The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Isn't that a great title for a book? It's the title of Aimee Bender's first. She's here in town to do a reading and workshop at the house.

And check out the cover of her newest:












This is a fiction writer with a poet's sensibility. Here are some snippets from interviews.

from powell's:

Bender: Saying "the man" or "the woman," sometimes I like those words better than the words of names, even though it's true that once you name someone they're more specific and the reader can identify with them more. Maybe it's just an attraction to a kind of fairy-tale storytelling — it feels like names would be slightly too specific for the story; sometimes it would be a loss to attach a name to the characters. Like the big man and the little man [in "End of the Line"] — the big man can't have a name. I would lose part of my feeling about who he is. He's just "the big man"; he can't be Bob.

It feels like a texture to me. The texture would go a little wrong if the character was named, if the story wants to be more mythic. As soon as someone is named, the story enters the world of reality a little more. As soon as a capital letter comes into play, it looks different and it feels different.

and from Beatrice:

You can write a sentence, and the sentence will have tunnels inside of it, and you don't know how deep each tunnel will go, but a certain noun might be a tunnel that could last the length of a novel. The only way you know is that you're vaguely curious about it. It's an intuition about where you need to go, and it is a bit like groping through caves in the dark.

Sexy!!!

To learn more about the reading click here

To visit Aimee Bender's website (it's really cool) click here