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What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive “we” encounters “hunger in two places at once.”
The Wide Road is a collaborative investigation of the female body, friendship, writing, community, activism, travel and the nature and possibility of human thinking.
Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, two of the most honored innovators of language, began writing The Wide Road in 1991. Over the following twenty-years, the co-writing occurred in turn by letters, by walking, in cabins, together and apart, and finally together again. The reader of this original and major work will find that it is no longer possible to distinguish who wrote what. Instead, one finds a joyful new feminist voice breaking out new possibilities for the future of writing.
The event of the making-writing of this book is now matched by the event of the making-book object of the book, for which the artist Nancy Blum drew two botanical panels, the fruit and the flower of the strawberry tree. HR Hegnauer, in discussion with editor, Rachel Levitsky and the authors, came up with two designs, and in celebration of the book’s multiple origins, Belladonna* Collaborative printed both!
Carla Harryman
Carla Harryman is the author of twelve books of poetry, prose plays, and essays, most recently the Essay Press publication Adorno’s Noise, two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999). Harryman teaches in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University and is on the faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts Graduate Program at Bard College.
Carla Harryman is also the author of Open Box (IMPROVISATIONS) (Belladonna*, 2007).
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941. Poet, essayist, and translator, she is also the author or co-author of several books of poetry, including Saga/Circus (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Fatalist (2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003), and A Border Comedy (2001). Hejinian has worked on a number of collaborative projects with painters, musicians and film makers. She teaches poetics at University of California, Berkeley, and has lectured in Russia and around Europe. She has received grants and awards from the California Arts Council, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Fund, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Berkeley, California.