Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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Dances of Time and Tenderness by Julian Carter JULIAN CARTER is the kind of person who will pick up a stranger at dawn on a seedy street corner in San Francisco. I know this because it is how we met—in that bleak hour before coffee—and it is why, years later, we are still talking about dancing, historiography, fairy tales, queer community, literary marginalia, nereids, nasturtiums, transfeminist activism, and whether a list can be liberatory. I have learned to have coffee beforehand. In one of our recent conversations, when we discovered that the Italian word for lace (merletto) comes from the crenellations in castle walls (merlons), I was reminded of Julian’s twin gifts for finding interconnection and queerly reimagining forms. In other words, he is the kind of writer who will pick up a stray word on some back alley of the English language and cherish it. To me, Dances of Time and Tenderness , his new book, is an act of public cherishing, an embrace of words and histories that might otherwise go ungathered. This is a book in which story cycles are concatenated like circle dances. The depth of its craft is apparent from the opening page, where Julian writes of “linked arcs, partnered bodies, dangling stories, turning and turning in the round and shining dance. A circle made of bones and lightning.” These literary interludes are held together by drawings of chains that give depth to the book’s metaphors. As Julian writes: “The names we give each other twine past and present with here and there, into ropes and chains of meaning that knot and coil and cable; fold and ply, link and fray and splice and split until they arrive at last, in you, with all their storied lineage aboard.” The “you” and the “we” of this book are full of this knowing intimacy—of care. At the same time, the first-person “I” refuses to deflate into any neat or flatly imposed truth; while Dances of Time and Tenderness generously displays Julian’s talent for grafting story onto history, it counters many assumptions around autobiography. One thing I […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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