BIO
“Katie Farris’s spare and lyrical language levitates—she is a haunting and new revelation.”
–Kate Bernheimer, editor of The Fairy Tale Review
Katie Farris’s poetry, fictions, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse, Indiana Review, Washington Square Review, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Green Mountains Review, Fugue, The Arava Review, Brooklyn Rail, and others.
Her most recent book is BOYSGIRLS, (“a dizzying series of colorful gem-like stories, demon-and-fairy tales that present fabulous monsters that we’ve known existed all along. In fact, any of us might be one” (Hayden’s Ferry Review). Published by Marick Press in 2011, it includes illustrations by Lavinia Hanachiuc. She is also the co-translator of Polina Barskova’s This Lamentable City (“words flicker — strange, elegant — a Russian evanescence. Heat lightning pulses between her lines” (The New York Times), which was published by Tupelo Press, 2010. Her co-translation of If I Were Born in Prague from the French of Guy Jean is forthcoming from Argos Books in 2011. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University’s MFA program in Literary Arts, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at San Diego State University.
From the Interview with Women’s Quarterly Conversation
Question: What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer? Who are your favorite writers and how did they change over time?
Katie Farris: There is a story about me as a toddler— I ran around, naked except for my diaper with a stack of picture books, hollering “Books! Books! Books!” (That’s still how I spend my Saturday nights, incidentally).
Now my two great loves are Southern Gothic and Magical Realism. And here is the all-important list, the majorest stars in my sky: Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Flannery O’Connor, Welty, McCullers, Byatt, Carter, Borges, and Calvino.
In terms of writing, my first love is language, words themselves, strange syntaxes and sounds—it’s always difficult for me to tear myself away from tinkering with linguistic minutia long enough to create stories. On the other hand, my reading has always revolved around plot—by and large, I will take a plot-driven novel over a linguistic meditation, because they’re fun, and provocative, and absorb me completely. The book that combines entertainment with fine language is rare and welcome indeed.
Question: Can you describe your interest with the Devil and how does this personal attention immerse itself in your work?
Katie Farris: How come you never hear about anyone selling his soul to Jesus to become a better guitar player? I guess Jesus isn’t in the market. He accepts them gratis, as a sort of donation (tax-deductible?) or rather a gift.
But the Devil is buying—and moreover, he’s betting. He’s preying (I love the closeness of the words ‘preying’ and ‘praying’) on our most human weaknesses, our vanities and egos to get his souls for free. Then again, he doesn’t always succeed. One of my favorite songs is “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” in which a cocky Devil bets Johnny a golden fiddle on the outcome of a fiddling contest. In the end, Johnny wins, and taunts “Devil just come on back if you ever want to try again/ I done told you once, you son of a bitch/ I’m the best that’s ever been.” It is the danger, of course, that keeps us hanging on, and also the chance, however small, that we get away with our hides, our pride, and perhaps a little more in the bargain.
And the Devil is sexy. He’s smoke rings and martini glasses and snakeskin boots. He’s sleazy or clean-cut: he’s muscle-bound or lithe, he’s whatever gets the job done. Grace Paley once said of one of her characters, “Faith works for me.” The Devil works for me, although he’s (or rather I would say ‘It’s’) often behind the scenes. He’s selfishness, he’s cruelty, he’s fear, he’s anger—at the same time that he’s passion, pride, foolishness—he’s everything that makes a story interesting.
Every artist makes their own deal with the Devil. While I’m not at liberty to discuss the particulars of mine, I will say this: without His existence (and the existence of others like Him, His predecessors and avatars) art would not exist. Whether you’re a practitioner of the most debased and subversive kinds of art (think of the Marquise de Sade, Jean Genet, Bataille… come to think of it, the French have a great history in this regard…), or a high moralist who believes that the duty of the artist is to bring man closer to God (William Blake, etcetera), you’re revolving around the same dichotomy. Even artists who are able to escape the Western particulars of our Lucifer-Satan, having never encountered our particular religion/myths, have their own set of dark figures, however those might be manifest. The artist must allow for a balanced view—to cut out one extreme or another is to devalue both art and life.
For me, moral ambiguity is at the center of art. In my short-short story from boysgirls, “The Devil’s Face,” a girl is trying to please the Devil sexually, and it is only ultimately through a sort of compassion, an empathetic moment, a recognition of someone else’s humanity, that she is able to do so. While people could view the story as perverse or degrading, I prefer to think of it as an honest love story. As all my stories are, ultimately. They are not romantic by and large, but they at bottom motivated by love. And that, for me, may be the only moral imperative.
From the Interview with California Journal of Poetics
Question: Nabokov couldn’t help but let his passion for butterflies populate his fiction. Is there something you are obsessed with that reappears in your writing, no matter how hard you try to abandon it?
Katie Farris: The fantastic. I think it’s because I never want to write metaphors as descriptions—the comparisons are always far more interesting to me than the reality. If I write, “The boy was feeling prickly as a hedgehog that day,” I’d be much more interested in his growing spines (fantastic fiction) than I would be in the fight he would get into with his mother in a more realistic piece.
Fairy tale lends itself to reinvention because it doesn’t need to be reinvented, not really. The nature of the tale, the fact that it exists outside of real time, in some idealized past that our grandparents can relate to in much the same way that we do, transcends the temporal. The issues that fairy tales revolve around too transcend time: rights of passage like marriage or birth, dealing with difficult family, class struggle.
ABOUT BOYSGIRLS
“BOYSGIRLS is one for the classic fairy-tale shelves, joining Borges/Lispector, Calvino/Carter, Andersen/d’Aulnoy with its spectral powers. Katie Farris’s spare and lyrical language levitates here—she is a haunting and new revelation.”
–Kate Bernheimer, author of Horse, Flower, Bird and editor ofThe Fairy Tale Review
“In this first collection, Katie Farris reminds us that “Times are hard for dreamers”, only to go on to provide a number of vivid singularities…a storm of unexpected pleasures to be dreamed while awake.”
–Rikki Ducornet, author of The Fanmaker’s Inquisition, winner of Lannan Award
“Smart and witty, tantalizingly interesting characters: the boy with one wing, the inventor of invented things, the brief sparkling cameo of the cyclops…something of a little tour de force.”
–Robert Coover, author of Origin of the Brunists, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
“These kaleidoscopic fictions have an astonishing delicacy. They spark and cascade and then burst again, changing shape and settling into surprising, entrancing patterns.”
– Joanna Scott, author of Arrogance, winner of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
“Farris…has crafted her unheard stories so intricately, with so much care, that we feel… as if they’d been given to us from another generation.”
–Micah McCrary, Bookslut
“BOYSGIRLS is a dizzying series of colorful gem-like stories, demon-and-fairy tales that present fabulous monsters that we’ve known existed all along. In fact, any of us might be one. In the story “Mise en Abyme” the first line of the story is, “People are forever falling for the girl with a mirror for a face.” In “The Girl who Grew” the first line is, “I know what I look like, lying in this muddy water, my toes and fingers as thick as the trunks of elephants, my eyes rusted almost shut with pondweed and petrified eyelashes.” In “Her Mother’s Mother was a Machete” the first line is, appropriately enough, “Her mother’s mother was a machete.” In “The Devil’s Face” the first line is, “The girl has been learning to shit on the devil’s face.” I rather like and will also quote another line in this story: “It is difficult, he explained, after a millennia of existence, to get off.” These stories are from the “Girls” section. “Boys” is more of an extended parable, concerning a boy with one wing who is seeking flight. It’s a little more obviously empathetic, although empathy is without doubt present in all of Farris’s fiction. It’s beautiful. It escapes being pretty, fortunately. Farris took a risk including it. It might have undermined the fear and loathing, shock and awe that she so carefully cultivated in the “Girls” section. Farris insolently promises to provide fiction that you will be forced to react to, something unique, something you will want to keep reading−and then she insolently makes good on that promise. It is another testament to the potency of Farris’s fiction that its imagery is more brilliant than the ink drawings by illustrator Lavinia Hanachiuk. Yup, you get pictures too. Unless you object to the fecally encrusted face of Satan, there’s nothing not to like here. I suggest getting a copy of BOYSGIRLS as soon as it is published. It is forthcoming this spring.”
–Debrah Lechner, Hayden’s Ferry Reveiw
“BOYSGIRLS is a collection of texts that put everything at stake on language and teeter on the edge of an abyss familiar to readers of Blanchot, Kafka or Lispector. This is not freakishness for its own sake, but is in pursuit of what cannot be said any other way. Farris’ texts lurk below experience, but casting a wider net by the slant of their approach. With this, her first book publication, Farris has emerged as a truly innovative writer. One wonders – and almost fears – what she will accomplish with a longer form.”
– Stephan Delbos, Prague Post (Czech Republic, EU)
“Katie Farris’s BOYSGIRLS is a remarkable collection of stories filled with rich images and language that invites you into the moment: “People are forever falling for the girl with a mirror for a face. And why not? They think, not unaware of the irony. Of course, one has to be careful in direct sunlight. But imagine: if stranded on a desert island, who could resist the siren song of the girl with a mirror for a face?” Thus begins the first story in the collection. Her work is fearless. She recreates the fairy tale with fresh and visceral themes…Farris’s work challenges us to suspend our disbelief, shocks us into looking at the naked truth of the stories… This collection will have you mesmerized from the moment you open the cover to the last words.”
–Midwest Book Review
“Farris’ style is biting satire that… leaves a bloody mark of recognition on the reader… Over the course of my reading life, I have encountered several descriptive passages by a variety of writers detailing the sexual dance between male and female, but this is the first time I was surprised by the outcome…The division between men and women results in a spiritual isolation based on mutual clinging to polarities that no longer work. It is a sage warning against being devoured by our apathy, and a suggestion to instead work toward a change that unites…In addition to the stories, several medieval drawings of the characters punctuate the text, imbuing it with a Brothers Grimm sensibility. However, it would be unfair to extend the comparison beyond this, because Katie Farris is an original in her own right, adding an enchanting new voice to literature…a writer and a storyteller of very human truths.”
–Val B Russell, Her Circle (Canada)
“Farris engages the reader through a powerful voice and an infectious enthusiasm, suffusing these stories with a palpable sense of both delight and danger. As her madwoman narrator blithely declares in the book’s “Introduction/Implication,” it “is time to laugh, to free that deep itch in your tongue,” and she invites the reader to “giddy yourself atop these sheer drops.” The joy of delirium, however, comes tinged with the threat of violence. The stories in this collection carefully navigate between wonder and terror. [Farris] pays loving attention to every word on the page, wedding the exuberance of her narrator’s mad passion with an impressive control of the prose line… Lingering somewhere between dream and nightmare, boysgirls leaves the reader…on the razor’s edge.”
“Katie Farris heralds the dawn of a “new literature” with both fierce audacity and untender irony. One of the first parallels that comes to mind when reading these strange, visceral, both oneiric and palpable “fairy tales” is of course Angela Carter (with a touch of Bulgakov here and there, and even Kharms), only that unlike the English classic, Farris swerves not only from the standard tone and imagery and plot of traditional fairytales, but from the genre itself, and not only hunts the reader’s expectations down in order to deconstruct the story and story-telling, but blows up the very notion of literature and even writing through “fake” allegories that flow into theory and poetry, a combination I see as the writer’s trademark and an accomplishment remarkably above those of quite a number of other American and international young writers who share similar goals. It is for the future to tell us whether these original approaches can “produce” a prolific and consistent work capable of absorbing and covering wider areas. Until then, one cannot but be hypnotized by her curt and jerky statements that coagulate the rhythms of good poetry in prose, verge on theoretical speculation or paradox or allusion, hover over ampler musical phrases, and then fritter and dither back into the obsessive ticking of wordplay and the bursts of liberated pure sound. “The scientists come from everywhere to make a study of the girl. … She loves to hear them say her name, loves the circular sound of Cy-clops, psyclops eyeclops, like a horse galloping over their tongues.” A book that indeed convinces the reader that “the girl is no lamb either” and announces a unique talent with a fearless and original approach that will surely know how to keep metamorphosizing from “inventing invented things,” as one of the characters shrewdly puts it, to the “invention of love” which, as the author strongly states even beyond the book’s pervasive sarcasm, will give us a (poetical) body to eat from and live.”
– Chris Tanasescu, EgoPHobia (Romania, EU)
“Farris’ stories recall Carter and the best of A.S. Byatt’s short works. They are mystical and magical – girls with mirrors for faces, boys with one wing. Stories of almost Greek legend and fairytales taken back to the darkness that was theirs originally.”
– Andilit
“Katie Farris seductively draws us in…dreamscape, character development and plot are handled with the linguistic specificity and precision of poetry in every line; a voice that breaks open the feminine in every turn.”
– Women’s Quarterly Conversation
“Beautifully crafted and illustrated collection of short-shorts written in the vein of modern fairy tales…pieces are short-shorts written in a highly lyrical style packed with beautiful repetitions, anaphora, rhyme, and surprising metaphors, such as the grandmother who is a machete…The stories are more than entertainment; they are a reminder of our multiple personalities, [they] address the process of metamorphosis and the idea of embracing otherness…all the characters are connected by the theme of reflection and vision. To be seen and to see seems to be at stake”
– California Journal of Poetics
“It’s no coincidence that people describing both Katie Farris’ book…invoke Calvino, because the combination of intelligence, whimsy, and wit are certainly there – but I think this is something new, more contemporary, some seizing of some momentary zeitgeist. I think poets should go pick up a copy of BOYSGIRLS, and read as we try to decide: what hybrid form will we wear today? what hybrid will be born to us today?”
“In my years as a book worm and reviewer… I can honestly say that BOYSGIRLS is one of the most interesting books I have ever read. “
– Hampton Reviews
Buy boysgirls from Marick Press