 Let me say good evening. Welcome to Bearpond Books. Can everybody hear me OK? I'd like to invite you. If you're in the back and you'd like to sit in the front, please feel free to do so. I'm very excited to present Kathleen Carr, author of Miraculum Monstrum, a unique narrative tale that blends poetry, prose, what I kind of think is science fictiony and fantasy, and original artwork. I for one am in awe of this work the layers of fable upon fable and how the tale unfolds through poetry and cataloged fictional documents. It just astounds me. And I love the idea of the museum of ladder hybrids and the post-climate disaster collection. Just that idea alone, I was so enthralled with that kind of idea. It's so creative and unique. This book is truly a brilliant contribution to contemporary dystopic literature, to quote the author, Jan Kahn, who has a blurb on the back. If you haven't read Miraculum Monstrum yet, I urge you to pick up your copy tonight. We have them at the front desk. And then you can have it signed by Kathleen tonight. She joins us from North Adams, Massachusetts. Tonight's talk and reading will be about an hour, including time for Q&A. And I'd like to remind you to please mute or turn off your cell phones. And to let you know I was mentioning the front door is now locked. So if you need to leave during the reading, please use the back door, which is that way. The front door will open again after the reading. If you need a bathroom, it's located at the back of this door to the right of the back door. And please help yourself to refreshments. We have cookies and juice and seltzer. I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring tonight's event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program. And you can help yourself to a Vermont Arts Council sticker there at the refreshment table. I'd also like to thank Orca Media. They're here filming the event tonight. And if you'd like to see this video or learn about other events, I'm going to pass around our newsletter signage. We'll have the video in the next newsletter. Let me tell you about a few events coming up for National Poetry Month in April. We have a terrific lineup. We have our annual open poetry reading, which is next week, Tuesday at 7 PM. You can sign up at the door and read your original work for about three to five minutes. We also have Allison Prine, who was a Vermont Book Award finalist last year with her book, Steel. She'll be reading with Bianca Stone, who's the author of this newly published, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief. They'll both be here on Tuesday, April 17. And you can find all of that information in the poem city program. You can pick one up at the counter or find them around town. We're also featuring an author. She's a poet, but this is her first collection of short stories. Eleanor Giorgio, and this is the Immigrant's Refrigerator. She'll be here April 24. And she'll be reading from her book and speaking with a member of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. And sales from the book go as donations to the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. So that'll be a really fascinating talk. So for now, let's welcome the winner of the 2015 Clarissa Dalloway Book Prize from Aroho Foundation and the Best Book Award finalist in the fiction cross-genre category. She's a writer and visual artist. Please help me welcome Kathleen Carr. Thank you, Samantha. So happy to be here and feel so very welcome to buy this bookstore and everybody here. Thank you for coming out. Can everybody hear me OK? Because there is a mic. And sometimes people can't hear me, so let me know. So I think Sam did a pretty good job of describing what the book is essentially what's happening. So I might just start reading and interject some comments as I'm reading. And if you have any questions after, I'd be happy to answer them. There is a curator character, and she comes in. I'll just tell you when that's happening. And there's also notes throughout and visual art. So sometimes I wish I'd figured out a way to show the images while I'm reading, but it's kind of, you know, I'd have to project them. And it might be distracting, but anyway. But that's how it's laid out. I wanted it to feel like an exhibit catalog. My husband and I are visual artists. We look at, we read exhibit catalogs all the time, and they're really getting better and better. And I feel like that's a form to be explored for sure. I'm a Goddard alum. And somebody that I worked with there wrote the introduction, Jill Maggie. And she offers, I have to say this, she writes, Joy exclaims the flying Tristia Vogel of Kathleen Karr's Miraculum Monstrum, who is an artist living at the beginning of a world without oxygen and who grows wings. And the confusion of who and the grammar I chose is indicative of the book's fiction biography, autobiography. The joy of flight in the actions of the protagonist and in this book soaring genre abandon is possible despite an overwhelmingly inhospitable context. I almost wrote In Hospital Context, which is one of this book's truths. Institutions rarely serve the ones who are meant to fly. Yet it is inevitable that some should spread wings. If it chooses you, I think the book argues you are called on to be susceptible. So be susceptible. Miraculum, a wonderful thing, prodigy, a miracle, monstrum, a significant supernatural event, a wonder, portent, alternatively a monster. Words are artifacts, relics, symbols. In Spring, a rabbit opened by a crow. Dark-edged fear writes the rabbit death. It happens in the spring. Lilac-centered air in the park turns pages of her book as she eats her lunch, little wings and bright sun. An April afternoon lies on the grass, not hearing the murder of crow's shrill gate. The leaves knife sharp against the sable trunks, high-pressure finite lines written across a landscape. She hears a bird's serenade, tiny hammers on bells. Airborne notes punctuating vestiges of clouds, now thinned to gray scraps, her back itches. Curator, this all happened before I was born. I imagine her, she might have been before her transformation, before the annals of Miraculum, the monstrum, the lost years when she was presumably living as any human woman would. There was breathable air then. This was before the atmospheric catastrophe, before the birds died, before the winds and earthquakes, when there was waste and leisure, whole days of temperate radiation. In retrospect, her mutation was prophesied. As many things are reckoned in hindsight, her temples hewn and texts produced. Contrary to natural law, she was born out of herself in the April month, already fused to a mythology that had yet to be created. Anomaly, the persistence of peripheral vision. I imagine her in time in the weave of every moment, regardless of fact or record. On April 25th, she wakes up with a single hair thick as a bristle growing out of her left scapula. With a hand mirror, she examines over her shoulder. The sinister, portentious vine looks like a wire. She can't pull it out. It seems to be fused to the bone under the skin it erupts from. Is a dream the real world? This hair, a blackened bone being born. Beneath her skin, she feels herself leaning toward flight patterns of bird cloud, lifting off a tree to the east of where she sits. She isn't aware of implications, a small irritation on the west side of her back, a black hair. Walking home from the park, her senses heighten, she feels like running. Breathing hard, though walking, walking at a tilt vertiginous sidewalks in motion. The sensation on her back, several more wiry black hairs and bony protrusions on shoulder blade makes an appointment to see her doctor. Sarcoma could be ewing sarcoma, blood sample, white paper, pale cheek to vinyl stretcher, nude from waist up on your stomach, please. Abnormalities and chromosomes. Ewing is notably found in the bone shaft, rare. Inside her chest, the ribs rest over her peritoneal sack, housing heart, lungs. Once she saw a bird heart still beating in a ribbon carcass. The bird had been struck, turned in ragged cartwheels, glanced off a car. The body curled like a continuous apple peel. She walked from her porch where she had been sitting to look at the moist shards of gelatinous red, wanted to put her finger in the chest to touch the velvety blood charged with ebbing life, thrashing pulse, flailing wing. She can't be dying on your stomach, please. Is there pain? Vivis sectio, alive cutting, migration and song phenomena to be dissected. X-ray shows there is a consistency with, perhaps fibrous dysplasia. Origins are mysterious, monostatic in one bone, left scapula, spinal bone cysts, semen related, inconsistent with fibrous dysplasia. The X-ray shows pitting in the bone. Two are like growths consistent with dysplasia. Magillary bone becomes fibrous tissue. There are growths, non-consistent. Benign, let's hope. The X-ray, the beating heart caged, this part looks like a feather shaft. We're not sure what this means. Your temperature is running below normal. Is that part of dysplasia? No, unrelated. Do you feel cold? No. On this night, she dreams a dead pond, frogs belly up but the storks aren't feeding. It rains an oily spatter. Starling wings speckled the black, runs down her glass porch door. She looks closer, bird after bird, pounding soft bodies into the glass. Stunned, they recover vertical poise and launch into the door again. Again, the pile grows. She thinks she will vomit. Her mouth opens, she almost breaks from the dream here. Feels, sees a bird beak writhing in her throat, rising from her throat hole, pushing along the esophageal passage, trying to be born, trying to escape, trying to herald. It is shrieking then begins to wail and infant in the dream her bile rises, propels the bird out, leaving her flaccid. The bones of her crushed. She wakes, vomitting, shoulder throbbing, sarcoma. The moonlight's translucent snakes in her vomit, like tapeworms, maybe string or hair. She takes the bus to the emergency room. It is 2 a.m. Medical form, I can't read this. Control number, district, am I dying worker, phone? You are upset. Please calm, number, date, client ID. This information provided temperature dropping. On this form may be used to determine eligibility, pressure on chest for federal, and we want you to speak to state programs using dead birds, social security, disability criteria one. Patient information, how long have you been? I am not address, phone, date of birth, physicians. There is a research lab name, address, phone, specialty, dates of exam. First visit, last, will not live in a cage. Visit, presenting symptoms, height, weight, blood pressure, muscle strength, one, five to five, five, two. Diagnosis, you must attach, HIV infection. Diagnostic, made comfortable. Test, performed, attached. They look like feathers. Can you explain results? Psychiatric evaluations, psychological evaluations. Treatment and response, tests and conclusive. Please include past treatments. We need more tests and response. Be advised. This is blurry. Please sign here. We want to help. Herendo rustica. Swallow, swallow, bloody bird. Turns milk to blood, flying under the herd. Flying over your house, your death, he portends. If he lands on your shoulder, your life will end. This is a reading from the letter from Tara from Miraculum Monsimum, verse 8, chapter 8, verse 21. As Tristia and the broken women walked the path to the walled city, the Christians followed and one of them shouted behind, these women are the slaves of contrivances. See the monster they follow. And the demon seed still swimming in its eyes. Tristia told her apostate, Tara, this annoying harassment should stop. And so they turned to the faithful and spat oil onto their skin. They ran away in fear but continued to throw rocks from a distance. When they reached the city, Tristia spoke through Tara. The wall they've constructed won't keep the water out. So find higher ground. The water will wash the cities away. In the caves we will breed new life. This is the word. This is fragmentary because there's, the scripture is from the text of Miraculum Monsimum, which is, it's a religious text based around the prophecy that this bird woman is going to come. Just so you know. They superimpose the stature of a god over her. Morphine drip, gurney, the beige walls streaked with death stench, bony eruptions metastasized, shifting tectonic plates, margins, testing, brush strokes, line, tone, linseed, testing her blood, plastic, planet, her saliva, marrow, feathers, secretions, probing her body, lungs, vines, liver, pancreas with instruments, dermis, marrow, plasma, vial, basin, cramps, vomiting, fever, biopsy, shoulder, strata, ultrasound, x-ray, magnetic resonance imagery, dissecting, specialist, surgeons, photographs, documents, burning, leaking discharge, sedation. But the miraculous feathers leak out. People come to see. Tests mutate to experiment. Papers are published. The published papers metastasize a kind of greed. A tracking device under left wing. Disruptive, they move her to a locked room with one small window to make her comfortable. A whole intolerable bird. She was stainless in herself, wished everything away like space. She could grow a far of purity, fly out again, young and included to somewhere. In pericula rectus, she will fly. Leather straps against her arms, uncoiled feathers sprung from the bone meat. This feather of undaunted blood-water arches she sees in the dark, the morphine drip. The songbirds whose songs are stolen for research. Migratory birds who are funneled and disoriented. Disoriented. Where is their gyroscope? Arthur Cleveland. RNA. Employed a county general for six years. Employment terminated on X. Incident involving a patient X. Released without discharge. Patient terminally ill. On morphine drip. Hospice. Ascination. Patient released from locked ward by Mr. Cleveland on X. He informed staff that patient was uncomfortable and unnecessarily restrained and incedated. Patient in advanced stage of bone disease. Unknown origin. Cleveland claimed patient was a mystic. Induced his cooperation. Termination enacted. Psychiatric evaluation recommended. Up on the roof. Up on the hospital roof. Shaking the morphine off. Tristius arms. Our lead sticks. Covered with bones first. Dying, she thinks. Last she knew. There is one arm mostly gone. Weight loss. She feels fine. Hungry. My body in revolt, she thinks. These look like wings, not tumors. Bone disease. She runs the roof. Like an infant tied to a kite. Hands intact. Wearing a ragged snap down. She rears her wings and dives. Like painting the next stroke. There. Like a net. A brace. Every feather. Moves. She is tired. Lands too quick. Bloody knees. Laughs. Where do I go now? She knows where it lies by air. I'm just going to read a little about what she looks like. She's meeting somebody who's going to help her and flies into her house. Obviously scares the shit out of her. The beauty of her ivory under feather cloaked with black, slick like tar. Tara tries to hit the bird thing. Throws a plate, her boot. Pulls a lamp from the socket and smashes. Points the jagged end at the howling figure. Crouching. Makes her weep. Tara sits on the floor, cradling glass. Closes her eyes. The adrenaline disrupting the high. What the fuck? Listens while it speaks. That's fixed. Can't move. Curator. I'm often asked how long it took for the wing growth transition to reach completion. How long did she lie drugged in the hospital? This would seem to be a simple matter of record, except many of the records were destroyed. We don't know why. We do know her cottage was emptied out and her things forwarded to her aunt, Percy, Vogel. Her relative was then informed that Trissie had volunteered for a long-term research project, which her aunt disbelieved. Later she was told Trissie had fallen from the roof of the hospital. From a complete inquiry into all existing records, my estimation is that it took six months for her wings to grow in and become usable. As soon as she realized she had wings, she escaped. Though they attempted to find her through a previously implanted tracking device, this was apparently destroyed or surgically removed. Trissie in nervous motion had jerks to trailing edge of wing after attempts at recapture. Gaunt covered with fine definitive down. Contour feathers lay flat and gray on her chest and belly. The fur swells on her breasts, nipples darkened flinty, her calves in atrophy. She hunkers into a squat. The plumula on her back blanket the network of stars where each primary feather tore through her skin. There is bat-like bone, fingers growing alula into the wing bend. Sharp and will-dee after-shaft, semi-plumes. Skin ribbon with feather picks. The glowing red pill sends out real-time signal to data-logging medics. The mechanized body, a trader of flesh, machine propagandizes animal. She flies to the roof, dives to the top of the tree, glides then back down, swimming. Wants to carry Tara on her back just to the top of the garage. No way, Tara laughs. She watches there. One more plunge, leap, shiver, howl, this joy. Fluff pants as she winds down. Later she'll need meds. Tristia's pain, white needles, stitch in her bones, singe fire, rip and bind. The violent flesh-tip heals and quill. Nail heads back in, barb-wise, welter sores. She dreams in a restless opiate fume, women who will come for talons. She dreams also of a half-faced man. Where word reaches, masses come to witness the bird woman, first the bridge, revival-like, then meetings-revolve, graffiti-house squatters, vacant lots, dirt-sellers, writhing the abscess-armed desperata, internet code forwards the flock. The nascent legendary attracts another kind of fire. The raptus began writing of a bird woman messiah in a natural-text, miraculous monster during the latter years of the 20th century. There is great rejoicing at the news of Tristia. They send Dr. Kure to bring her home. So I'm going to stop there and encourage you to heed on. But there's one quote from Anne Waldman, which I really love, from manatee humanity, as things really heat up in the environmental crisis. That's what they'll say about us generations hence, how living men hence, without so many animals then, they fucked the world over in their sweet, avaricious timeframe. That's what they'll say about us, those stupid fuckers. They let the animals die, they let the plants die, they killed the air, they killed the water, they killed each other, they killed language. Thank you. Happy to answer questions about this. Yeah, well, there were a couple of things really. I'm as a writer interested in hybridity and I work in a lot of different forms and I'm also a visual artist. So I thought I wanted to make a work that sort of included all of that and also my mother was dying of early onset Alzheimer's at the time and so that her transitions were sort of inspiring to me as well and sort of the kind of research that I was doing for her condition sort of ran alongside the research I did with different bone diseases and what it might actually look like if somebody were to grow wings because they wouldn't just appear something would happen it would be it would be crazy and shocking and scary so I wanted to build that out. So looking at this work I'm interested in any parts of the book already existed as like these different little projects like did you have a bunch of illustrations that you wanted that you knew were going to go somewhere or did you start with like letters themselves I'm interested in the process Yeah, that's a good question I was working on them sort of alongside and some of them I didn't really know where the things were going to go at all I was just making a lot of bird related work which if you go to my website it's pretty much all abstraction so it was so like the swallow I probably painted that first and then wrote the it's kind of rustic but it's some of the work was already done and just lying around so so it kind of evolved they grew together I'd say but then of course the idea of putting something in a catalog for an exhibit was very appealing like that the way when you're looking at a catalog there's other people's work and then there's the artist's work or there's things that they were never that were never meant to see you know they're on the like here's some junk from the Saw & Saw studio you know what I mean so I wanted it to be a real container for that Did you do an outline of the book first or did it just kind of flow together No, I've never written an outline in my life and if I did probably wouldn't people do that and I can see the value of it but I kind of sort of knew what was going to happen I just didn't know how A to B was going to go but definitely grew around the story that was evolving you know it's sort of writing is a lot like painting that you write something and then you think about it and respond to it you know it's kind of a I wish I could just sit down and work off an outline or probably make things a lot easier you know in some ways of course as a writer artist you can always change your thing so it's really just a game like okay I have this outline does that answer your question Yeah Do you write in the morning do you write in the morning do you write in the morning I worked on it for a year and a half and pretty steadily let's say I worked on it every day I mean as an artist I work on something every day I've really been doing more visual art lately because I just had a show but then you know I always feel like whatever I'm not doing in a very concentrated way becomes the escape from the work you know so I feel like I always have some like I'm going to go procrastinate and go make some prints now you know but I'm still working so it's a I feel like that's it took a while and the ending was we were just talking about this the other day my mother had died and I had sold our houses and the people who bought them allowed us to stay while we were cleaning out it was her house, my house and this barn that had like a hundred years of stuff in it and so while we were staying there in this plasticed off room they were ripping the house to shreds that I lovingly rebuilt myself you know and so at the end of the day after we'd like to drag things to the dumpster it was horrifying snowed every day so we're dragging things my mother's house was up on this hill and there's a picture of it in here actually in the very beginning as Tristia's cottage and Sears house and so yeah Sears Roebuck house on this hill and there was all this snow and it was just so at the end of the day it would be totally exhausted and emotionally drained and it was like throwing away all my stuff from my entire life and in these dumpsters they were covered with snow and I'd sit down to write so I was probably in a sort of a morbid state of mind because your editing process looked like your editing process looked like oh um I'm fairly rigorous but I allow myself to just write whatever at first and then and then I'll go back at it later as sort of another person so otherwise I could never write anything I'd just be like oh that word no oh my god I can't imagine having to do that kind of thing all at once the editing and the creative process probably nobody I'm talking about there's this dreadful editor who's like you have to shut it off you have extra visuals and stuff that you created during the work on this that you are now sort of you have to sort of figure out what is this and what will it go with later or do you show other work in a different context I well I have tons of stuff in fact sort of hilarious that I have most of the pieces in here still but I mean I've sold a lot of work subsequently but never really you know so I kind of like to have a show sometime in conjunction with the book that would be fun yeah so there's always things that I mean I'm making things and I think well could this be part of another book or you know I'm because I'm I'm writing things but I haven't really I haven't even figured out if there will be visuals or how they will be but I feel like that's sort of something that comes together in a kind of a magical way that I don't need to know right now but it will sort of it will occur you know if it's supposed to but I didn't want the the art in here to feel illustrative yeah although sometimes it might be slightly illustrative of what's going on in that section yeah the theme of transformation is you know widely through literature do you think you know the other texts like I'm thinking of the is there any introductionality is there any introductionality were you thinking of how your book fits within the realm of the theme oh yes I mean there's certainly a lot of literature to consider that sort of makes use of that sort of hybridity right is that what you so and my idols do it really well like Benooka Pill and Anne Waldman is a great hybrid writer I mean there's a lot Jill Maggy for that matter who wrote the introduction and you know there's a lot of there's a lot more artists that are writing and using that form which is really nice but at the same time I didn't I haven't really seen too many fictional art catalogs like monographs so I was kind of like is anybody else doing that maybe not and so maybe that will you know Kumiko Han she's sort of a writer who's very conscious of inventing forms you know sort of based on Japanese ancient Japanese forms and and she bought my book at AWP I'm so excited and she's like can you sign this for me it's like the weirdest thing oh my god no you sign my hand or something you know and so there's you know being aware of it is hard you know when you're writing something so be aware of other work that's come before and want to be separate from that and yet you're you can't help sort of being influenced by everything that you consume you know so but of course you can't worry about that you just have to do your thing you know and that's the rest of us to do because it's like the human nature of wanting to define those connections and patterns yeah and it is the nature of the bookstore to want to define what you've written so it's sort of like you do need to have a shelf at the end of the day like where are you gonna you know like we were just talking about this that was I went to a bookstore and it was under assays and I was like well you know that's not really right but I hope it could be under science fiction or fantasy or poems or you know maybe just by itself or in a sort of a glass case with a light on it it would be okay too but yeah you know that's one of the pratfalls of hybrid literature and if anybody's anybody writing sort of looking at hybridity and yeah it's kind of like you know it makes it it's a hard sell you know the publisher I worked with they've been really really great and they've been so supportive but Kate Gale said maybe you want to write a novel and I thought yeah that would be really great I'd like to write a romance novel like a set of them so that I could then write my weird thing over here but you know if that's actually possible you know you do have to like your wax as what you feel will find its own form so so you kind of stuck with yourself at the end of the day although romance novels like detective novels I think about it sometimes I think could I, should I, would I I think about the same thing the crime novels sometimes I like crime, I could do that but I'm not sure I could really do it play it straight the hybrid form is really growing do you know Lydia Yutnovich the author she's an amazing author so she just had a little thread on her Facebook page the other day about tell me if I'm making a big giant list in a group she's compiling like a resource for her students of hybrid publishers and hybrid books and I was like oh I know some I mentioned Kathleen even like and Red Hat I think is doing a great job of publishing a lot of hybrid there's a book of lyrical essays Chelsea even I met her they're different they are, they're different and I think publishers are more apt to jump on that now it's kind of like a growing thing so you know you write what you write and you hope the book store is going to shelf it somewhere we'll find it yeah yeah this is the kind of store where we would put it I do the science fiction book club so when I sent out the newsletter I said hey this is getting read how could you not put that under science fiction but I also do poetry you know to be in both places I'm happy to see it growing because I wrote this almost you know it's getting on ten years ago now you know took a while to write it and then took four years to submit it to places and all that time every time I got rejected I thought should I take the images out or should I change this or nah I'm just going to keep sending it out and you know I I was sending it to both contests and also just calls and you know writing queries but I got this letter from a room of her own that said have you given up on your manuscript I said yeah actually I have one of those because it was so it felt like a long time and then it was two more years before it came out so I mean it's you know you have to be persistent especially if and you have to believe in your thing I mean it's so easy to go some writing teacher had told me she had sent out stories thirty times and I was like oh wow I thought four was a lot okay you know so persistence you know also red hand press respected the way you constructed it they kept my original manuscript the way it was laid out they really didn't change hardly anything they changed the font a little bit to make this feel like they did something do you also teach? teach? yeah I do I'd like to teach writing more but I actually have my graduate degrees in visual art so I end up teaching that more but I'm trying I keep like I'll run the class and it's really weird no one will sign up and that's been happening come to VCFA I'd love to get an actual job that would be great because you know you just have to do whatever to pay the rent so teaching would be great but and greenhouses and teach at our crazy school that we're teaching at crazy well I know a couple of students up there that would benefit from your wisdom and this specific style that you've written in oh thank you yeah well just tell your tell the faculty that I'll be right over I'll be right over it is yeah I looked at that school actually but we ended up going to powdered so so any any other anybody? well thank you so much it's been