Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Dead Girls and Other Stories
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1986
WEBSITE: http://www.emilygeminder.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
http://www.emilygeminder.com/contact.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017024767
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017024767
HEADING: Geminder, Emily, 1986-
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005 20170501100145.0
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010 __ |a n 2017024767
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC
046 __ |f 1986-02-26 |2 edtf
053 _0 |a PS3607.E455
100 1_ |a Geminder, Emily, |d 1986-
670 __ |a Dead girls & other stories, 2017: |b CIP t.p. (Emily Geminder) data view (“birth date: 2/26/1986; Emily Geminder’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House Open Bar, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and her work was noted in Best American Essays 2016. She has worked as a journalist in New York and Cambodia, and is a Provost’s Fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California”)
PERSONAL
Born February 26, 1986, in NY.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.A.; University of Southern California, doctoral fellow.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Cambodia Daily, Phnom Penh, journalist, 2011; also worked as a journalist in New York.
AWARDS:Intro Journals Award, Associated Writing Programs; Glenna Luschei Award, Prairie Schooner; provost’s fellow, University of Southern California; award from Vermont Studio Center.
WRITINGS
Contributor of essays, stories, and poems to periodicals, including American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House Open Bar, and Witness.
SIDELIGHTS
Emily Geminder was born in New York, educated in California, worked in Cambodia, and traveled widely. Her writing reflects her exposure to the international scene and the universal concerns of women everywhere. In award-winning stories, poems, and essays, she explores the lives of women searching for connections in a frightening world.
Geminder found her inspiration in Cambodia in 2011, as a young reporter in Phnom Penh, she told J.M. Tyree in a New England Review interview. She was one of four foreign women who arrived in the aftermath of a tragedy. Another female reporter had died, and no one wanted to talk about it. The ambience was dark and unsettling. Geminder came to realize that the uneasy atmosphere extended beyond the newsroom to envelop the entire country. It was not only present because of the reporter’s death, but because of an ongoing history of violence against females in that part of the world. Moreover, she told Tyree, a similar uneasiness can occur whenever and wherever a female finds herself in what she called a “male-dominated environment.” The underlying potential for violence can bind women together for protection, for solace or strength, or it can divide them. “There’s something cyclical at work here,” she explained, something “that’s bound to keep happening.”
The author’s exploration of this theme resonates in her debut collection Dead Girls & Other Stories. The nine stories span the globe but echo a similar fascination with death, real or imagined. “Phnom Penh,” related in the plural voice of four female reporters far from home, bears comparison to the author’s own experience at the Cambodia Daily, as she described it in her New England Review interview, the periodical in which the selection first appeared. “Coming To,” which first appeared in Prairie Schooner, is also rooted in the experiences of female reporters in Phnom Penh, but it reaches into the memories of young children viewing their father’s embalmed body, a teenage girl in a clinical setting where someone is drawing her blood for medical diagnosis, a rash of mass fainting spells across the area, and a reporter’s commentary on the difference between rape and rape-murder. The events are vaguely connected, and death is a fear, a threat, or a reality in every location.
Other entries range farther afield. The title story is narrated by a woman who attends an anatomy workshop and establishes an emotional connection to one of the corpses. In “Houses,” a homeless teen recalls the series of events that defined her sexual awakening while she and her nonverbal brother Eskimo move among abandoned houses and broken-down vehicles in search of safety and shelter. Preteen girls seek the ghosts of the dead in “1-800-FAT GIRL.” The story “Edie” revolves around a friendship that began in kindergarten, then focuses on the rape of a high school girl named Edie, as related by a narrator named Ruthie who cannot remember how she knows about the assault. Death may or may not have played a literal role, and her memory may or may not be that of someone who was there.
“Geminder’s characters embody desperation,” observed Sean L. Corbin at the JMWW Blog. Hannah Pittard commented in the New York Times Online: “The worlds her characters inhabit are chaotic, disorienting, nightmarish and vital.” The presence of death propels them toward the world of the living. The encounters “enrich the characters, break them down, rebuild them,” Corbin wrote.
There is horror in these stories, but as in life, there is also a dark sense of humor. “The true texture of life … is never ultimately any one thing,” Geminder told Tyree. The language emerges from the “sneaky, subtle darkness,” Corbin wrote, and can be “both beautiful and more than a little disturbing.” The plural voices and the author’s intentional use of repetition emphasize the urgency of their plight.
To a Kirkus Reviews contributor, these are “startling, far-reaching tales of women who haunt and are haunted.” “Geminder’s stories are refreshing, surprising, and evocative,” noted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. Pittard described Dead Girls & Other Stories as “a breathlessly fast-moving collection that leaves a reader enchanted, provoked and curious.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of Dead Girls & Other Stories.
Publishers Weekly, August 7, 2017, review of Dead Girls & Other Stories, p. 48.
ONLINE
Dzanc Books Website, http://www.dzancbooks.org/ (March 21, 2018), book description.
Emily Geminder Website, http://www.emilygeminder.com (March 21, 2018).
JMWW Blog, https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/ (September 9, 2018), Sean L. Corbin, review of Dead Girls & Other Stories.
New England Review, http://www.nereview.com/ (February 17, 2016), author interview; (November 23, 2017), author profile.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (November 17, 2017), Hannah Pittard, review of Dead Girls & Other Stories.
Emily Geminder is the author of Dead Girls and Other Stories, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and elsewhere. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and a Pushcart Special Mention. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a PhD fellow in fiction at the University of Southern California.
Emily Geminder is the author of Dead Girls and Other Stories, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.
May 16, 2016 - Emily Geminder's short stories, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review Online, .... Born and raised in New York, she received her bachelor's degree from Harvard and her master's from Columbia.
DESCRIPTION
With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the sparks of villagers below. In Cambodia, four young women confuse themselves with the ghost of a dead reporter. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and again: as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare.
2/17/16
elcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which NER shares conversations with our current writers. Nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree spoke recently with author Emily Geminder about the powerful content and unusual shape of her essay “Phnom Penh 2012” (NER 36.4).
J. M. Tyree: Could we start with some basic facts about what you were doing in Cambodia as a reporter? What drew you into this life?
Emily Geminder: In 2011, I went to work for The Cambodia Daily, a newspaper in Phnom Penh. There were four of us, all women in our mid-twenties, who started together at the paper. That was really the launching point for this essay. We were like any young journalists coming to Cambodia—a little wide-eyed and out of our element. But the fact that we all were women drew a certain amount of attention: speculation about the publisher’s motivations, jokes about the editor who’d hired us. Whereas of course four men coming in at once would be nothing remarkable at all. And then there’d also been this terrible tragedy a few months earlier in which a young woman at the paper had died. Drugs were involved, and three other employees were fired. The four of us heard trickles of this story, but no one talked about it directly, and some of what we heard initially turned out to be completely wrong. I think this added to our sense of being linked to something dark and unsayable and also gendered, a ghost who was always following us. On the one hand, it was a very specific entry into this world but at the same time, a not entirely uncommon one—you can’t work in Cambodia for any length of time and not find yourself thinking a great deal about the undercurrents of history and the strange and uncanny forces they exert on the present. When I got to Phnom Penh, I started taking Khmer lessons from an amazing teacher named Chin Setha, and he and I would go line by line through the Khmer newspapers, which were even more brutal and violent than the English-language ones, so just coming into the language was an initiation into this sense of pervasive violence, particularly violence against women. And at the same time, the trial against the four senior living leaders of the Khmer Rouge had just begun, and there were whispers about why charges like forced marriage and sexual violence had been so slow to be addressed by the prosecution, if at all. There was a sense too that there was a history of violence that was continuous, something unsayable but hovering just below the surface of everyday life.
JMT: When thinking back on these experiences, what made you decide to write about this time in such a lyrical but elliptical way, rather than in the form of a more standard-issue personal essay?
EG: I think the piece really started to take its current shape when I began to hear the voice as plural. Which was also a way of thinking about what it means to be female in a very <
JMT: Were there other writers who influenced your decisions about style?
EG: Reading Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson and Roland Barthes really changed the way I thought about nonfiction. Coming out of the journalism world—where you tend to view language as something inert and functional—I thought for a long time that nonfiction was something I had no real interest in writing. But then I saw these writers doing really extraordinary things in the borderlands between prose and poetry, using the interiority and fluidity of the essay to look not just inward but outward, to create this dynamic exchange with the world. They were taking the same rigorous approach to issues as journalism but doing it in a way that pricked the reader into a kind of immediacy and intimacy and maybe even complicity with the subject matter, and in such a way that form was inseparable from substance. If we’re all to some extent captive to language and narratives not our own, then I think the only way to get at something new is through the language itself. There’s no way out but through.
JMT: You mix elements of horror and humor in a way that strikes me as very honest and true to life, at least in my very limited experience hearing from or about writers who have worked in somewhat similar situations. Any reflections about that specific choice?
EG: A lot of the writers I love mix darkness and humor in brilliant ways—Anne Enright, George Saunders, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Lucy Corin. I think part of that is just getting at <
JMT: I wanted to be sure to ask you about an element of your essay I admire very much, its very short length. You capture an entire world in this brief space, but I wonder how many pages and drafts had to be left on the cutting-room floor? Hearing something more about your process would be illuminating.
EG: I tried initially to write a straightforward short story that drew on some of the same experiences, but I failed horribly every time. So certain lines had been rattling around my head for quite a while. Once I started to hear the voice, though, the essay actually came pretty quickly. But then I put it away for a long time—about a year and a half—before sending it out. I remember really loving the experience of writing it but also being very aware the whole time that it was this weird experiment that might actually be completely terrible—the sort of thing you write for yourself but never ever show to anyone else. So much of the essay, too, relies on sound and repetition, and I almost had to forget it, to get the rhythm of the lines out of my head, before I felt like I could make any sort of judgment about it.
Emily Geminder’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a fellowship award from the Vermont Studio Center.
11/23/17
Emily Geminder Receives 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize
egeminderNER congratulates author Emily Geminder on winning the 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize for her work, Dead Girls. The Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize was created to recognize daring, original, and innovative writing.
Geminder, a doctoral fellow in fiction at the University of Southern California and winner of a fellowship award from the Vermont Studio Center, said of receiving the prize: “I couldn’t be happier to have my short story collection published by Dzanc. Writing stories is a long strange journey and it’s wonderful to think of them going out into the world.”
Geminder will receive a cash prize for the award, in addition to publication in the fall of 2017.
Emily Geminder’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House Open Bar, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and her work was noted in Best American Essays 2016. Previously she worked as a journalist in New York and Cambodia. She is currently a doctoral fellow in fiction at the University of Southern California. Her essay “Phnom Penh 2012” was published in NER 36.4.
Print Marked Items
Geminder, Emily: DEAD GIRLS AND
OTHER STORIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Geminder, Emily DEAD GIRLS AND OTHER STORIES Dzanc (Adult Fiction) $16.95 10, 17 ISBN: 978-
1-945814-33-4
A chorus of dead and living girls and women in nine stories.Geminder's cohesive debut features diverse
settings, but whether in India, Cambodia, or New York, her female protagonists face similar anxieties. These
are the horrors of the body, the limitations of language, and the constant presence of death. Events recur and
become motifs. In "Edie," the narrator recounts the rape of a high school girl. The strange part, she thinks, is
her own inability to remember how she first heard of it. "It was as if the story had been conveyed not in the
usual way, person to person, but had existed quietly inside me and was only now revealed." In "Coming To,"
the staff of a Cambodian newspaper begins using the term "rape-murder" in their articles despite questions
from the copy chief. "Almost every day, there's at least one rape in the paper....Sometimes they are rapemurders."
There is an eerie convergence of female identities and experiences across time and space--mass
faintings, possession by aliens and by spirits, and the horrific series of dead girls that permeates the lives of
the living in the title story and throughout. We meet an old hippie man who refers to all girls by the same
name--Annie--and in "Phnom Penh," four women, narrating in a collective first person, give voice to this
concept themselves: "We'd come to replace a dead girl," they explain. "We were replacements," they note.
"We were girls."<< Startling, far-reaching tales of women who haunt and are haunted>>.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Geminder, Emily: DEAD GIRLS AND OTHER STORIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364862/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ed383208. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364862
Dead Girls and Other Stories
Publishers Weekly.
264.32 (Aug. 7, 2017): p48+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dead Girls and Other Stories
Emily Geminder. Dzanc (PGW, dist.), $16.95
trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-945814-33-4
In her debut collection, Geminder covers a range of subjects and injects them with her own brand of
liveliness and creativity. "Coming To" uses dictionary definitions to both frame and splinter a narrative
about a reporter's unsettling experiences in Cambodia, including a rash of unexplained fainting episodes.
The title story, written in the second person, is structured around a four-day anatomy workshop. Abundant
with gallows humor, the workshop serves as a backdrop to a self-examination by one of the participants.
The straightforward and affecting "Houses" tracks the rough existence of a homeless family. In "Nausicaa,"
the narrator addresses a departed friend, recounting their experiences together through the lens of James
Joyce's Ulysses. The eerie and memorable "Edie," the collection's best story, has a fair number of references
to death as well, but it's left to the reader to decide how literally they are to be taken. At the core of the story
is a tight friendship between the authoritative but enigmatic title character and narrator Ruthie, who first
meets her in kindergarten. Through a child's eyes, friendship, the rocky road to adolescence, and the dangers
of the modern world are compellingly treated.<
(Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dead Girls and Other Stories." Publishers Weekly, 7 Aug. 2017, p. 48+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500340324/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6ad1f1de.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500340324
September 18, 2017 · by jmwwblog · in Reviews. ·
Dead Girls and Other Stories
by Emily Geminder
192 Pages
Dzanc Books (2017)
$16.95, paper
ISBN: 978-1945814334
While reading Emily Geminder’s Dead Girls and Other Stories, one word kept coming back to me, again and again: desperation.
<
Geminder shows this desperation not only through the words of the narrators, but in how those words, those stories, are constructed. This is not a collection of stories overly dependent on plot; these are stories that attain their power through description, through syntax. Geminder uses a lot of parallelism and repetition to quickly build the urgent worlds of these stories. Look at this passage, from “Phnom Penh”:
We called to report gossip. We called to ask what kind of mood he was in. At bars, we sat on the same stool, then shouted that we were not the same person. But can I just point out that you’re sitting on top of each other right now? We debated the coming coup, jumped at dark spots scuttling across the floor. We fell in love with the ones who shouted most. The dead girl understood.
These are girls who have come to a foreign country to work in the news industry, to replace a girl who was killed. They are out of their elements and overcompensating. They are desperate to find comfort so far from home. The repetition of “we [verb]” to begin sentences builds a passionate litany with an energy that grows and grows without real traditional release.
The desperation, and what I would call <
We are six. We know that there’s a body and the body is her father. But how the body is her father is harder to say. He’s become a dark spot hovering just above our eyelids, a presence that tilts the whole room. We move through it like we would a funhouse, not knowing what’s real—everything swollen and overwrought, red velour everywhere grown-ups stiff as wax.
The room is described, feeling both hot and (emotionally) cold. The father’s presence is described. These two descriptions connect to make a terrifying and, in some ways, exhilarating scene for the speaker and her cousin, who are both eight years old.
And of course, the presence of bodies in the stories creates a desperation to live for the characters who survive. Villagers are bombed in “Your Village Has Been Bombed” and yet the citizens continue to live their lives. A father has died in “Coming To,” and now the family and friends must learn how to live without him. A young woman with anxiety issues signs up for a “four-day anatomy workshop” and encounters dead bodies in the title story. These encounters with death <
Geminder’s characters, then are looking for life, for connections, for ways to keep breathing. The ending passage of “Choreograph” best encapsulates, for me, what these characters are hoping for, looking for, waiting for: “Or maybe, if you were lucky, you’d wash up on the shore, someone pulling on your second toe. Someone tugging you back to this world, the world of things. As if to say: here is the world of bodies, of light. Of all the things light touches. Someone calling you back.”
Sean L. Corbin
By HANNAH PITTARDNOV. 17, 2017
DEAD GIRLS
And Other Stories
By Emily Geminder
176 pp. Dzanc. Paper, $16.95.
Photo
The girls of Geminder’s title may be dead, but her debut collection brims with life. Whether she’s writing, in the first story, about a displaced young girl at odds with her family and herself and this world or, in the last, about a young woman seeking meaning through her interactions with a corpse named Gracie (to which she’s assigned at a four-day anatomy workshop), Geminder demands attention through her prose. <
If it’s true that good art is often in conversation with the good art that preceded it, then Geminder’s stories seem to be in conversation with Aimee Bender’s work — the collection’s second story, “1-800-FAT-GIRL,” especially calls to mind Bender’s “Debbieland,” from the book “Willful Creatures” — as well as the work of master storytellers like Steven Millhauser and John L’Heureux. In short, this is<< a breathlessly fast-moving collection that leaves a reader enchanted, provoked and curious>> about the little-noticed corners of the darkening world.