Jen Gann wrote something that features buffalo and AMERICA. Check it out at American Short Fiction.

I’d also just like to say a big thank you to Robert Kloss for introducing me to Vanessa’s work. I wasn’t familiar with it before, but I will be stalking her work from now on like you wouldn’t believe. Anyone who shares my love of myth and folklore and the power of the origin story–that’s a writer I want to see where they’re going and watch how they get there. Brilliant stuff.

I think I first heard of Lily when she won the 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award for Changing, published by the Fairy Tale Review Press. (Obviously I came to the party rather late, but then I just arrived at the indie lit party a couple of years ago, so you’ll have to forgive me.) I remember reading the excerpts published at PEN, and being astounded by the wisdom and the poise of the prose there. It felt like fate, this sudden discovery, this need to read this writer who represented a sort of cool brilliance, these elegant pieces that read almost like theorems but also like dreams, like play, like memory shuffled too many times and spilled all over the floor. The way Lily picks up the pieces of memory and story and dream and equation and arranges them in new and sometimes jarring ways is nothing short of astounding. I thought then, and think now, I would read anything that came out of this person’s brain.

Lucky for me and for countless other fans, Lily’s brain is always producing new thoughts. You can read many of them over at HTMLGiant, where she’s a stellar contributor, expounding on everything from solipsism to Perec to hipsters to constraints to Schumann. And you can read more thoughts here. And here. And here.

And today, you should read Lily’s lovely, playful piece for The Ancient City Project at Necessary Fiction. And pick up a copy of the Evolutionary Revolution afterward–because you’ll want to, and because you’ll want to thank Lily and her lovely brain.

Because I am your friendly September Writer-in-Residence there, and you’re going to want to check out this project I’m working on right from the get-go.  You’re going to see some seriously amazing writing, on topics you couldn’t possibly dream up, by some seriously amazing writers.

What are we working on? Well, I don’t want to spoil it, but we’re creating a history. A city’s history. You’ll be spending the month of September at a dig site, learning about the inhabitants of the city throughout its history, about how they’re linked across the ages through the soil and sediment and sludge, about the things they treasured and the things they left behind. By the time September is done, we’ll have built a shared history far more interesting and three-dimensional than anything you could find in your textbooks.

So head over to Necessary Fiction tomorrow for your first look at the Ancient City. That’s all I’ll say for now.

As most of you have probably discovered for yourselves, the magic of Marcus’s book is in the slow but steady construction of a new/old world–it is/isn’t us, we are/aren’t the “members” in Marcus’s text. Right away the book was familiar, as it will be to anyone who’s studied anthropology, myth, religion, ritual, or history. It’s a guidebook to a civilization, with motifs and terms and testimonies. At first, it was just a bit of a slog because of course it reads nonsensically; but very shortly–after just one or two motif descriptions–the wording was so perfect, the constructs so precise and careful that I absolutely started to believe this world. I didn’t quite know what I was believing, but I believed in it just the same. It was kind of like being a very small child; you understand little of the world around you, but you never doubt its existence. And like a child, when I read Marcus’s book I began to catch small truths, then large truths,  emotions that I recognized, that rang true underneath the names given to banal objects.

If you’ve studied much history at all you know that religion eventually becomes myth, and myth becomes folktale or legend. This is true for all societies and civilizations, everywhere. So it the smaller pieces of Wire and String read like folktale, the larger pieces like myth. The religion, the world, we know to be a primitive one–or do we? How easy to see the realness, the need for worship, of a Thompson or a bird or a Perkins or–especially–a Father.  As I read further, I was drawn in deeper to this world like a looking glass placed against ours, topsy-turvy and frightening but also somehow ours, somehow real, somehow the only real. The inverted glass in the inverted glass.

The writing is brilliant, and often funny. “The Food Costumes of Montana,” for example, was one of my favorite funnier chapters. But just as you’re sucked into the craft and phrasing, the wordplay and games, you come across a definition like this one:

WESTERN WORSHIP BOXES      The smallest structures, designed to fit precisely one body. They are rough-walled and dank, wooden and finely trimmed–the only areas of devotion.

No mistaking the despair or futility there. The recognition of death and the only final place to be complete and completely loved.To worship at one’s self, forever. Ouch.

The family relationships are also recognizable and poignant, particularly the relationship between father and son. The father in Wire and String is a changing, vast concept: leader, patriarch, disciplinarian, playmate, disappointment, cruel fiend, taskmaster, beloved.  I found, though, the most aching sadness in the relationships between brothers, echoed over and over again throughout the pieces, often opposed, absent and present, partly present (one leg left over from the dead brother) or present but a premonition of absence keenly felt.

Reading The Age of Wire and String was a transformative experience, and was so immensely helpful to my current project that I can’t possibly overstate the fact. Reading it was like dozing off while reading The Golden Bough,  to find an equally strange yet entirely recognizable ritual taking place in the grove, in the space between dreaming and waking. The book really pushed, really encapsulated for me the exact spot where religion, myth, folktale–the stories of our past, of humanity–mix and merge and tell some fundamental truth about all men that has never faded, never dampened, never died. We have and always will make the stories and the structures, give our words and actions and loved ones meanings beyond their meanings because we must, because to stand armed with nothing and face just the blank end, the box, would be unbearable. So we build instead. And this book understands that better than maybe any other I’ve read.