Take Ecstasy With Me

 

  

 
Moodboard for Etheline in my story Etiquette.

Top two photos by Sara Berntsen. Third photo of Lana Del Ray; photographer unknown. Penultimate photo by Dana Boulos. Final photo by Amy DiLorenzo.

I Want Candy

 

 

 

Champagne and cake for the "ingenue" of my story Salt.

Marie Antoinette

You're My Favorite Flavor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. - The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Young Mr. and Mrs. Silk

Moodboard for John and Hanna in Grass Widow.

Photos by Laura Makabresku

Grass Widow

Title and moodboard for a new story. 

Photos by Marie Zucker

Favorite Reads 2011: The Chronology of Water

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch is my spirit animal.

 

Words carry oceans on their small backs. - Lidia Yuknavitch

 

Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight. They swell and dive in and out between great sinkholes of the brain. - Lidia Yuknavitch

Out of the sad sack of sad shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse. - Lidia Yuknavitch

 People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life: did this really happen to me? The body doesn't lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn't it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind's powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body? - Lidia Yuknavitch

 I believe in art the way other people believe in god. - Lidia Yuknavitch

  My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words came from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt—bruised and cut from falling from a train—or a marriage—or a self in the night—I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book. Until my very skin made screamsong. - Lidia Yuknavitch

Photos by Michael Dweck.