microbursts

by Elizabeth Reeder, Amanda Thomson

microbursts is a collection of hybrid, lyric essays about the places between life and death; memoir and poetry; making and letting go. Originally written by Reeder as an intense text-based collection of lyric and experimental essays responding to the illnesses and deaths of her parents, it confronts the raw emotions of crisis, grief and creativity. Through collaboration with Thomson, the project expanded to consider how design and visual intervention might alter the nature and impact of the text.

The outcome is a book which explores the subjects of illness, crisis, creativity, caring, death and grief, alongside the aesthetic and formal concerns of cross-genre writing, including how image, formatting and text work together to create tension, understanding and pace, expanding the possibilities of the essay and the artist’s book.

Formally audacious, linguistically fluid, sensitive and intricate in its visual presentation, microbursts uses the potential and elasticity of the essay form to explore intensely personal, yet universal, experiences and considers the ways in which we can express and communicate these through spatial and linguistic form. Crucially, it achieves these things effortlessly, with its accessible, poetic language and engaging narrative of family, love, care, grief, dying, death and creativity.

Genres: Nonfiction

120 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2021

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

Reviews

[Tom Hope · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful piece of literature, from the first page to the last. an outstanding, heartfully composed lament on liminality and unmistakably also a book about love.

[dish · Rating 5 out of 5]

a great collection of scattered thoughts (felt through the various structures of the essays and poems) about grief, living grief, loss, and feeling in-between.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloody brilliant but I also need to stop reading about dying parents

[Basic Book Bitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

very few books manage to make me openly weep. This book is simply exquisite - its ingeniously interwoven fragments meditate on themes of grief, home, the contradictory pull and push of family relations and the experience of time passing. It is hyper focused on the subtle shifts in feeling and relation in a family going through loss and grief, but at the same time spacious, and able to hold other elements and places up to light (the section on prairie, in particular, was perfect). Amanda Thomson's illustrations are sensitive and bring a tenderness and sense of support and care.

[Xenia Tran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving collection of essays and poems about childhood memories, illness and the death of her parents, with illustrations by Amanda Thomson. The way the text is presented on the page is part of a collaborative creative process. Sometimes this brings us closer to the emotions of the writer, other times it acts as a barrier and renders some of the text illegible, which is a shame. I hope next time she will have more faith in the reader and the strength of her story, and let the words alone speak for themselves.

[Alycia]

"We've never been this close to the end before. If we can laugh it will be okay. A bell rings, echoes through the next minutes. You start in one corner, me another, and we may meet in the middle or you might fly off one edge and me the other."

[chattysworld · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a couple of incredibly somber sweet ways to describe mortality and the feeling of insecurity when your parents are dying. But it didn’t show a whole bunch of perspectives. I dunno

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful poetry collection + made me appreciate prose poetry more <3 my cat did eat a chunk out of it after i finished it though