Telephone: Essays in Two Voices
Telephone: Essays in Two Voices
Essays | Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade | October 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7348167-3-0
168 pages
* Winner of the 2019 CSU Poetry Center Essay Collection competition, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib *
Praise for TELEPHONE:
Telephone is, for me, a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This is a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from. HANIF ABDURRAQIB
Miller and Wade’s Telephone is a polyphonic emergency. These divinely nostalgic and politely oracular essays—are they essays? watch them essai—pursue the maximum boundaries of genre, and there, in the peripheries, together, we reach into our pockets to read their decoded message: I love. LILY HOANG
Wade and Miller’s collaborative essay collection, Telephone, stretches the possibilities of the form, creating a kind of thought puzzle that you’re happy to never truly solve. Their voices bounce and blend, weave and bob, in a way that seems almost impossible and magical. Telephone is a testament to the power of voice and the beauty of collaborative art. STEVEN CHURCH
Telephone is unusual, thoughtful and compelling. The two voices together are clever, passionate, entertaining and intriguing. Telephone pushes the boundaries and demonstrates the power and potential of the creative nonfiction genre. LEE GUTKIND
Miller and Wade’s marvelous Telephone takes the ordinary—cars, exercise, toys, sex—and elevates it to the extraordinary. Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation. Telephone stuns us with its burnished music, its use of form, and its brilliant musings on seemingly quotidian subjects. In these twin-voiced essays is a celebration of narrative’s thrall, but also a liberation blueprint that frees us from the tyranny of a single self, a single story. JAMES ALLEN HALL
Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections, most recently An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016). She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her poetry chapbook The Daughters of Elderly Women received the 2020 Floating Bridge Press award. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and associate faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of twelve collections of poetry and prose, including the memoir Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020) and the poetry collection Skirted (The Word Works, 2021). A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in Dania Beach.
MORE INFO:
