Camille Roy

Cold Heaven joins two plays, Sometimes Dead is Better and Bye Bye Brunhilde, with an introduction by the author. Both plays have the dissonant, radical beauty of poetry.

As Roy writes in her Introduction to the book: “Plays are porous, written to be entered… Plays provide a frame for studying collisions… Language can be an (uncontrollable) character, moving in on the others, creating a stir… [I]n a play… the private self disappears. Writing can move out into the dead zone between any two people and test what is there.”

Imagine a Punch and Judy as lesbians whose domestic and sexual squabbles are paraded in the language of brilliant poets; these are Camille Roy's Fear and Technique. A wonderful play.

The forest is a place of refuge and story, created by characters who enter and enlarge it beyond the fantasy of any one person. Authority is diminished and recuperated. Personalities perform themselves via vivid and anarchic gestures. A condition of dereliction becomes the arena where bodies rustle with erotic pulse.

"My hope was that this book would be entered as its own social space. Like a gay bar of the fifties, entry would signal that you have taken membership in a stigmatized community, with the risk that entails. Can readership entail risk? Readership as a secret society."—Camille Roy

"If a book can be yummy & brilliant, of course this is that. Reading THE ROSY MEDALLIONS I felt I had come upon a world with so many insides, moments forged, then strewn, by an alienated pleasure seeking 'I.' This author's perspective ranges back and forth over her life and memories like a hungry camera, doggily attracted to instances of beauty, cruelty and aeons of female privacy. Camille Roy's a pioneer in the new literature which used to be called autobiography, poetry, theater, prose or even the essay. See all their walls submissively crumble on her trek towards a gaudy piecemeal something resembling truth for the new dark ages and some light at the end of the tunnel"—Eileen Myles.

[These copies are from the original print from 1995. Some of them have damaged covers, mostly scratched ink. The insides are in perfect condition. No bend corners.]

Honey Mine unfolds as both excavation and romp, an adventure story that ushers readers into a lesbian writer's coming of age through disorienting, unsparing, and exhilarating encounters with sex, gender, and distinctly American realities of race and class. From childhood in Chicago's South Side to youth in the lesbian underground, Roy's politics find joyful and transgressive expression in the liberatory potential of subculture. Find here, in these new, uncollected and out-of-print fictions by a master of New Narrative, a record of survival and thriving under conditions of danger.

A Community Writing Itself features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson. The book fills a major gap in contemporary poetics, focusing on one of the most vibrant experimental writing communities in the nation. The writers discuss vision and craft, war and peace, race and gender, individuality and collectivity, and the impact of the Bay Area on their work.

Sarah Rosenthal grew up in Chicago and lives in San Francisco. She is the author of three chapbooks: How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), SITINGS (a+bend, 2000) and not-chicago (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 1998). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and have been anthologized in BAY POETICS (Faux Press, 2006) and hinge (Crack Press, 2002). She has taught creative writing at Santa Clara University and San Francisco State University. She has edited a collection of interviews entitled A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Award for Fiction and grant-supported writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Ragdale Foundation.

The fourth issue of FIELDNOTES contains new work by:

Adeola Titiloye, ajw, Fanny Howe, Will Alexander, Michael O’Mahony, Agnieszka Szczotka, Renee Gladman & Isabel Mallet, Can Xue, Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, Tony Brooks, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan, Mat Jenner, Alba Schloessingk, Camille Roy, Pete Segall, Johanna Hedva, Beihua Guo, Cedar Sigo, KP Culver

FIELDNOTES is an artist-run publishing project based in Newham in east London, aiming to promote and support non-conforming creative practices that pioneer new cultural forms.

Robert Glück's new book I, Boombox is a long poem fashioned from the author's misreadings. In that sense, it's a queer autobiography in which Glück dreams on the page.

"Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God's laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film, and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes."—Lisa Robertson

"In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the 'umbilical/indescribabilia' that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the 'invisible speakers' that populate Glück's poem—their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies—turn dream's content into poetic foam. In this mind's eye—the 'suburb' is blithely rendered into a thing 'superb, ' and 'loneliness' roars with the face of a 'lioness /and intimacy.' I, Boombox is a poem of frothy divinations tempered by the slapstick of speech. It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless—and this is a delight to understand."—Shiv Kotecha

Winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English.

Robert Glück served as director of San Francisco State University's The Poetry Center, co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. His books include two novels, Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe, two books of stories, ELEMENTS OF A COFFEE SERVICE and Denny Smith, a book of poems, Reader, and with Kathleen Fraser, a book of prose poems, In Commemoration of the Visit. With Bruce Boone, Glück translated La Fontaine for a book of that name. With Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, he edited Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück prefaced Between Life and Death, a volume of Frank Moore's paintings, and, with artist Dean Smith, made the film Aliengnosis, based on readings from I, Boombox. Other books include Communal Nude: Collected Essays, and Parables, an editioned artist book with Cuban artists José Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero D'az. Margery Kempe was republished by NYRB Classics in 2020 and his novel About Ed by NYRB in 2023.

In this issue, Worms explores New Narrative alongside writers working today that incorporate some of it’s themes. The cover star Saidiya Hartman talks with Rhea Dillon about the limits and processes of creating stories from the archive, while Camille Roy and Dodie Bellamy give insight into New Narrative from their experiences involved in the movement. Savannah Knoop tells about their life playing the character of J.T Leroy, while Calla Henkel delves into ideas of using other people’s narratives as our own. There’s lots of gleaning, lots of stealing and lots of hard truths coming from the human body. There is poetry and fiction and all of the usual bits, as well as an experimental cut up piece demonstrating the appropriation method that Kathy Acker (via William Burroughs) used in so much of her work. Many more worms to be found in these pages.

Featuring:
Saidiya Hartman, Camille Roy, Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman, Estelle Hoy, Rhea Dillon, Savannah Knoop, Lauren Fournier, Madelyne Beckles, Joanna Walsh, Anne Turyn, Cristina Morales, Calla Henkel, Jenny Zhang

Contributors:
ZARA JOAN MILLER, HAYDEE TOUITOU, NICOLE DELLA COSTA, CECILIA PAVON, VALENTINA VON KLENCKE, FEYI ADEGBITE, ALICE PLATTI, VICTORIA CAMPA, ALICE BUTLER, CLEMMIE BACHE, CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN, JACK STUART MILLS, HONOR WEATHERALL, ARCADIA MOLINAS, AIMEE BALLINGER, WES KNOWLER, ELEANOR WANG, KATY DADACZ, OLIVE COURI, RACHEL CATTLE, ISABELLE BUCKLOW, SARAH BODRI, HOPE ROAFL, MAURA SAPPILO, JODIE HILL, JACQUELINE ENNIS COLE, MARY WATT, DELIA RAINEY.

This long overdue anthology of New Narrative includes both classic New Narrative texts and rare supplementary materials, allowing the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to bound back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion, to form a new map of late 20th century creative rebellion.

"Gossipy and uninhibited, its breath is hot in your ear. It wants to tell you everything, and it wants you to overshare back." — M. Milks

"One of New Narrative's all-time best jokes is about the movement itself. It's the parodic motto that Bellamy formulates in Academonia for New Narrative "at its worst" "I have sex and I'm smarter than you." But "sex without fantasy," Camille Roy posits, "is nothing." The pieces compiled in Writers Who Love Too Much don't restrict fantasy. They use, as Boone says, eros, rather than facts, as the matter of narrative. Sex and fantasy are for New Narrative the stuff of ordinary life." — Jean-Thomas Trembla

Contributors include: Steve Abbott, Kathy Acker, Michael Amnasan, Roberto Bedoya, Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Benderson, Charles Bernstein, Nayland Blake, Bruce Boone, Lawrence Braithwaite, Rebecca Brown, Kathe Burkhart, Marsha Campbell, Dennis Cooper, Sam D'Allesandro, Gabrielle Daniels, Leslie Dick, Cecilia Dougherty, Bob Flanagan, Robert Glück, Judy Grahn, Brad Gooch, Carla Harryman, Richard Hawkins, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Edith A. Jenkins, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, R. Zamora Linmark, Eileen Myles, John Norton, F.S. Rosa, Camille Roy, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, David O. Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Matias Viegener, Scott Watson, Laurie Weeks.