We Are Bespelled: A Discussion with Katharine Coldiron

K. Coldiron

I first came to Katharine Coldiron’s work on the pages of LARB, where I quickly fell in love with her critical eye. She is the kind of analytical writer I wish I could be: searingly sharp in observation, deeply persuasive in an inconspicuous way, and also incredibly funny. It was only sometime later I came to her fiction and began to understand that these techniques are the foundation of all her work. Coldiron writes about human failure and human strangeness and human longing in ways that ask us to pay closer attention. Her critical-creative oeuvre disturbs the status quo not just through unconventional plot turns and lines of argumentation, but also through exquisitely rendered detail that estranges us to what we thought we already knew and understood.

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Bodies, Bodies Everywhere

Pen & paper

Bodies, Bodies Everywhere
(how studying art history turned me into a thriller writer)
by Laura Leffler

As a student of art history, I was taught to ignore the bodies—the many, many bodies, mostly female and mostly nude—strewn through textbooks and set on pedestals and hung from gallery walls. In art history, you see, bodies are not really bodies; they are vessels. A body is form. It is light and shadow and line and curve. It is a shape in space, a means to an end. Something to be used—to be handled—by the master. 

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