#heather fowler

Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness

by Heather Fowler

Art and Appendices by Pablo Vision

Heather Fowler’s fourth collection of fiction speaks the language of need. Desperate, obsessive, even demented need—both emotional and erotic—is voiced by characters ill or ill-advised. From cyber to stalker, illicit, explicit, tender and tedious, the relationships in Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness translate love and lust into disorder. How we hear our own need and the way it sounds to others proves in these enthralling stories an imperfect but utterly captivating conversation, a destructive yet dynamic discourse between well-being and disease, images and words.

  PRAISE for Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness :

“The stories in Heather Fowler’s Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness span time and space, sanity and insanity, our dreams and our nightmares. From Renaissance Italy to the French Revolution to the modern dangers of Facebook stalkers, Fowler’s characters explore all of the pleasures and pains of love, that “monster…forged from both hope and desire.” Fowler takes risks; each story is a spellbinding journey. I can’t think of a short story collection I’m more excited to recommend this year.” —Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time and The Children’s War and Other Poems

  “Heather Fowler writes stories that need to be written. Unabashedly ripping open the emotional turmoil that continues to plague the lives of men and women, Fowler crafts fantastical tales that reveal the underbelly of our pains and desperation. She’s the heir of Angela Carter, caressing words like lovers, making the unreal real.” —Paula Bomer, author of Nine Months

  “The characters in Heather Fowler’s fiction are strange and magnificent, sad and strong, trapped and independent, adjusted and not. In other words, they are real. The sheer variety of stories in Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness is striking and the pure athletic grace with which each is told is testament to Fowler’s willingness to stretch and experiment. This is an author with a voluminous bag of tools. She is daring and audacious in all the right ways. There is a delight to her surprises, her wonderments. Savor her titles, which, emblematic of her range, are pithy, mordant, cerebral, playful and ingenious: ‘Giant Balloon Animal Tragedies,’ ‘Good Country. People’ (with its conscious echoes of Flannery O’Connor, an author to whom Fowler can be favorably compared), ‘Speak to Me with Tenderness, Howard Sun.’ Heather Fowler is adept at decoding the human predicament. One yarn begins, ‘Listen, I am telling you a story.’ So you lean closer and, when you do, you can feel the author’s warm breath on your cheek.” —Corey Mesler, author of Diddy-Wah-Diddy: A Beale Street Suite

  “In Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness, Heather Fowler draws us into characters buzzing with internal lives that feel eerily familiar, as though she is showing us a piece of ourselves. What is chilling—and addictive—about her writing is how often those internal lives are ones of disorder. Her renderings remind us of the sanity within insanity, and they do indeed reveal the elegance—and sexiness—of the seamy underbelly of what it means to be human, of the most private parts of our bodies and brains.” —Ming Holden, author of The Survival Girls

“The characters in Heather Fowler’s Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness are so vulnerable and full of yearning that I read the collection with my heart in my throat. Their lives of quiet desperation are rendered with such depth and grace that they seem to haunt the stories they inhabit even while they live and breathe inside them. Fowler is truly a master of her craft.” —Rebecca Kanner, author of Sinners and the Sea

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Recently I started digging into the story collection "People with Holes", by Heather Fowler, and I've been enjoying the slightly surreal excursions into people's daily dysfunctions so much that I decided to find out more about this press, which describes itself as publishing speculative fiction with a queer-feminist twist. Fortunately, the American Book Review just interviewed Rose Mambert. (I didn't interview her, just sharing the love)Here's an excerpt:

"What is your role in the publishing scene?

RM: Our role in the publishing scene, as editor Stacy Giufre put it, is mostly about finding new, talented authors and dancing along the edge of marginal and mainstream. …Although we don’t specifically categorize ourselves as being a feminist, LGBTQ, or minority publisher, we would like to be a safe haven for those writers who may have felt marginalized by the publishing industry or just by real life. This is an essential part of the PNP philosophy – the authors and their stories comes first.

How would you characterize the work you publish?

RM: In a word: eclectic. In more words: speculative fiction, with an emphasis on feminist or queer fiction, and fairy tales. Which is not surprising as most of the editors are feminists and/or queer. So our choices are very personal – which is the case with all editors who aren’t thinking foremost in terms of commercial profit. …

Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them?

RM: We have a very mixed audience because we produce a variety of books that appeal to different readers on different levels. On the lighter side, we have novels like Stuart Sharp’s Court of Dreams, which is a Terry Pratchett-style comic fantasy, and Ash Krafton’s Demimonde series, which offers a fresh take on some of the old tropes of urban fantasy. Pushing the boundaries, we have authors such as Lyle Blake Smythers and Duncan Eagleson, whose novels defy easy classification, blending together elements from various genres and sources including adventure, fantasy, dystopian science fiction, mystery, Shakespeare, and more. For the more literary minded, we have story collections such as Heather Fowler’s People with Holes, feminist magic realism that is very frank in its explorations of relationships and sex. On a similar note, Amy E. Yergen’s At Times I Almost Dream touches upon similar themes, but through the use of modernized fairy tales. In both collections, the protagonists are real women laid bare upon the pages in all their glory, strengths, and weaknesses."

ALSO: I just read that 60% of the money made from People with Holes is being donated to Planned Parenthood - I'm liking Pink Narc more and more!

More about Pink Narc's books can be found here: http://pinknarc.wordpress.com/

People with Holes is a packed collection of stories, and many of them invoke a kind of magical feminism, one that’s erotic and inventive and violent and complicated and sometimes beautiful.

There are girlfriends who cut their boyfriends’ heads off and fractured fairy tales like “Sex with Dwarves,” and a devastating story about a woman who literally strips off her scars and keeps them in a room; all of these incite a feeling of empowerment that ascends to liberation, even if it cannot be fully realized. This kind of liberation is to try to do and see and be, regardless of any gender or societal expectations.

***I should also note that what initially drew me to Heather Fowler’sPeople with Holes was that she’s donating 100% of her proceeds from it to Planned Parenthood, and her publisher, Pink Narcissus Press, is matching her donations. This is a marvelous, hugehearted thing to do and I wanted to help make public this gesture.

"Fowler’s ability to make a reader believe all the strange things that happen in these stories is deft and precise. Some of the living beings are not human; and while they’re certainly used as metaphors, each is also presented with behaviors specific to their species. The power—and joy—of magical realism is that the combination of “real” world and fantasy is never explained, and the informed reader knows that that’s how this genre “works.” One might say, “stuff just happens,” and thus describe this entire collection, but only in a superficial manner. Fowler’s prose is by turns rowdy, affectionate, erotic, absurd, and glittering, with images both awesome and awful.

Readers who admire any of the finest writers in the genre (Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie) should enjoy the flights of fancy within this book, and also be able to confront its darker journeys."

-Janine Stinson, ForeWord Reviews

"When expectations are low but effort is high, you’d be surprised what you might come up with.  So, are you a writer or an artist and do you want to be prolific, too?  Oh, good.  Sit down on my couch.  I’ll tell you what to do:  Go back to a learner mentality, as often as possible; read ravenously and react to the world around you. Do not expect every flourish of your pen to yield a Pulitzer Prize.  Do not care what anyone else is writing—unless you are reading for enjoyment.  Do not allow the criticism or praise from others to invest your craft with anything more than your glancing consideration. Write not to get ridiculously famous, but to express your personal truths and assert your right to be a thinking person in this world.  Practice that self-expression as though you’d wanted to be a prima ballerina your whole life, probably since childhood, so could expect your bones might grow wrong to create mangled feet and your toes would bleed raw from toe-shoes in your practice, before any grand performances could be had.  And keep writing anyway.  Keep dancing anyway."