Frequency North, October 9

The first of the semester’s series of readings, all prose this time around.

Professor Daniel Nester welcomed the audience, which filled the Standish Room to standing-room-only & introduced the reader, Chloe Caldwell.

Caldwell read from the essay collection Legs Get Led Astray (Future Tense Books, 2012) & from a new novella Women (SF/LD Books, 2014). Although she said “That Was Called Love” (from Legs Get Led Astray) was an essay, it sounded more like a memoir, or a lightly fictional auto-biographical story, listing the apartments she/the narrative lived in from Brooklyn to Seattle, addressed to her girl-friend like a love letter. Then it just ends.

She followed that with a selection of pages from her novella about a relationship between 2 women & their breakup & the narrator’s various dating experiences afterwards. Back to Legs Get Led Astray she read “My Mother Wanted to Be Betty Boop,” with her mother in the audience. It was also a memoir, with stark, personal details that characterized all the pieces she read.

When I first saw the schedule of Frequency North readings I wondered, “where are the poets?” Caldwell’s writing, while certainly “prose” often contained sections that could be read as poems, her preferred style being anaphoric lists, such as what friends in NYC were texting her in Seattle, or the segment from her last piece, each sentence beginning, “My mother…”

Check out the schedule of the remaining readings at the St. Rose website.