What are you currently working on? What can we look forward to reading? All of IT: the reading, the writing, the revising, the submitting, the self-soothing when you get rejected, and the celebration when you get published. You have to commit to it, and you have to do it. Writing is hard, but it’s not rocket science and it’s not magic. What advice do you have for would be novelists/writers? Rosa Lane leaves her ridiculous job and loses her long-term boyfriend and spirals into a depression that is at once psychological, financial, and existential. The prose sweeps you up with its music and rhythm, and the humor is so subtle and smart. Just one? I’ll pick a contemporary British one: Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna. What is the one book you wish you had written? Everything in this world wants to limit and box and stereotype I want to expand and complicate and imagine. I explore the lives of my characters - both fictional and historical - and imagine alternate possibilities that often contradict received narratives about who they are, who we are. How do you see your role as a writer and what do you like most about it? The stories I wrote in grad school were the first ones I published, and several of them are in my book, For Sale By Owner. It helped that I could get a degree in it: something to make it seem legitimate rather than a hobby that took me from my young child. I began to explore other possibilities, and slowly I gave myself permission to pursue writing. I was no longer an athlete, and I hated being a coach. I was an athlete, not a writer.īut my competitive athletic career ended was I was twenty-three years old, and I became an English teacher (for I was reading and writing all along). In fact, I became wrapped up in that identity and believed it excluded being a writer. But I did not learn that I could be a writer. As an athlete, I learned discipline, I learned to practice regularly, and I learned to trust my mind and body. On my university soccer team, I was the Most Valuable Player. In fourth grade I was given a certificate: Best Athlete. In track and field, I did the high jump, the long jump, the hurdles. I played soccer (football to the rest of the world), softball, and basketball. and wish her huge success with her latest book and her future writing. We would like to thank Kelcey for taking part in A Conversation With. The two sections combine to create a book asĭefiant, enchanting, and complex as its namesake. To Božena” is Parker Ervick’s epistolary memoir of her own failing marriageĪnd her quest for a Czech typewriter, as well as a meditation on reading, Inspired by Němcová’s letters, the book’s second section, “Postcards Kundera calls the “Mother of Czech Prose.” Kelcey Parker Ervick’s innovativeĬollage form, with its many voices and viewpoints, questions the concept ofīiographical “truth” while also revealing a nuanced and spellbinding portrait Life of Božena Němcová is a biographical collage of found texts, footnotes,įragments, and images by and about the Czech fairy tale writer, whom Milan It’s a terrific work of lyric nonfiction, a form underrepresented on the fairy tale shelves.” Fans of Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts-frankly, anyone interested in fairy tales and in memory and in desire-should read this haunting biographical collage. “ The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová by Kelcey Parker Ervick is one of the least bitter, most loving books I have read in a long time, and it’s beautifully made. Artistic, rebellious, and unapologetically intelligent, Božena Němcová defiedĮvery convention for a woman in mid-nineteenth-century Bohemia: she wasĪctive in nationalist politics, she smoked cigars, she took a series of lovers,Īnd she laid bare her ideas and emotions in her letters and stories. The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová A Biographical Collage by Kelcey Parker Ervick. Her blog features interviews with contemporary writers and the series, “Letters to Dead Authors”. A recipient of grants from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches creative writing and literary collage at Indiana University South Bend. She is the author of the story collection For Sale By Owner (Kore Press) and of Liliane’s Balcony (Rose Metal Press), a novella-in-flash set at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and winner of silver medal awards from the IPPY, Foreword, and Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Kelcey Parker Ervick has travelled to Prague regularly since 2003 and currently directs an overseas study program to Prague and Berlin, where students create collage journals inspired by artists such as Hannah Höch, Toyen (Marie Čermínová), and Jiří Kolář.
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