:: Reading List: Gayle Brandeis
Winner of Barbara Kingsolver's 2002 Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change
Found Forms
I am not a formal person. I rarely brush my hair, rarely make the bed. I don’t like being boxed into a tetrameter, into a three act structure, in my own work. I’m a huge fan of found forms, though—I love finding existing shapes in nature, in culture, and wrapping words around them. My book Fruitflesh is structured around the growing cycle; my Dictionary Poems collection found its form in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate. My as-yet-unpublished short story collection, The Three States of Rice, is divided into three parts—The Live, The Raw, and The Cooked—which reflect the states of rice, and the themes of the various stories (The Live contains stories about childhood; The Raw has some sexier stuff; The Cooked stories are centered around marriage. And one of the stories within the collection is structured around the list of hurricanes from the year 2000. Another story is structured around the alphabet.) Self Storage, my new novel, is structured around Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.
I love when other writers blow the dust off old, often taken-for-granted, structures and make something new.
Here are a few of my favorite examples:
Gayle's Picks
In the Language of Love: A Novel in 100 Chapters
by Diane Schoemperlen
Schoemperlen employs the 100 stimulus words from the Standard Word Association Test as the framework for her wonderfully associative novel. Each of the 100 chapters is titled with one of the words. (Available through Link+.)
Yoga Poems
by Leza Lowitz
Lowitz borrows the forms of yoga, patterning each poem in the book after a particular yoga pose or practice. (Available through Link+.)
The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi
Levi, a former chemist, uses the structure of the periodic table of elements as a jumping off place for this collection of stories (both fictional and factual).
The Body in Four Parts
by Janet Kauffman
Kauffman calls upon the four elements (Water, Earth, Fire and Air) to name the four sections of this beautifully-written novel. (Available through Link+.)
A Natural History of the Senses
by Diane Ackerman
Ackerman divides her book (one of my favorites of all time) into the five senses, then draws them all together for the final section, Synesthesia.
Alphabetical Africa
by Walter Abish
Abish uses the alphabet—that primal backbone—to structure his novel (all the words in the first chapter begin with A, all the words in the second chapter begin with A or B, and so on, all the way up to Z. Then, in the following 26 chapters, the same process happens backwards, letter by initial letter taken away until the final chapter, like the first, is composed of words that all start with A.) (Available through Link+.)
The Hanged Man
by Francesca Lia Block
The Tarot deck provides a pathway for Block’s powerful young adult novel.
Summerland
by Michael Chabon
Chabon’s magical baseball tale is divided into Bases (and, of course, ends up at Home).
Submitted July 2005