One Year

by Elizabeth Reeder

EP 66.

Being within intense times of illness and death is an experience many of us share, and the essays in one year give entrance to a time of living grief when we are completely, almost obsessively within the smaller world of illness, family and crisis, and yet, also, functioning as individuals, friends, and lovers in the wider world. one year is taken from the manuscript of Reeder’s full collection of hybrid/lyric essays, direction is the moment you choose, and presents a year of living in the places that flourish between life and death, where living is elegy: half poetry, half inevitable narrative.

Excerpt:

On some hills, where rocks balance on inclines, there is a point geologists call the angle of no strain. Rocks repose despite steepness because all conditions allow for rest. I sleep lying down, pace upright, and when I lean I need a wall or a chair or a person to lean against.

40 pages, ebook

First published May 15, 2016

About the author

Elizabeth K Reeder writes novels, essays, and stories. She also writes for the radio. Her first novel, Ramshackle was shortlisted for a number of awards including a Saltire Literary award (2013). Her second novel, Fremont, a story of ill-starred fairytale romance is full of prejudice and desire, garnered great reviews, and re-jigs notions of home, identity and citizenship. An Archive of Happiness, a novel, will be published by Penned in the Margins in September 2020. microbursts, a collection of lyric and intermedial essays about the places between life and death, memoir and poetry - a collaborative work between herself and the artist Amanda Thomson - will be published in spring 2021 as part of Prototype’s interdisciplinary strand. Her interest in the essay (in particular in experimental, hybrid forms) has developed from a desire to write so that language, form and structure embed knowledge in a way that can be ‘read’ like poetry and art with a high level of complexity and intentional ambiguity. She holds a doctorate in English Literature/Creative Writing and is a senior lecturer Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. She organises and is invited to run workshops, seminars and talks on a range of subjects, including her own books and processes; the essay; exuberant creative failure; giving and receiving feedback, and on subjects she explores in her texts such as: illness, grief, Chicago and its architecture, archives (especially difficult, elusive archives), family, narrative structure and many others. In 2019-20 she co-runs Arts Lab Lab on Reading and writing Death and Dying with Dr Naomi Richards and Amy Shea. She is a MacDowell Fellow. twitter: @ekreeder / instagram: @ekreeder26