HEATHER FOWLER
www.heatherfowlerwrites.com
WELCOME!
NEWS:
June 2013
Enter the GoodReads Giveaway for a free copy of This Time, While We're Awake.
A new in-depth interview is also available at Necessary Fiction, where Heather discusses writing influences, revision strategies, magical realism, the new book and also what's to come.
Stay tuned for an audio excerpt of selected stories to be released in mid-June, a new installment of the Writer's on Craft series at Fictionaut, and a new issue of Corium Magazine.
May 2013
This Time, While We're Awake releases in trade paperback and kindle formats.
Heather wins the THE TWIN ANTLERS PRIZE FOR COLLABORATIVE POETRY with a collection entitled Bare Bulbs Swinging, co-written by fantastic poets Michelle Reale and Meg Tuite. Due for release in 2014.
Her new interview series Writers on Craft welcomes Carolyn Turgeon's remarks to the Fictionaut Blog.
April 2013
In honor of National Poetry Month, this Friday, April 5, Heather will be Guest Hosting on the theme of Poetry at LitCh@t on TWITTER, 4-5PM EST. Please join. :)
March 2013
People with Holes named a Foreword Reviews 2012 Book of the Year Award finalist in Short Stories.
Heather participates in Meg Tuite's Exquisite Duets at Used Furniture Review, writing poems with Michelle Reale.
Her fourth book, Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness has just been contracted for release May 2014, with Queen's Ferry Press--this is an illustrated collection of literary modern and historical short fiction on mental illness. All artwork by Pablo Vision. More to come. Click here to be put on a list to be alerted when the book is available for pre-order.
Also, don't miss Heather's stint as a guest blogger at the BRAND NEW Aqueous Books Blog, "Do You Care About Women? Good, Now You’re a Feminist," a humor post—on redefining the negative connotations of the word “feminist.”
February 2013
The new Winter 2013 issue of Corium Magazine has been released with some excellent poetry and fiction. :) Stop by and take a gander.
Heather attended The Better Bombshell four-day launch in mid-February. Drop by The Better Bombshell blog for her Guest Blogger's discussion of both the launch itself and the wonders of artistic and literary collaborations in terms of process. Buy a copy of the recently released book and read Heather's piece "Treatises on Desire" now.
January 2013
Thrush Poetry Journal publishes a new poem entitled "Sequestered Second Sister" about the death of an infant sibling.
Heather is Connotation Press's January Fiction Featured author where Meg Tuite reviews People with Holes, interviews Heather on process and forthcoming work, and publishes a dark story from the collection entitled "Room Full of Scars." Drop in to read the triple-feature.
November and December 2012
New review out at Necessary Fiction for People with Holes. A short excerpt--click the link to read the whole:
"The magic in these stories is a way of de-familiarizing, of opening up reality, splitting it apart, disturbing it into the light. It is not separate from reality. The magic makes itself known through metaphor; but metaphor is embedded in our reality. Up is a metaphor, down is a metaphor; we speak and think and live in metaphor. The magic of this kind of magical realism is in separating out the metaphor for attention, to explore the magic already within reality.
In Fowler’s worlds, men take from women what they haven’t necessarily given; the women enact successful and failed revenges, they are whole and sometimes mean and sometimes hurt and sometimes win, but they are present and trying on their innate power, recognizing it, in ways that sometimes benefit them and sometimes send them reeling into newly painful places, lit by the new light of transparency and rupture."
At work on longer collaborative projects and editing. More soon. :)
October 2012
Fall 2012 Issue of Corium Magazine just released with the poetry of Alisha Brown, Sina Evans, Anthony Opal, Angela Readman, and
Claudia Serea! Not to mention tons of tasty fiction. Thanks, as always, to Lauren Becker for making this issue glorious. Drop in and read!
A new review for the second magical realism collection drops: "People with Holes is packed with sudden transformations. A woman dating a hunter wakes up with a deer’s head. A scholar’s skin ripples like the pages of a book when he’s sexually aroused. A lover turns into a duck, and no amount of kissing can bring him back." -- People with Holes, out via Pink Narcissus Press this July, gets some love at the San Diego CityBeat Halloween segment of The Floating Library review troika, entitled, oooohoooo "Monsters in the Mirror"--excellent. Happy Halloween everyone!
Heather also participates in a women's conversation at the VIDA:Women in the Literary Arts HerKind blog, entitled "Divining the Lasso of Truth: A Conversation with Author Heather Fowler and Visual Artist Elisa Lazo de Valdez," with a candid talk about their artistic use of the body for collaborations and literary work.
A poem from long ago and far away, released at The Hollerbox entitled "One Crow Sorrow, Two Crows Joy."
September 2012
Three new long projects in the works. Stop by and read a collaborative illustrated piece entitled "The Narcissist's Birdwoman" on The Better Bombshell blog where Heather works with female photographer Elisa Lazo de Valdez's (Visioluxus) "Sparrow" series and publishes a new fable.
Also, a long story "Summer Rose" goes live in Prick of the Spindle's Issue 6.3.
A newly released poem "The Light Upon the Water At Your Feet" is added to the Crisis Chronicles online journal and poetry library.
Jumping Blue Gods publishes a poem entitled "In Defense of Releasing Turtles to the Wild."
A new interview on process and writing is published at Literary Lunes, entitled "Writerly Wednesday: An Interview with Heather Fowler."
Stay tuned: More poetry due out and Heather reads one of her censored stories in early October at the San Diego Central Library's Banned Books Week reading.
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SEE SITE PUBLICATIONS LIST PAGE FOR A FULL LIST OF TITLES AND VENUES.
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER IN March 30, 2013, from Aqueous Books. May 2013 release.
Heather's feminist dystopia collection THIS TIME, WHILE WE'RE AWAKE will be released by Aqueous Books this Spring. Check out the blurbs--click here to be notified when This Time, While We're Awake pre-order starts in March.
Blurbs:
Heather Fowler's This Time, While We're Awake makes its way from one dystopia to another, climbs them like fences, and the problem is they're barbed wire, so it's torn cloth and shredded flesh the whole way. Hiders, breeders, love drugs and practice babies, muse boxes and zombie picnics: they all serve to showcase Fowler's finely honed sense of what is worth saving, what we can let fall, and how hard we must work to survive our worlds intact.
—Roy Kesey, author of Pacazo, All Over, Nothing in the World, and others
Where Carson McCullers meets Flannery O'Connor for modern times, Heather Fowler updates us with a ‘contemporary macabre’ in such stories as ‘Practice Baby,...’ placing us at the intersection of emotion-meets-Cyborgian-exercise in procreation, with an uncomfortable but compelling momentum, leaving us alert and contemplative of real-world effects for technology's ever-increasing integration with human behavior . ‘Dystopian’ doesn't quite do justice to Fowler's work, as this label implies a pessimism her stories betray; much like the subjects in a Diane Arbus' photograph, through peculiar twists and upsetting, even seedy circumstances, Fowler's protagonists poke and prod her readers to unseat any bias we might unknowingly harbor to build an empathy for those unlike ourselves, as in the turn from annoyance to sympathy for the closeted transgendered salesman hawking difficult objects in ‘Child Silencing Devices.’ In This Time, While We're Awake, the heart lays bare its own dark recesses -- and the ways in which we've attempted to place our dark parts beyond ourselves (‘The Muse Box’). Fowler's prose illustrates the refined sensibility of a poet; these stories move in the peculiar without overbearing, tempt without cliché and ask us to dig deeper into a wired, very human world we call the ‘present’ so that we can act on the future, now.”
--Amy King, author of I Want to Make You Safe, Slaves to do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, among other titles.
Heather Fowler writes stories the way I want to them to be written: As part fairytales, part fables, part science fiction, part dreams, and part confessions, all bound together with prose that is simultaneously ornate, simple, and capable of anything.
—Grant Bailie, author of Cloud 8, Mortarville, New Hope for Small Men, and TomorrowLand
Heather Fowler has described herself, perhaps tongue in cheek, as a morbid Alice in Wonderland in the men's room of dystopia. The stories in her new collection, This Time, While We're Awake, are dark, creepy, disturbing, and quietly horrific. "Call It Shelter," describing the paranoid tension in a community tornado shelter, and "Child Silencing Devices," in which a traveling salesman attempts to hawk a new technology to an unimpressed customer, use prosaic details that evoke that master of modern horror, Shirley Jackson. Others employ a violence that is almost indirect, witnessed but not personally experienced, as in "The Hiders," where aliens come periodically to select and kill a single individual while their friends and families hide without watching—except when one decides to watch. These inventive tales sometimes have unexpected humor and often have female protagonists and a feminist tone, presenting entrapment and empowerment as two sides of the same coin. The reader will be surprised and engaged.
—Lyle Blake Smythers, author of Feasting With Panthers
A word from the publisher, Aqueous Books: Fowler's new collection, This Time, While We're Awake, welcomes you to the worlds of egregious dystopias—environments where tornadoes come one after another as neighbors spar, drugged breeders make babies in the near-future for the sterile rich, humans are sacrificed by contract to aliens who protect them, and the government provides zombie murder buses for insurgents while testing middle-class children, in advance, to fill the needs of militants and industry. In this collection, Fowler examines what it means to be fair and humane in the surreal landscapes where the ruling factions are neither of these things. Come and get your Practice Baby, if you'd like to try parenting. Take an injection to experience love without a partner. This collection showcases not only Fowler's trademark heart and humor, but also a darker dimension of commentary similar to Bradbury or The Twilight Zone. Selected stories in this volume have been published internationally and online.
AVAILABLE NOW, from Pink Narcissus Press.
Heather's second magical realism story collection, PEOPLE WITH HOLES, has just been released in trade paperback, Nook, and Kindle formats. All author's proceeds to be donated to Planned Parenthood. Pink Narcissus Press to match author's contribution. A bit about the book from the publisher:
PEOPLE WITH HOLES Stories by Heather Fowler Hailed as “magic realism at its finest,” Fowler’s writing reveals the small but essential truths that motivate sex and relationships. Whether in museums of solitude, in airports of dreams, or at the circus, these stories are bound together by transformation, anthropomorphism, and ultimately by love’s inevitable consequences. Fowler’s unique vision is thought-provoking, with a touch of feminist sensibility, and shot through with quirky and laugh-out-loud humor. |
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AVAILABLE NOW, from Aqueous Books:
Book Description:
In an explosion of love’s metaphors, Fowler’s debut collection of stories, SUSPENDED HEART, takes on American fabulism with a cast of unexpected heroines in the narratives of life and loss—women whose hearts fall out at public malls, women whose bodies bloom with changing seasons, women who sprout blades or have multiple eyes, sleep as snakes, or birth saints like lapis lazuli babies. Where there is struggle and sadness, there is also humor: Fowler’s fictive voice has been compared to both Franz Kafka and Donald Barthelme. There’s a fearlessness to this prose, a melody of life and magic and loss. Selected stories in this volume have been published online and in Australia. Partial author’s proceeds to be donated to the San Diego Family Justice Center.
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