#lucy ives

[victoriajoan]

Lucy Ives, "Ten Writing Prompts"

[jacobwren]

“Whether we are convinced by the metaphors selected by Freud and Lacan, a general effect of these psychoanalytic accounts, celebrated by literary critics perhaps more than clinicians, is to foreground the ways in which behaviour associated with a time when we could not survive on our own determines whom we love as adults and how. Indeed, it is the famous mechanism of repetition you’ve surely heard about: the treatment you receive at the hands of a caregiver becomes the action you associate with someone who loves you. Thus, in this account, do parents win for their children their future partners. If a parent physically abuses their child, that child will seek a lover who will do the same, even if that child is able to recognize that physical abuse is, in the abstract and rationally speaking, harmful and in no way loving. Because a child is compelled to understand an abusive parent’s behaviour as loving, because to survive a child must view a caregiver as loving. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, even if circumspect about Freud and Lacan, often privilege a sort of practical suspicion designed to help the patient explore self-defeating narratives adopted as a protective veil during childhood. To undergo treatment, then, is a bit like stopping where one is on the path of life and turning to face something that one has for so long kept at one’s back. It’s the thing you think is going to kill you. That thing. That unspeakable thing. The one thing that lacks contingency and seems fated and is therefore “yours.” In a way, you’re not wrong. In the past, it could have killed you, when you were small and vulnerable, but it cannot harm you anymore. What is harmful is that you run from it – and that you run, uncannily, toward it, as in a waking dream. What is harmful is that when you find another person you believe figures this thing for you, you fall deeply in love with them. And the whole world falls away.” ― Lucy Ives, An Image of My Name Enters America

[listenallyehpeople]

- Lucy Ives, Poem

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58034/poem-56d23c0eb6be0

[s0ftspine]

cosmogony, lucy ives

[shewhoseeksfreedom]

And I guess the big people for me are Nabokov and Flaubert, although Flaubert, he’s a more subtle metafictional artist, and he’s more interested in extractic things, but I’ve always liked that. I like doubling. I like it when there’s another work of art inside the piece of writing, and when there’s some kind of writing on that work of art and in that writing. There might be a scene in which there are people talking, and those people might talk about another book, and then inside of that book, there might be a reference to a landscape, and in the landscape, there’s a little goat, and the little goat is singing a song. And then a gnome comes along and shows the goat an urn, and on the urn there’s… I could go on forever, but I just, I like that. I like that distance, because I find that sometimes I feel sort of imprisoned in life, and it’s great to be able to find that distance somewhere, that sort of infinity.

Lucy Ives, “On committing to your creative work”

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-lucy-ives-on-committing-to-your-creative-work/

[nprbooks]

In Lucy Ives’ debut story collection Cosmogony, the stories’ “plots and mechanisms can be baffling, and yet each one is emotionally precise in the extreme,” says our critic Lily Meyer. Check out her full review here.

-- Petra

[lazyydaisyyy]

He is my closest friend. But I’m a creature of this century and it’s no longer entirely clear what human friendship is.

Lucy Ives, Cosmogyny

[audreyhheart]

book review: Loudermilk by Lucy Ives

Good news. I now know what to name my firstborn son: Troy Augustus Loudermilk.

This novel by Lucy Ives has a fantastic premise. Set during the early aughts, two recent college grads scam their way into a fully funded MFA program, "The Seminars," a fictionalized version of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. One boy is the statuesque alpha male, Troy Augustus Loudermilk and the other, his socially awkward friend, Harry Rego. Loudermilk doesn't have the writing chops to get into the program and Rego doesn't have the charisma. So, they decide to work together and apply as one person. Loudermilk is the face of the operation attending the workshops while Rego writes the poetry. Ultimately, their plan is to live off the program's generous stipend and sleep with as many girls as possible.

The novel hilariously critiques MFA programs and the colourful characters who inhabit them. Jealous students, students crippled by self-doubt and professors with troubled marriages.

As much as Ives pokes fun at the navel-gazing, pretentious writing produced in these programs and interrogates its value to readers outside of elite literary spaces, she also honours the creative process and artistic genius.

By the end of the novel, Loudermilk and Rego go their separate ways. Without giving too much away, they become fully realized versions of themselves, one leaning into his craft and the other his image.  

My only issue with this book is that the character development is uneven. We know a lot more about Rego than we do Loudermilk. In an author's note at the end of the novel, Ives describes Loudermilk as a libertine in the tradition of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac and the 1987 film Roxanne. He is Rego’s proxy, "the hollow hero we can't look away from, though in truth we know little about him." This works as a creative exercise but is less satisfying to readers outside the hallowed halls of a prestigious MFA program.