt requisite instead of earned, and smacked of gimmick, as did this footnote, no. 102:
If the window is open, then true. If the door is abruptly shut, then false. If the villanelle was blond, then add five points to your answer. If she was drinking a dirty martini, subtract 60 points for fear. If you forgot her name, wait out a turn. If love, then the ace of spades: for everything else, reshuffle and deal again.
Seeing that no other footnote makes mention of any such games or rules, this passage seems forced.
These flaws are those of a young writer in thrall to her own experimentation. Ironically, while Boully frequently mocks the controversy over emotional honesty in poetry, her own work soars when she risks vulnerability and fully and vividly explores a felt moment, as in footnote no. 29:
After my sister and I stared at the magazine, we were, the both of us, afraid to part our legs or even to pee. For months, we were inseparable in the bathroom, but then, we became brave and decided to look for our holes, and if the spider did in fact come out we would kill it.
Or in this excerpt from a love letter in footnote no. 42:
If this were a cartoon, you would be a giraffe & I’d be a mouse & we’d live in a sycamore-leaf shaped house & we’d fight all the time, that is, when you could hear me, your head being so high up, so far off; I’d sleep in your little alarm clock, sing a morning song for you, chew holes in your favorite socks, hide my best straw and bits of yarn in your breast pocket, let you use my tail to mark your places in books. . .
Or in this marvelously surreal annotation to footnote no. 100:
In the morning, the doves cooed their fuck-yous. And she departed, taking the wrong baggage, the wrong flight of stairs. Over the fire escape, the dress fluttered in the misdirected wind. Because he never said a word, the bits and pieces of her: lipstick and rose petals, sugar-spoons and pink envelopes, ended up in the wrong pockets. And damn-it-all-to-hell if someone didn’t, overnight, uproot and replant the road signs in all the most-traveled but wrong intersections. In the cathedral, the font was never so wanton, yet it liked that dipping of fingers again and again, and the candles were so whorish in their sharing of flames.
Such passages lend the book its charm, and keep it from feeling like an exercise — they give the work its humanity.
But so, how best to read it? The key is perhaps found in annotation z to footnote no. 143, which comes only a few pages from the end: the footnote quotes a character called Del Vecchio as saying about Jenny Boully, one assumes: ‘And then she started going on and on about this Robert Kelly [z] guy,’ and annotation [z] reads:
The following excerpt from Robert Kelly’s ‘Edmund Wilson on Alfred de Musset: The Dream’ was pasted above the author’s various beds in the various places she lived: ‘Dreams themselves are footnotes. But not footnotes to life. Some other transactions they are so busy annotating all night long.’
Does The Body poke a hole in the notion of a book? Certainly, like Thalia Field’s recent debut Point and Line (both Field and Kelly provide the blurbs on the back of The Body), it offers an invigorating new approach to the idea of a text, of fiction, of essay, of poetry collection. But does it do more than poke a hole in that idea? Yes. Boully’s book is, in the best sense, a restless effort, curious and full of rich curiosities, and signals a courageous and thoughtful new voice in literature.
Two from Tarpaulin Sky Press
By Elisa Gabbert (March 1, 2007)
No Comment
[one love affair]*
By Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007
The Pictures
By Max Winters
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007
Founded in 2002, Tarpaulin Sky is an online literary journal as well as a small press that publishes, according to its website, “cross-/trans-genre works” and “innovative poetry and prose.” As such Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]* (2006) and Max Winter’s The Pictures (2007) are representative examples of Tarpaulin Sky’s still small catalog. These books suggest that the press is committed not only to innovation and hybrid forms but to a certain level of accessibility—while by today’s somewhat lax standards both authors could be fairly labeled experimental, neither book is marked by the dry intellectualism sometimes associated with the term. On the contrary, Boully’s and Winter’s work, though challenging, are approachable and even whimsical.
Tarpaulin Sky is also clearly invested in the process of bookmaking. It offers both perfectbound paperbacks and handbound editions of its full-length books. The perfectbound editions, available for $12 each, are aesthetically appealing as objects in themselves. At 5” by 7”, they feel imminently pocketable though packing over 60 pages each. Founding editor Christian Peet is responsible for the clean and pretty design.
The back cover of [one love affair]* characterizes the content within as a mixture of “fiction, essay and memoir.” In the genre usually known as prose poetry, lines are not broken as in “traditional” poems but have some characteristics of both prose and poetry. More than a series of discrete prose poems, Boully’s book feels like a novel in verse (in prose). Its project is ambitious. Through three sections rife with asterisks and superscript roman numerals, Boully not only tells the story of the eponymous love affair (a story that includes “unnamable endless flowerings” and “countless empty bottles”), but attempts (the original meaning of the word essay) to outline a theory of how we read and construct new texts from our readings, which parallels the way we learn to love and love again. Remarkably, Boully’s fluid, lyrical writing makes what could be a difficult, intimidating read instead a delightful one.
Boully’s previous book, The Body (Slope Editions), is composed entirely of footnotes, and a forthcoming work is titled Book of Beginnings and Endings. The title [one love affair]*, in fact, is itself footnoted. Boully is obviously obsessed with edges, with starts and finishes, with cusps. A footnote explains the origin of something, but it also lives at the end (of the page, or chapter, or book). “[one love affair]” is also the title of the book’s first section of three, which consists of eight prose poems (with their own footnoted subtitles), each poem a page or two long.
The first note at the end of this section informs us that the title phrase is borrowed from Thomas Bernhard, and that, “when reading, our minds often supply another narrative.” Accordingly, Boully’s text is an exercise in substitutions—reading and love are both systems based on this act. We read a love story and replace the characters with ourselves; we reiterate its phrases but with our own words traded in (for example, “Actually, she is telling about how a dwelling becomes empty when she moves in,” from Marguerite Duras, becomes “Actually, she was telling him about how a bulb flower bursting really marks the beginning of spring” under Boully’s pen); we replace our former lovers with new ones; and we “have to learn to somehow begin again,” because every love story has an end.
The title of the book’s second section, “He Wrote in Code,” is taken from Carole Maso’s 1995 novel Ava, another footnote informs us. The section models Ava’s form and also quotes from it. “When not obvious,” Boully writes, “these passages are followed by an asterisk.” I’m not sure if that “obvious” is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but almost nothing in “He Wrote in Code” was an obvious quotation to me (is that part of the code?) and we don’t reach the first asterisk until 16 pages in. Not having read Ava, I don’t know how much of this is appropriated. But we get more of Boully’s obsession with the boundaries that define things, conveyed in a slightly different form: a series of short bursts of prose, a few sentences each, almost like tiny chapters. Some of these chapterettes end abruptly, mid-sentence:
“We planned, as Jefferson and his wife did, to read Tristam Shandy to one another each night. You had not yet read it, and I’m sure that if you had, the voices would have made a correlation between me and Tristam’s Jenny. I am sure then that you would have asked me to”
…To? The speaker here seems so resistant to endings that she tries to avoid them entirely. She clings desperately to beginnings, terrified of the inevitable closure, as though a period means death: “I am too often pregnant in my dreams…I refuse delivery when it needs to happen, claiming that I can’t have my baby because I won’t be pregnant anymore.”
Yes, this poetry has a bit of a dark side, but it’s also touchingly, adorably frank (“you made frequent and over-demonstrated attention to your boner”) and at times funny. The lovers in “He Wrote in Code” are fond of the renga, a collaborative Japanese form—they compose a series of poems together at the same time that they co-author a “real-life” love story. This section is interspersed with the titles of the rengas, including I Did, I Loved You; How I Would Have to Leave You Soon; and You Fucking Suck. [one love affair]* is full of this playful engagement with narrative levels of reality (poems within poems, stories within stories). I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a way into the “trans-genre” of prose poetry.
Not itself a cross-genre work, but equally a book-length project as opposed to a collocation of un- or loosely related poems, Max Winter’s The Pictures is divided into two sections, “Still” and “Moving.” These consist of poems that are essentially descriptions of photographs and film clips, respectively. (The pictures being described, if they exist and are not just dreamed up scaffolding, are not reprinted in the text.) The titles, too, are principally descriptive—denoting the dimensions of each picture or the runtime of each film.
The success of a book that draws so heavily from source media hinges on two things: the intrinsic power of the pictures themselves, and the extrinsic power of the words used to describe them. Winter has written a readable book with a number of subtle, thought-provoking moments. But where The Pictures fails, it fails on both counts: the weaker poems in the collection tend toward the prosaic and do not betray why the object of art at hand was chosen as an object worth explication.
At first read, the opening poem, “4 by 4,” seems as though it will serve as a kind of ars poetica for the rest of the collection. The poem-picture depicts a stone lying on sand described with “squiggly” lines that may or may not “have meaning,” and, creeping in at one edge, the “snout” of a scorpion. “Hard to believe, but / it must be true,” Winter writes—setting up belief as a central theme.
There is a shimmering that happens when he makes such tonally ambiguous statements—it is difficult to say if this is meant to be ironic, faux-naïve; or if a genuine conjecture is being made: that for the purposes of a picture, seeing really is believing. What truth can there be in art beyond what it presents to us? Why look past the physical and temporal frames of the film? The visual landscape emerges as its own level of truth. In “5 by 7”: “His lips: thick, / and stretched by what must be a smile.” That “must be” is another card trick—it’s hedging, tentative language, it suggests that we’re in uncertain territory and are forced to assume. But flip the phrase over and it screams sureness—of course it must be a smile; if it looks like one, it is.
In “4 by 4,” Winter goes on: “We almost don’t want to look. / Although nothing will happen next.” The latter line seems an apologia for the lyric moment—for poetry that freezes, that denies time—in opposition to a narrative world of cause and effect. However, Winter later falls victim to the paradigm of expectation he appears to be arguing against. In “8 ½ by 11,” we get a caption to a young man: “He looks down, as if not thinking. / Who could blame him. / In five minutes it will rain.” Excuse me? I contest that assertion. No, in this flat, notebook-sized land, it will never rain, no matter how heavy and dark the sky. Just as the scorpion will never fully arrive.
In many of these poems, there’s a trademark royal “we”—Winter creates a collective audience to view his pictures and reinforces it with a backgrounded but insistent museum-tour-guide voice, a quiet pushiness that implicitly asks the reader to agree with its conclusions. “We cannot see,” the voice intones repeatedly. “We cannot tell.” So it comes as a pleasant surprise when in “7 by 12” an “I” emerges:
What I see here
if I may make a leap
is the newly written
covering
the erased.
This shy speaker is inclined to ask permission for sharing his opinion, but it’s a compelling one—proposing that the picture, or the poem about it, or some vague nexus where they meet, is a pentimento/palimpsest. This brief conflation of images and text is a window into the mind of a poet who would make a book from pictures. I wished for more of these first-person-singular insights among so much viewerly remove.
Due to Winter’s sometimes flat, even inaccurate descriptions (a leg, bending at one point versus many, strikes me as impossible to visualize as “arched”), I found the “Moving” section a little less engaging, since a series of moving images is inherently more complex and difficult to delineate than a single image. (I wonder where these little films came from—the “least watched” list on YouTube? They remind me of early music videos in the first days of MTV, when, given no basis for comparison, anything went.) The last and longest poem, however, is lovely and peculiar in its wording: faces are, what?: “granular the best way to say it, / is it dust or just the way of skin, / not sure with the fusky lens.” (Fusky isn’t in my dictionary, but I love it.) Winter disappears the movie’s characters in the final lines with another deft sleight-of-hand move: “An explosion occurs. / We cannot see them. / When the smoke is gone, / they are gone too.” Removed from the domain of our gaze, they simply cease to exist.
___
Elisa Gabbert holds degrees from Rice University and Emerson College. A poet living in Boston, she is a reader for Ploughshares and an editor of Absent. Recent work appears or will appear in journals including Pleiades, LIT, No Tell Motel, Kulture Vulture, RealPoetik, H_NGM_N, and Redivider. Her collaborations with Kathleen Rooney can be found in MiPOesias, Foursquare, Past Simple, Elimae, Dusie, and other journals. A chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available from Kitchen Press.
March 1, 2009
[one love affair]* by Jenny Boully
Review by Craig Santos Perez
[one love affair]*
by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press
PO Box 189
Grafton, VT 05146
ISBN 0-9779019-0-4
2006, 68 pp., $12.00
www.tarpaulinsky.com
As we learn in a footnote, the title of Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]* comes from the cover of Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator and alludes to how “when reading, our minds often supply another narrative” (17). Boully’s collection of prose pieces documents the narratives that emerged while she read various books, such as Roberto Belaño’s By Night in Chile, Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, and Severo Sarduy’s Cobra and Maitreya, just to name a few. This intersection between source text and emergent text creates a fascinating movement throughout Boully’s work.
[one love affair]* contains three sections, each section composed of various, titled prose poems. The individual pieces don’t necessarily connect to each other as they emerge from various sources and project Boully’s narratives into a multiplicity of directions. What ties the disparate narratives together is Boully’s unique prose style:
In a field of rye, rye which did not allow for solitary moments, but opened one up to each flaw and freckle, in a way that Duras’s rye would never do, [viii] the couple put down a blanket and dreamt things: in the sky, a million wallowing anemones; in a shaft of rye, a landscape of hills and boulders, a crenellated planet’s covering; within a stone, a billion years of plate tectonics, cross-sections of sediment and historical evident (6).
Boully’s sentences are a joy in and of themselves; they move lushly towards the period, transversing commas, semicolons, and colons to accrue and sediment in our own minds. In a section titled “…its smell of books and solitude,” we read: “[i]n her garden full of ravenous rooks, in her dreams of kidnapped youths, in her study of frail and reread books, a flower that emerges to sprout over and over” (8). The flower of narrative sprouts throughout [one love affair]*, allowing us to supply our own narratives to Boully’s often strange, often captivating articulations:
And if, after all, the peeling blue paint, the workmen spying in, the orange boat, the seaweathered dock, the calico cats should prove to be—because she knew that he knew that she knew (yet he pretended not to know) that he heard things, saw things—all but a false mimicry, then perhaps all things, even the most remote, were present all along, lurking underneath (14).
While the first section focuses on a “she” and “he,” the second—composed of shorter paragraphs—revolves around the relationship between an “I” and “you.” The relationship is described through a series of paratactic moments:
The bats always come back; at the same time, all together, they come back.
I would mail it to myself; it would be as if you were again with me.
You mailed me the autumnal leaves of Annapolis: yellowing things, decaying things, crumbling things.
My lack of pregnancy flashes, a keen knife parting the silently tremulous waters. (26)
In Boully’s writing, there are no beginnings or endings; instead, we are presented with impressions, threads, and flashes of narrative. Within the space of these short paragraphs, we are compelled to narrate our own ideas about the pleasures and failures of love. At one point, Boully comments on this phenomenon: “Maso writes, So that the form takes as many risks as the content, where I think love is the content and the risk is separation, and the pain is the returns, the repetitions, the completions, or the making meaning of” (38). The form of [one love affair]* takes as many risks as the content, and the poet dwells in the returns of memory, the completions of interpretation, and the making of variable meanings.
The final section, “There Is Scarcely More Than There Is,” weaves together the “he,” “she,” “you,” and “I” into a meditation not only on love and relationships, but also on poetry and narrativity:
In a last correspondence, he was abroad; he said he saw mountains so beautiful that they reminded him of her. In a last correspondence, she posed a question which he never answered. In last correspondences, never so much about what it was that really did happen in the end, in the very end. There is instead so much talk about beginnings. And so, that is where, for so long, I stayed, within budding hydrangeas, within unnameable endless flowerings. (59)
There are many questions in this work that are left unanswered, as well as many silences surrounding what happened “in the end.” Yes, there is much talk about beginnings, but we are never truly situated “in the beginning.” Instead, we remain in the continual becoming of love and loss, memory and perception, narrative and poetry. We stay, as the various characters and the speaker herself, “within unnameable endless flowerings.”
____________
Craig Santos Perez is a co-founder of Achiote Press and author of from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). His reviews have appeared in The Colorado Review, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Latino Poetry Review, MiPoesias, First Intensity, Rain Taxi, and Jacket, among others.
Woo
A review of Jenny Boully's 'not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them'
Amy Wright
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them
by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky 2011, 80 pages, $14ISBN 9780982541678
You’ve gone and forgotten all about your muffins, and you’ll now make
excuses and say well then they were only make-believe, but we all know
better: a fire and smoke that’s been here for days and days. (35)
Jenny Boully’s reading of J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) prompts us to ask if we had known in childhood that the lure of childhood would not cease to woo, would we have understood what the lure was then? Have adults always been afraid to wait in a place they do not yet know? The back cover of this fiction/poetry collection advertises a “dark re-visioning” of Peter and Wendy’s story, though more it offers perspective on what the fairy tale ruins in Wendy and how the slippery perma-innocent Peter conquers his foe. No victory trumps forgetting, if one is remembered.
If the propagators of Barrie’s story are enamored with the naïf, the originating text is as grown and grim as they come: “That is all we are, lookers-on,” he writes, “Nobody really wanted us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt.”[1] The “we” here refers to a first person narrator the author inserts among the children to defend his portrayal of their mother, Mrs. Darling, as a finicky domestic with “no proper spirit.” “I despise her,” the writer-narrator admits. Boully’s keen commentary on such a text is clearly justified: the cycle of the book and its metaphor require a recurrence of wedded cherubs to fall from girlhood into marriage, dowry for doury. Wendy follows in her mother’s footsteps, as her daughter Jane too joins Peter, and in time her daughter Margaret will play his nursemaid and chef, “and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless” (242).
“Heartless” is a wry description of children and Barrie thus closing the novel calls attention to it. “Each day I cut a bit of sunflower,” Boully writes, “and take it. Home. Will Peter notice these?” (65). Does any child notice what is done for him? If gratitude is learned by loss, Peter’s poor memory cancels even the gesture of Tinkerbell to save his life. He not only forgets that she risked her own by swallowing poison Hook meant for him; he forgets her entirely. Boully calls such character into question and with it that long-standing love affair with youth, a flight one takes before learning how to stop (53). The parallel final word in Boully’s text is “outgrown,” as in hollow cradles under a moon swelled “so full” with the light of loss (65). The bough bent with big babies snaps when one has done with the idealization of never growing up.
“I will give you a thimble so that you will know the weight of my heart,” Boully’s second paragraph states: “A thimble may protect against pricks” (1). The hearts of the Darling children are as unguarded as that window Peter flies in to rifle them with dust. not merely contributes so rich a reading to Barrie’s text it should be assigned as a prep course for adolescents loosing the anemones inside their chests and a refresher course for fortysomethings who have forgotten the point.
The pull between freedom and time is a complicated one, and Boully holds in her form the two birds of this paradox by alternating arcs throughout the text. The first begins with an untitled section that converses with the novel via such reflexive statements as:
that is the story he will tell you … Oh Wendy … He will come to you
in the darkest part of night when you are sleeping and play upon
his pipes until you stir. (1–2)
Hip to the jig and rippling with innuendo, this thread is interrupted regularly by “The Home Under Ground,” named for the cavern Peter and the Lost Boys keep in Neverland. The structure mirrors the lock and lush of these asynchronous worlds: Peter’s game of pretend is made real not by the heart that darts away but the one that lands. Poor steady bird is a Never bird, wooed to follow nest and all.
“See Wendy,” Boully explains the paradigm: most want to have their cake and eat it too. Not Peter. He found an escape hatch in the clause — dispossession: “he doesn’t want to have the cake; he wants to eat it.” (46). Held “cake gets old; gets old” like Wendy and her “old lady” panties and Tink with her skeleton leaves, both of which Peter out flies, abandons, drops. Is the only way to “beat the game,” Boully asks, to play dead? (46, 20). How is it that Peter lives? He becomes Godotlike, as anticipation of his entrance kindles hope and Byronesque as he taunts that “it is not so difficult to die” to all that bloody mediocre life.[2]
“Pan, who and what art thou?” Hook asks, and Peter calls back “I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg,” but his lines are “nonsense,” Barrie’s narrator interjects, except as “proof … that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form” (208).
Barrie’s male protagonists are preoccupied with form, good and bad. The sloppiness, for instance, that causes Peter to take Hook’s suggestion in midair and kick instead of stab him, allows Hook to meet his defeat in peace. If men are but players on a stage, these two measure themselves like fencers by tallying the points of their performance. The rules of form and Peter’s moral caliber in relation to it are defined by Barrie in the chapter “The Mermaid’s Lagoon.” In it, Peter and Jas. Hook meet on a rock. Not insignificantly, Barrie refers here to Peter as “the only man the Sea-Cook had feared” (127, emphasis added). The man-boy’s seriousness is evidenced when he has the chance to stab Hook, but recognizing he has the higher position, offers a hand that Hook bites. Stunned by iniquity, Peter is made “helpless” and defeated — as all children are, Barrie says, the first time they are treated unfairly. But none else recover so completely and this distinction is what makes him Pan.
Perhaps his choice seems not an option for Wendy or Tootles or Smee or Tink, but to begrudge him it is the real cause of battle — wherein enter sorrow, violence, envy, seemingly justified by the slight of his forgetting. The choice should be examined closer, coming as it does in a book appropriated for children but first marketed toward adults. In the passage that precedes it, for example, Peter achieves such high-functioning psychological effect as to mimic Hook’s voice so well Hook “felt his ego slipping from him,” thinking Peter to be himself and separate, which scares him hoarse (123). Such results, if unconsciously administered, imply a greater symbol in Peter than irresponsibility. His readiness to forget may even be an act of generosity so daring it unmans him repeatedly — to forgive. As anyone attempting to clear the slates of injustice may guess, his magic may be deserved.
Certainly his self-forgetting is exemplary. The complication enters when that forgetting encompasses others, especially the doting Wendy, toward whom Boully’s pathos appeals. The defense is long-coming. The poignancy of Wendy’s role has been sandbagged since her name was excised from the novel’s title, published in 1911 as Peter and Wendy and limelit later solely for him. Boully intercedes on Wendy’s behalf:
“Betwixt-and Between” that
“male hand … scrawling on a little girl. All over, that is.” (56)
In not merely, the tables on which attachment and freedom play are not reckoned but turn. A mother, Boully says “is someone who always contains two things” (32). not merely contains more than two, but these — that love can act in memory and it must last to be believed: “No one wants to love forever a wild thing” (52). Except Peter, who keeps prying himself free — not away from but to love. To accept such possibility is to forgive even him — “wolf one” whose death Wendy will ever-after mourn (49). But, “for now: peaches:” empathy for the wicked, courage after one — to get past wolf two and the rest of them to a place where,
there should always be more. Love involved. (49; 58)
[1] J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953): 215.
[2] Lord Byron, George Gordon from Manfred, quoted in Oliver Elton, ed. A Survey of English Literature 1780-1880,ed. Oliver Elton volume 2 (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press 2010), 164.
January 20, 2012
Review: 'Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life,' by Jenny Boully
NONFICTION: In hypnotic essays, Jenny Boully traces her evolution as a writer.
By TOBIAS CARROLL Special to the Star Tribune April 13, 2018 — 10:10am
Agnes Donnadieu
Jenny Boully Photo by Agnes Donnadieu
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Near the end of her new book, “Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life,” in an essay titled “A Poet’s Education,” Jenny Boully muses on a literary life that has eluded easy classification. That started in her youth: “The teachers never knew where to put me,” she reflects on her childhood classroom experiences.
Boully is an author who often takes bold formal steps: Her first book, “The Body: An Essay,” is made up entirely of footnotes to an absent text. In her preface to this collection, Boully explains that the essays contained within span her career to date — that they, in her words, “began to appear when I began to write truly as a writer.”
What emerges from the cumulative experience of reading them, then, is a glimpse inside a singular authorial voice, and the way that life experiences and a literary aesthetic are intertwined. The overall effect is hypnotic.
This book’s title comes from a description of Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s “The Little White Bird.” Boully speaks of becoming “attached to such hesitations, refusals, yearnings, oscillating and uncertain desires.” And throughout the book, she uses unexpected juxtapositions to achieve a powerful effect. Several of the essays within feature self-consciously sprawling titles: “The Art of Fiction” and “How to Write on Grand Themes” are two examples.
Both essays eschew rote advice on craft and instead delve into the idiosyncrasies of Boully’s own life experiences — and, in doing so, neatly leap over the oft debated argument over the personal vs. the universal.
What the titles of these essays seem to say is that the largest themes in art cannot be addressed without incorporating the deeply personal — and that writing itself exists as a kind of process of revelation.
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, by Jenny Boully
It doesn’t hurt that Boully can also compose a crushingly good final sentence, with “On Writing and Witchcraft,” “22” and especially “Between Cassiopeia and Perseus” having particularly striking examples.
For all that Boully can write in a heady register, she also incorporates familiar questions in these essays: Family, identity and desire all occupy plenty of space within the text.
Late in the book, Boully writes about urging her students to have hobbies “because if they don’t have hobbies, then that means writing is their hobby, and it shouldn’t be that way; writing should be their life and not their hobby.”
“Betwixt-and-Between” is living proof of that: It’s not only a powerful demonstration of writing as life, but of the ways that lived experiences can illuminate and transform writing.
Tobias Carroll is managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
By: Jenny Boully.
Publisher: Coffee House Press, 132 pages, $16.95.