The Writers' Block
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A weekly podcast featuring writers of all stripes reading from their recent work.
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Kate Braverman reads "Fusion City," an essay from her "accidental memoir" Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles.
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About Fusion City
"Fusion City" is an expansion of the essay Braverman wrote for the Economist Prize. It's about 3 women who meet episidocally to bear witness to the childhood
they shared as marginalized girls in a region that detested its inhabitants
and thought them incapable of making art. They had been consigned to deletion and transcended their cirumstances, surviving magnificently. It's a fairy tale rendered in subverted poems disguised as essays, meditations on history and architecture, still lifes and stand-up comedy, held together with threads of hallucinatory glittering language that ignites like landmines and fragmentation bombs, conflagrations. It's the first essay in Kate's new "accidental memoir," Frantic Transmission to and from Los Angeles, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and released in February 2006. Frantic Transmissions is a sculptural rather than painterly book, but if the stars are alligned, it might be Kate Braverman's fire dance, the time she tamed flame.
Purchase Frantic Transmission to and from Los Angeles (at katebraverman.com).
About the Author
Girl child (slippage) of the dirty secret city of Los Angeles, Berkeley in
the '60s, founding member Venice Poetry Workshop, professor of creative
writing, four books of poetry, the novels Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes and The Incantation of Frida K., two short story collections include the widely anthogolized, Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta and Pagan Night.
Awards include Best American Short Story, O.Henry, Carver, and Economist and
Graywolf Prize.
Visit Kate Braverman's web site (at katebraverman.com).
Suggestions? Comments? Experiencing technical problems with The Writers' Block? Please email us at arts@kqed.org
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