Dodie Bellamy

A reading by Dodie Bellamy and a conversation with Michelle Tea in the PRB Archives.

Tuesday, October 26

7:30pm

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Bee Reaved, a new collection of essays selected by Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of 33-years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Seven months into her widowhood, COVID-19 radically changed the world. In her struggle to reconcile her personal disaster with global disaster, Bellamy abandons conventional narratives of recovery and redemption. Instead, she explores how grief ushers in new states of being and of community. In Bellamy’s highly focused selection themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Just as she did in her previous essay collection When The Sick Rule the World (Semiotexte 2018) Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence and calm.

First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s—a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.

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Dodie Bellamy’s writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. She is the 2018-19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. With Kevin Killian she edited for Nightboat Books Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997. More info at <www.belladodie.com>.

Michelle Tea is the author of over a dozen books, including the cult-classic Valencia, the illustrated Rent Girl, and the speculative memoir Black Wave. She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim, Lambda Literary, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, PEN/America, and other institutions. Knocking Myself Up is her latest memoir.

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Readings are supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts 2021 Organizational Support Grant.