Laurie Blauner / Courtesy of Laurie Blauner
Ballard writer Laurie Blauner still finding truth in her
imagination
04/14/2014
By Emile Monte
Laurie Blauner had a smile in her
voice as much as on her face. She wanted to talk poetry—my poetry, her
poetry—and prose and the combination of the two that her work has become. Her
enthusiasm for literature—for words, characters, sounds, meaning—was as
transparent and contagious as laughter.
But have you heard of her? Perhaps
not. She’s a small press kind of writer and less interested in her work being
popular than being true. In twenty years of writing, Blauner still writes
primarily for herself.
And in twenty years of writing Blauner
has a lot of work to show for her efforts: seven books of poetry, four novels,
and a few more on the road to being published. The next in line is a book of
poetry, It Looks Worse than I Am, due in the fall of this year.
Not to give anything away, but the book is divided in three parts: the first,
about animals and intimacy; the second, about rooms and the loss of capability;
the third, about a self-contained man who cannot be contained.
This only hints at the introverted
method and darkly personal themes prevalent in Blauner’s work but that one
wouldn’t guess based upon her immediate personable-ness. Her lines are evidence
of her acts of choosing and judging all at once—the revealing of a character or
scene while at the same time dissecting it. She wastes no time or space in
drawing forth meaning. A few exemplary lines from her past work:
The rose tattoo at her ankle has no
point, is a story without an ending.
Where hands are unhinged like bad
grammar, color jumps out at me. The random yes or no of everything. Morality
swirls in its poodle skirt.
By forty there is a sideshow of
vanities: the dragon breath you wake to, bones tossed against your skin like
waves, or the flesh that grows where a waitress tucks her loose change.
It Looks Worse than I Am, and
all the rest of Blauner’s poetry these days, is the fruit of her temporary
returns to poetic roots after relishing in the writing of long prose. “Fiction
is nice because you can spread it out, give it a longer life.” It requires and
offers more time, both in the reading and the writing of it.
Twenty years ago Blauner wouldn’t have
thought herself capable of writing prose, much less long prose. The complexity
of plot and the grasping at the thread over a long period of time was too hard.
Even recently Blauner’s first and last contribution to the blogosphere was to
assert that she was incapable of taking part in it. But what Blauner has
discovered is her ability to empathize and follow through with characters.
Writing, in addition to helping her find
significance in her unconscious, allows Blauner to live lives that are not her
own. “It’s all about imagination. It stretches us. That’s what I love.”
Blauner is channeling other lives and
other voices more and more these days. Whereas her first novel was at least
“85% nonfiction,” her latest, The Bohemians, is all made up. Her thematic
concerns have similarly shifted with her maturity. When she was younger she was
concerned with making sense of her personal experience, but now Blauner
concedes that “there are some things you’ll never resolve, and at a certain
point in your life you’re OK with that.”
Rather, Blauner is now concerned with
the ins and outs of everything—herself and others, relationships, aging,
childhood, entrapment. She’s an explorer going with the flow and producing maps
of her experiences along the way, offering readers a ticket on her ride.
For
more information about Blauner’s work, visit http://www.laurieblauner.com/.