Ben Miller
The Extravagant Art of Seeing:
Thoughts While Tearing Up a Novel Late One Night
Synopsis
An ill-conceived old novel draft starring a very confused narrator at last enrages the author to the point where he rends the text one night in an effort to let in light and air as if a home office were a field hospital, and he a trauma surgeon. As pages are operated on a fury of autobiographical facts, healing quotes, and peculiar visions of new literary forms are unleashed. The destroying of art leads directly back to the act of creation with startling results. Each page in the book functions as a unique stop-action picture of the evolving event, moving pieces stilled and offering readers a buffet of visual options for engaging with the building tension of a cataclysmic revision stage of cure and custody. Explored from shifting directions is a theme of the artist’s responsibility to continually scrutinize, reassess, and come to terms with the incredible messes imagination breeds.
Excerpts have appeared in Inverted Syntax, The Normal School, and are forthcoming in Rollick.
Ben Miller
Ben Miller is the author of the debut memoir River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa. He has published in AGNI, Ecotone, the Kenyon Review, the Antioch Review, Raritan, Salmagundi, One Story, and other journals. His essays have been reprinted or noted six times in Best American Essays, and his awards include fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New York City with his wife, the poet Anne Pierson Wiese.
Website: riverbendchronicle.com
Blog: benmillerauthor.wordpress.com
