Content area
Full text
Carla Harryman is a prose writer, playwright, poet, and essayist. Born in 1952 and raised in Orange, California, Harryman moved to San Francisco in the early seventies. She is one of the relatively few women who participated in the very earliest theorizing and practice of what has since become known as "language writing." Harryman has been active in the Bay Area's community of experimental writers for over twenty years, regularly reading, performing her work, and giving talks on poetics. She was a cofounder of Poets Theater in San Francisco, a venue for experimental plays from 1978 to 1984. Many of Harryman's dramatic works have been performed, including Memory Play in May 1994 at The LAB in San Francisco and Fish Speech in 1996 for the Public Broadcasting Service's television miniseries The United States of Poetry. Harryman has also performed in and directed productions of her own as well as others' works. She directed the 1995 production of Leslie Scalapino's play Goya's L.A. at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and in 1994-95 she was dramaturge for A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, an opera based on the text by Max Ernst. She has taught fiction and scriptwriting at the University of California, San Diego, a seminar on narrative at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, and a course on gender and hybridity at Wayne State University. Harryman recently moved from Berkeley to the Detroit area with her husband, poet and scholar Barrett Watten, and their son Asa.
Harryman is the author of many books, including Percentage (Tuumba, 1979), Under the Bridge (This, 1980), Property (Tuumba, 1982), The Middle (Gaz, 1983), Vice (Potes & Poets, 1986), Animal Instincts (This, 1989), In the Mode Of (Zasterle, 1991), Memory Play (O, 1994), and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (City Lights, 1995). Her work has also been widely published in journals known for promoting innovative writing, including New American Writing, Zyzzyva, Mirage, This, Abacus, Avec, and Poetics Journal. Harryman is currently working on three new manuscripts: "The Words: After Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre," in which she uses Sandburg-style repetition as an investigative mode; "Gardener of Stars," a "post-plague" novel with two wildly subjective narrators; and "Games," a collaboration with San Francisco...