Please join us in welcoming to Twenty Stories author Claire Donato, reading from her new short story collection Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts! She will be joined in conversation by essayist Adrian Shirk, followed by an audience Q&A. This event is free and open to all!
ABOUT KIND MIRRORS, UGLY GHOSTS
In the disquieting stories of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, a fractaled Claire Donato contemplates grief and disgust in heterosexuality, deconstructing the romance myth and the illicit fantasies which reflect our haunted selves. These fictions are populated with Lynchian characters, draped in memory and the subconscious mind, who imagine their way out of the painful limits of their world: a turtle retreats into its shell and becomes a real girl. A porn addict turns into a baby boy in the arms of his barren cyber-girlfriend. And a digitally-marred depressive joins forces with the ghost of Simone Weil to kill a chicken.
Donato’s fictions are precise and cutting, seamlessly integrating a vast knowledge of art through sharp criticism and a history of cult traditions: Donnie Darko, Wings of Desire, Daisies, and Twin Peaks and artists including Clarice Lispector, M.F.K. Fisher, Sibylle Baier, and The Velvet Underground.
Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts concludes with "Gravity and Grace, the Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", a novella-in-vignettes that frames cooking as an entrypoint to light, awareness, and connection. With associative lyricism and a preternatural ability to gaze into the void with tenderness, Donato relays an indescribably strange perception of our world, in which maniacal grief turns to a gleeful protest before becoming, against all odds, a love letter to what remains.
Claire Donato is the author of three books of fiction and poetry, most recently Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions). Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Parapraxis, Forever, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Chicago Review, BOMB, The Elephants, DIAGRAM, and GoldFlakePaint. She also contributed an introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer. Currently, she serves as Acting Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020-2021 Distinguished Teacher Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat Woebegone.
ABOUT HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON EARTH
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial’s quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.
When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward.
Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
Adrian Shirk is the author of Heaven is a Place on Earth (Counterpoint, 2022), a personal odyssey of American utopian experiments, and And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy (Counterpoint, 2017), a hybrid-memoir exploring American women prophets and mystics, named an NPR ‘Best Book’ of 2017. Her essays have frequently appeared in Catapult, The Atlantic, Lit Hub, and others. She teaches in Pratt Institute’s BFA Creative Writing Program, and is an ensemble member of The Party, with whom she devises original theatrical productions. She lives in the Catskill mountains at the cooperative arts lab The Mutual Aid Society.