the lab is out, another shout-out for the lunatics' ball

There was a wonderful launch event for THE LAB on Tuesday night at The Booksmith in the Haight, where I got to touch bases with a current member of my writers' group (Sasha Vasilyuk) and a past member of my writers' group, Matthew Clark Davison, whose book we were celebrating. I'm so honored to have my flash "The Lunatics' Ball" and a craft essay about hybridity and their writing prompt  based on the flash in the book. And to hear from Matthew that teaching the sequence has gone really well!

Today the fifth of five installments on their book in LITERARY HUB came out, this one on the important question of finding a container for what you want to express, and there's a paragraph on my hybrid manuscript-in-progress:

"In The Lab, we share excerpts from Jacqueline Doyle’s project The Lunatics’ Ball, which is the title of her book-in progress, a hybrid memoiristic text that focuses on women who lived in psychiatric hospitals. Parts of the project also illuminate the history of psychiatric hospitals—formerly called “lunatic asylums”—in ways a publisher might categorize as “historical nonfiction.”
When her own and her family’s history with mental illness needed space on the page, she added sentences constructed with strategies typically used in memoir. Soon, however, the project moved fluidly to include what the writer dreamt, personas she invented, and even included bits influenced by her characters’ (reported or author-imagined) interest in music, syntax, and lyricism. Doyle said, 'It was a challenge…to write about the silenced, the hidden, the lost, and bring them alive on the page…' Her obsessions didn’t fit into any one narrative category, so she combined strategies from multiple genres and shaped them into something new."

I love the concluding point that they make after discussing a number of hybrid projects: "What connects all of this isn’t resistance to genre. It’s loyalty to what’s urgent. We cross forms not to break rules, but because the material won’t come alive any other way. Hybrid writing, when it works, is the opposite of casual. It’s what happens when the writer follows a line of inquiry past the known forms into something more precise."

I'm enjoying the whole book, now that I have a copy, and I wish I could teach a semester-long class with it! (I don't, however, wish I hadn't retired from Cal State.)