My first Writer Spotlight is on emerging author, Julia Elliott. From her bio:
"Julia Elliott's fiction has appeared in Tin House, the Georgia Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Puerto del Sol, Mississippi Review, Best American Fantasy, and other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. Her novel The New and Improved Romie Futch will be published by Tin House Books in 2015, and she is currently working on a novel about Hamadryas baboons, a species that she has studied as an amateur primatologist. She teaches English and women’s and gender studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she lives with her daughter and husband. She and her spouse, John Dennis, are founding members of Grey Egg, an experimental music collective."
Even if I had never read anything she so brilliantly wrote, I would still want to be this woman's friend. It's not really stalking if it's virtual, right? Baboons. Women and gender studies. An experimental music collective. I'm very close to using that annoying *swoon* I see in mommy blogs so often... but I won't. I won't fake-pass-out on a velvet settee, because I want to talk about Julia Elliott's awesomeness.
I read The Wilds, a small collection of Elliott's short stories. This is the bit that caught me. (Spoiler: It's the very first paragraph, from the very first story entitled, Rapture.)
Brunell Hair lived in a lopsided mill house with her mama and her uncle and her little withered-up critter of a grandma. In honor of her eleventh birthday, she was having a slumber party, but so far, only my best friend, Bonnie, and I had showed. Our mothers had had some kind of powwow, during which they'd smoked cigarettes and worked themselves into a tizzy over how vain and selfish we were getting, finally declaring that sleeping over Brunell's house would be just the thing to "teach us a lesson" about how fortunate and spoiled we were. Truth told, we wanted to see Brunell in her natural habitat. We wanted to see the creepy troll-child's lair, witness the antics of her Jesus-freak mother, spy on her uncle, who'd appeared in several television commercials. And see her Meemaw speak in tongues.
There is a possibility that other readers won't be as close to weeping as I am after reading that, but I choose to pretend those people don't exist in this world. If I could crawl inside Elliott's beautifully twisted mind and roll around in the sticky deliciousness of her oh-so-lavender imaginings, I would be one blissfully whacked-out writer. For the sake of reality, I'll settle for inspired.
Julia Elliott is a new favorite. I'm looking forward to her next novel The New and Improved Romie Futch set to be published by Tin House Books this year.
"Julia Elliott's fiction has appeared in Tin House, the Georgia Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Puerto del Sol, Mississippi Review, Best American Fantasy, and other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. Her novel The New and Improved Romie Futch will be published by Tin House Books in 2015, and she is currently working on a novel about Hamadryas baboons, a species that she has studied as an amateur primatologist. She teaches English and women’s and gender studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where she lives with her daughter and husband. She and her spouse, John Dennis, are founding members of Grey Egg, an experimental music collective."
Even if I had never read anything she so brilliantly wrote, I would still want to be this woman's friend. It's not really stalking if it's virtual, right? Baboons. Women and gender studies. An experimental music collective. I'm very close to using that annoying *swoon* I see in mommy blogs so often... but I won't. I won't fake-pass-out on a velvet settee, because I want to talk about Julia Elliott's awesomeness.
I read The Wilds, a small collection of Elliott's short stories. This is the bit that caught me. (Spoiler: It's the very first paragraph, from the very first story entitled, Rapture.)
Brunell Hair lived in a lopsided mill house with her mama and her uncle and her little withered-up critter of a grandma. In honor of her eleventh birthday, she was having a slumber party, but so far, only my best friend, Bonnie, and I had showed. Our mothers had had some kind of powwow, during which they'd smoked cigarettes and worked themselves into a tizzy over how vain and selfish we were getting, finally declaring that sleeping over Brunell's house would be just the thing to "teach us a lesson" about how fortunate and spoiled we were. Truth told, we wanted to see Brunell in her natural habitat. We wanted to see the creepy troll-child's lair, witness the antics of her Jesus-freak mother, spy on her uncle, who'd appeared in several television commercials. And see her Meemaw speak in tongues.
There is a possibility that other readers won't be as close to weeping as I am after reading that, but I choose to pretend those people don't exist in this world. If I could crawl inside Elliott's beautifully twisted mind and roll around in the sticky deliciousness of her oh-so-lavender imaginings, I would be one blissfully whacked-out writer. For the sake of reality, I'll settle for inspired.
Julia Elliott is a new favorite. I'm looking forward to her next novel The New and Improved Romie Futch set to be published by Tin House Books this year.