Last week I was in Washington D.C, having been awarded a week-long fellowship at the 2008 Kennedy Center's American College Theater Festival. A play I wrote/co-produced went up at the festival (one of four featured productions out of like a million). Won the National Student Playwriting Award. And a 2008 Sundance Theater Lab Fellowship. And a publishing contract for the play from Samuel French. What up?
This week I had to make up for all the work I didn't do while I was in D.C. Busy days, kids, busy days.
But now I'm back, and am doing a post I've been meaning to do for a while. It's all about the wonderful, magical world of Aimee Bender, a short-story author/novelist who I kind of have a huge book crush on. Here she is, looking very back-inside-sleeve adorable.
Note. Why is it that I only feature attractive artists on my blog? Or is it that I'm just so blindly in love with their talent I think they're all total hottie hot hotsters? This would be a topic for discussion if I allowed people to comment on my blog, which I don't, because I'm completely sensitive and afraid of vicious comments from anonymous haters. So you can just debate it in your own head. Or with me, if we know each other. Anyways. Aimee Bender. Let's do it.
Okay, here's the score. I've read both of Bender's collections of short stories, but not her novel. If I love her so much, why not read the novel? Because I have this weird thing where if I love an author to pieces, I don't want to read all of her/his stuff, I always want at least one book out there waiting for me. This is why I haven't read all of Haruki Murakami or Marcel Proust.
So Aimee Bender has written two volumes of short stories (she's featured in others, you can take point-ten seconds to google that if you want). These collections are....
AND, and, and---
Let's start with "Girl in the Flammable Skirt."
I'm forwarning you right now, this collection isn't perfect. Bender's all about these completely bizarre, modern, pseudo-fairytales. Apparently she writes her stories first thing when she gets up in the morning, when she's still half-asleep. For better or for worse, you can kind of tell, especially in this first collection. Her stories have that odd-dream logic to them, the kind that totally makes sense when you're asleep, but seems crazy town when something mid-day jogs your memory and your remember that dream about angels in your swimming pool drowning Satan in a circus tent. It's not for everyone. But I'm totally in.
In "Girl in the Flammable Skirt" a mermaid and an imp go to high school and fall in love. A man returns home from war to his sweetheart without lips. A grieving librarian has sex with every man that comes through the library doors. A boy who has lost his parents receives the magic ability of being able to find all lost things, his parents being the only exception. This girl has no censor in her head! Bender's stories in this collection are this unbeatable mix of being way kooky and very human, and emotional, and ultimately sad. But most of all, rad. Rad, rad, rad.
Then in "Willfull Creatures", Bender totally goes off her meds and it's even a little bit better than "Flammable Skirt." I hate to pick favorites, but I've got to give you guys the truth, or at least my very subjective perception of it. Okay, get this, in "Creatures" Bender writes of a man who buys a miniature person at a pet store and proceeds to torture him, a woman whose potatoes turn into children, a pumpkin-head family whose latest child ends up with a flat iron head, a boy with key shaped fingers, yay!
YOU GUYS, YOU GUYS, are you as excited as I am? I got so hyper and happy when I read Bender's stories, because I was raised on classic tried and true shorts, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler. I mean, I though Isaac Babel was a little out there but Bender, you guys, Bender brings the crazy home and it's just fab. She's totally insane and and tells really great stories and I give her an A with seven pluses. Bender totally expands your mind so you don't need drugs, because between you and me, I think she's taking enough for the both of us. And I totally support her probable substance abuse, because it makes her write like a fairy-angel-mermaid-princess with magical word-organizing abilities. Plus she's a Los Angelesian, and I always get really excited when artists are from/live in LA, I feel like it gives my place of origin/current residence more cred.
Okay. That's all. Go read you guys. As always and forever, I am---
Affectionately Yours,
Kit Steinkellner
