• For Now

    by Eileen Myles
    Price $18.00
    Hardcover
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    For Now
October 9, 2020

Eileen Myles

Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned, award-winning poet EILEEN MYLES—author of over twenty volumes of poetry as well as the acclaimed memoir, Afterglow—for a discussion of their book-length essay, For Now. They will be joined in conversation by ANDREA LAWLOR, author of the beloved novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Details

Blending humor and meditation, this wide-ranging essay by the award-winning poet and writer Eileen Myles is a candid record of the multivalent forces that shaped them as a writer. It is also a thoughtful investigation into the way that writing is inescapably enmeshed with time. Myles recounts how potential eviction from their apartment; relationships with friends, lovers, and neighbors; and the textures and identities of various cities, including New York and Marfa, Texas, all present a sense of writing as presence within time. “Once I tasted time I never wanted anything else. . . . The only way I can prove it is that I started writing. Writing is my alibi,” they note. The author concludes that writing is a form of loving that makes living “more beautiful” because “I have time for it, I am in it.”

About Author(s)

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker and art journalist. Their twenty-two books include Afterglow (a dog memoir), a 2017 re-issue of Cool for YouI Must Be Living Twice, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the PSA, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, Myles received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 they received an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, is the recipient of a 2020 Whiting Award for Fiction, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards. Paul, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, is out now from Vintage/Knopf (US) and Picador (UK & Ireland).