NEWSLETTER



OTHER PLACES

  



ISSUE 1

Michael Kimball

Michael Kimball is one of my favorite new writers.

Kimball is not trying to make extravagant prose, but rather makes extravagant stories through form and structure. His mastery seems to come from his curatorial prowess and the larger picture. Over the last year and a half, he has been writing other peoples life stories on postcards, as well as his own. In an interview with NPR, Kimball says, “there are two ways to group people who come to the blog to have their life story written: Those who have an ego and want ‘how good and what they've done sort of given back to them’ and those who have had interesting or difficult experiences and want to "reclaim" their lives.” His take on literature is not abstract, but wholly based in reality. There is little sentimentalism, few eccentricities, but an honest attempt to distill and honor things for what they are and what they’ve done. He says, “Everything has a life story. You just have to ask.” He has written over 200 life stories, including those of a red delicious apple, a cat, and young and old people alike. Here in PRISM index #1 we have excerpts of his most recent book, Dear Everybody. In the print edition you can read excerpts from Jonathon Bender’s suicide letters dated from 1967-1999. Kimball says, “Jonathon Bender had something to say, but the world wouldn’t listen. That’s why he writes letters to everybody he has ever known—including his mother and father, his brother and other relatives, his childhood friends and neighbors, the Tooth Fairy, his classmates and teachers, his psychiatrists, his ex-girlfriends and his ex-wife, the state of Michigan, a television station, and a weather satellite. Taken together, these unsent letters tell the remarkable story of Jonathon’s life.”

Kimball was an obvious choice for PRISM index as our goal revolves around the larger story. Each bit of the compilation is not intended to stand on its own, but rather create a dialogue between each other.

Memo:

Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-1951) changed how I think about novels. It is a huge canvas, 8’x18’, and striking as soon as you walk into its room at MOMA. But the way this painting is experienced changes as you get closer to it. The canvas is large enough, so that you can begin to feel absorbed by its color fields, maybe even becoming one of its zips. It’s unsettling and beautiful and transcendent. It’s a feeling that changed how I think about writing novels, about how I try to involve the reader in the novel, about how I try to get the reader to feel certain things through writing in certain ways (and by leaving certain gaps). The reader becomes a part of the novel if you can get them to look close enough.

-Michael

Official Site