Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative
Anthology of theoretical writings on New Narrative, a movement that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. New Narrative reconceives autobiographical writing through genre crossing and intersectional storytelling. Co-edited with Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott.
Coach House Books, 2004
“In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers discuss aesthetics founded on new explorations in the field of narrative, the mystery that is the body, questions of how representation may be torqued to deal with gender and sexuality, the experience of marginalized people, the negotiation between different orders of time, the “performance” of outlaw subject matter. Brave, energetic and fresh, Biting the Error tells a whole new story about narrative.” - Coach House Books
From Editor’s Introduction by Mary Burger
When I got there (eventually, to San Francisco), I found there were other writers who, like me, were at that time calling ourselves poets but doing a kind of writing that often looked like prose, and talking a lot about narrative.
Narrative meant that you could be a person having experiences and you could admit and afirm in writing that you, the writer, had experiences and thought about them and the meaning of them; that personhood itself, if a fiction, was no less useful for not being “true”; that in fact its very artifice made it a fruitful literary conceit; and that all this—the being, the experiencing, the thinking, the meaning, the artifice—could be the stuff of your work.