INFORMATION ABOUT THE NOVEL JOAN
Joan is a novel of everybody but mostly of a woman named Joan. It is the story of a private life made out of public language. It is probably a female epic, though Joan often knows she is a man.
I started it in Iowa in February of 2006, and I finished it in Kansas in January of 2009. I wanted it to be like Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe or Roxanna. I also wanted it to be like Kathy Acker.
I am not afraid to talk about this book in advance of itself because I would like you to read it. You could interview me and I would talk to you some more about it and other things like street fashion, suburban bars and the workers who frequent them, and so on. I will come read to you from it in your living room, cafe, bar, university classroom, university auditorium, non-profit institution, backyard, etc.
Most people who write novels work very hard on them, and I worked very hard on my novel, too. I cried a lot during its composition out of love for it and a deep sympathy for everybody and Joan, and then we went some periods of time eating low quality high carbohydrate foods from the pantry so that I could finish it before I died.
Once in a comment box Jasper Bernes wrote something about the new epic:
"I’m imagining something that takes the life of the collective as its protagonist, something lateral, relentlessly exteriorizing and objectifying, global, perhaps a bit didactic, documentary perhaps, something that does not assume character or even narrative as the sine qua non of the form"I think Joan is like that, maybe, except that it is very much a narrative in a pure and ancient sense of narrative in that it begins with birth and ends with death and has life and many ordinary human activities like war, birth, love, and work in between.
With Joan I feel like I accomplished something. I am happy to announce that it is forthcoming from Bloof Books by the end of 2009. I hope you will read it then.
