Background
Carla Harryman was born on January 11, 1952, in Orange, Orange Country, California, United States. She is a daughter of Floyd and Marion Harryman.
University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, United States
In 1975 Carla Harryman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, United States
In 1978 Carla Harryman obtained a Master of Arts degree from San Francisco State University.
(These hybrid writings, staged as they are between fiction...)
These hybrid writings, staged as they are between fiction and theory, the domestic and history, abstractions and androgeny, the rational and the nonrational, the creator and her artifact, organize themselves against normative ideas while using whatever tolls of novelistic, philosophic, autobiographical, or poetic discourse present themselves to advance their tellings. Concepts such as narrative, character, and binary thinking are manipulated and scrutinized but not adhered to methodically. The writing is also a response to literature and the things of the world: it does not separate one-off from the other. Marquis de Sade, rocks, Balzac, war, Lautremont, amazons, Jane Austen, news, Jan Bowles, utopias, Ludwig Wittgenstein, child's play, Saint Augustine, censorship are probable points on its strange map. in the world of this work, words themselves may become characters and instincts are regarded as if they were books.
https://www.amazon.com/There-Never-Rose-Without-Thorn/dp/0872863018/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(In The Words, Harryman playfully examines the family, the...)
In The Words, Harryman playfully examines the family, the suburbs, daily life, the position of woman, while boldly undermining notions about character and plot. There's a ferocity to her wit, a cunning to her deconstructions - and always devotion to language, its elasticity, and limits. I admire Harryman's rare mind, its gleeful feminism, broad intelligence, and anarchic inventiveness! - Lynne Tillman. At last, children's literature has been liberated, liberated into fiction! Carla Harryman's WORDS is a fiction in which the mischief is perpetually unnaming names in an ongoing discursive cross-wind beneficial to hybridizing texts. Bold and subversive!
https://www.amazon.com/Sandburgs-Rootabaga-Stories-Jean-Paul-Sartre/dp/1882022394/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(Carla Harryman describes Gardener of Stars as "an experim...)
Carla Harryman describes Gardener of Stars as "an experimental novel that explores the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire." The book offers a mythic history of a post-historical city situated in a garden landscape whose inhabitants are engaged in perpetual tending, limitless generation. Their generatings and tendings take place in speculation and dream, practical and impractical invention, desire and copious sex - all facets of a politicized eros and an erotic politics. The utopia in question ("the unruly utopia of the senses that is not in conflict with the world's current") must be understood first not in terms of place but in terms of personage. M, Serena, Gardener (the eponymous heroine of the novel) are themselves utopias (as distinct from utopians) surviving in a painfully fraught (though sometimes beautiful) milieu. Negotiating this milieu, the various characters come into contact (or, more precisely, throw themselves into contact) with events that are in a ceaseless process
https://www.amazon.com/Gardener-Stars-Carla-Harryman/dp/1891190105/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose...)
Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays, and essays. Her two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are "explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire."
https://www.amazon.com/Baby-Carla-Harryman/dp/0976161214/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and ...)
Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and influential writers of the late 20th century. Known variously, and notoriously, as a consummate postmodernist, feminist, post-punk and plagiarist, her oeuvreover a dozen novels and novellashas inspired a generation of writers and artists. Lust for Life is the definitive collection of essays on Acker’s inimitable work, including Peter Wollen’s elegiac primer, widely considered the best introduction to Acker, and Avital Ronell’s erudite meditation on friendship and mourning. Together these essays by scholars and writers reveal Acker’s profound and innovative project, and the ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political and cultural life.
https://www.amazon.com/Lust-Life-Writings-Kathy-Acker/dp/184467066X/?tag=2022091-20
2006
(Adorno's Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscop...)
Adorno's Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno's aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno's orbit.
https://www.amazon.com/Adornos-Noise-Carla-Harryman/dp/0979118948/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven...)
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 was collaboratively composed by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian between 1991 and 2010. The cover art was drawn for this manuscript by the artist Nancy Blum, and this first edition is printed with two different cover designs.
https://www.amazon.com/Wide-Road-Carla-Harryman/dp/0982338740/?tag=2022091-20
2011
("In this pair of wry, dark, brilliant books, we hear tell...)
"In this pair of wry, dark, brilliant books, we hear tell of domestic partnerships with a shifting array of W and M. Women and Men? Names multiply, genders reverse, and those initials, flipped, transform into one another. I suspect M could refer to the Market, which hovers everywhere, funneling itself through characters and settling at any opportunity into Mine. At one point the narrator declares that an artwork 'supplements being while framing the subject as a caged thing.' Characters are magic, says one narrator, because they are 'mine,' and control feels good. These speculatively anecdotal meditations on identity, agency, and artifice are witty, cagy, and provocative - Harryman at her best." - Catherine Wagner.
https://www.amazon.com/W-M-Carla-Harryman/dp/0985811129/?tag=2022091-20
2013
(Carla Harryman's Sue in Berlin is a collection of six gen...)
Carla Harryman's Sue in Berlin is a collection of six genre-blending pieces of poetry and performance that are informed in varying degree by musical, verbal, and physical improvisation. Composed between 2001 and 2015, each of the works is written for both the page and for live performance and are, what Harryman calls "recalcitrant texts," meant to perform their own object status "as both linked to and separate from the live performance of its language." Deeply collaborative, the pieces in Sue in Berlin are born from Harryman's improvisational work with both performers and musicians, while they touch on topics that span from childhood and gender to race and the social construction of space, to Detroit Techno and noise music. Works in the collection have been performed nationally and internationally: in San Francisco, Detroit, New York, Chicago, Austria, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic. Never settling between poetry and theater, Sue In Berlin resists genre to create a material sense of constant motion and morphing identities, heightening our attentions and sensitivities as readers to that of listeners: to the chorus that emerges - ruptures, rather - as text, as a process, as narrative insistently folding back into itself.
https://www.amazon.com/Sue-Berlin-Carla-Harryman/dp/B073ZTH4ZL/?tag=2022091-20
2017
educator playwright author poet
Carla Harryman was born on January 11, 1952, in Orange, Orange Country, California, United States. She is a daughter of Floyd and Marion Harryman.
In 1975 Carla Harryman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1978 she obtained a Master of Arts degree from San Francisco State University.
From 1975 to 1976 Carla Harryman was a literature teacher at Marymount High School in Los Angeles, California. From 1978 to 1982 she was a director of American Poetry Archives in San Francisco, California. In 1979, she co-founded the San Francisco Poets Theater, which staged numerous experimental plays, including her Third Man and other plays. From 1982 to 1987 Harryman was a director of the University Art Museum and also served as a writer and consultant. From 1986 to 1993 Carla was an instructor for secondary and elementary creative writing workshops. From 1988 to 1991 Harryman was a writer and consultant at Bedford Arts Publishers.
Carla Harryman also held various administration positions. She was a creative writing instructor a post-secondary institution, including the University of California, San Diego, Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, Wayne State University, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts. In 2000 Carla was appointed a senior lecturer at Wayne State University.
Currently, she serves as a professor in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University. She also serves on the MFA summer faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Harryman’s Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. In 2012 she performed (with pianist Magda Mayas) Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s "Music and New Music," a Re-performance, as the closing keynote of documenta 13’s What Is Thinking program in Kassel, Germany.
(These hybrid writings, staged as they are between fiction...)
1995(What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven...)
2011(Carla Harryman's Sue in Berlin is a collection of six gen...)
2017(Adorno's Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscop...)
2008(In The Words, Harryman playfully examines the family, the...)
1999(Carla Harryman describes Gardener of Stars as "an experim...)
2001("In this pair of wry, dark, brilliant books, we hear tell...)
2013(Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and ...)
2006(Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose...)
2005In 1984 Carla Harryman married Barrett Watten, a social critic and poet. They have a son, Asa.