In this lively, rangy interview with Lisa Robertson she addresses the co-inventive acts of independent bookstores and publishers and the emergent collectivities they foster, processes not unsimilar to the richly fluid co-creation she weaves between reading and writing, between prose, pleasure and its transmission in her second novel Riverwork. Through a lost aunt, through a buried river in Paris where laundresses worked and sang and tanneries poisoned, labor is championed over capital, excess over scarcity. All the while, Robertson both contends with and upends the traditional novel’s concepts of character, image, and the myth of the individual author, replacing them with the unseen, active instability of water, perception, archive, and the expansive nature of female dissent.
Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. The author of ten collections of poetry, including Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat, 2023) and A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2019) Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Tulane, and Sonoma State University. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is editor of VOLT magazine. Her translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights. Conoley has collaborated with installation artist Jenny Holzer, composer Jamie Leigh Sampson, and Butoh dancer Judith Kajuwara.
https://www.gillianconoley.com/
https://nightboat.org/bio/gillian-conoley/
https://nightboat.org/book/notes-from-the-passenger/
Links to purchase Notes from the Passenger: https://nightboat.org/book/notes-from-the-passenger/ https://boookshop.org/