AWP21—Aimee Bender

F***ing Shakespeare

Photo credit: Mike Glier

Aimee Bender graduated from UC Irvine and teaches at USC. Her books have received accolades in all the major outlets: from the New York Times, LA Times, & MCSweeney’s, to Oprah. Her latest novel, published July 2020, is The Butterfly Lampshade. When I was rattling off the list of Bender’s books, Kate deadpanned, “So she’s basically taken all the best titles from the universe.”

In this episode, Bender reads from her latest novel. Of it, an astute reviewer wrote, “[it’s] as if we’d shrunk to fit inside a Joseph Cornell diorama... we feel as Francie does: that anything and anyone might be a two-way street, capable of passing from our side into theirs by means of illustration—or from their side into ours by means of emanation...and after ‘slipping into being...we really ought not to be here.’”

Listen as we discuss why exposing your kids to things like modern dance and The Blue Man Group is a good thing, how to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on but also feel confident enough to vary your form as a writer, and remembering the mindless goodness (and potential writing prompt) in just staring at an object in space. (N.B. Your phone’s screen does not count.)

Honorable Mentions:

• Flannery O’Connor’s reminder to us all:

  “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” (from O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”)

• Best writer note to your younger self: “Write what you like, kid. Enough of this posturing.”

Aimee Bender’s Incredible Backlist:

• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

• The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

• The Color Master

• An Invisible Sign of My Own

• Willful Creatures: Stories