Novel Out of Town until May 2016

4/18/2016

I recently toured with the novel - now officially called Awake, Sleeping Heart - as part of the Sister Spit Tour, and the feedback I received was wonderful and honestly kind of surprising to me. Thank you to everyone who came out to the show or bought a copy of the work in progress. I've been traveling quite a bit lately, and will be out of the country until May 3. So the novel is out of town too. Writing will resume in May. I'm sorry for the interruption and thanks to everyone who's been keeping up with the work as it unfolds here.
xoxo,
Virgie

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ABOUT THE BOOK

I release a new chapter a week on Thursdays - unless I'm exceedingly overwhelmed or whatever I write is so epically terrible I'm too embarrassed to put it on the internet.

Earlier this year I was awarded a grant by the San Francisco Arts Commission to write a new book about gender, mental health, citizenship and the shifting sociopolitical meaning of the body. This work is a hybrid of fiction and memoir, written in short bursts over a period of nearly one year. The narrative is driven by my relationship to my grandmother - the woman who raised me - and her obsession with her own death, an obsession I learned to adopt in childhood. Soon after proposing the idea for the book, my grandfather passed away, and understanding him became a major theme, too. The book is set in present-day San Francisco and Mexico City, major cities in cultures I know well. The book was designed to be published online as a serial with author notes and images taken in Mexico by me. I ultimately chose blog format as a way to destabilize the idea of what a novel is. Each chapter is typically no more than 1000 words, following the short form aesthetic of internet writing. Thank you to Michelle Tea, Cat Donohue, Myriam Gurba, Tareke Ortiz, Thomas Page McBee, Xandra Ibarra/La Chica Boom, and my mother, grandmother and grandfather for making this work what it is. This work is dedicated to my grandmother, Esperanza, my mother, Maria, and my grandfather, Jorge.

Novel Out of Town until May 2016

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ABOUT THE BOOK