The Writers Series

Laurie was inspired by Laurie Weeks’ uncanny ability to simultaneously embody her characters and write them from a clear distance. The text in question is just a few paragraphs from a draft of the novel Zipper Mouth, more than ten years in the making, and published by the Feminist Press. The character is Weeks the addict, but the substance of her continual addiction is not the heroin of the story, but the real junk of a life of refusal — refusal to be a girl and not relinquish a girls true insight and desires; refusal to participate in our corrupted cultural heritage yet be a witness, an embedded journalist, a chronicler of a more authentic culture. The video is a bit romantic, a portrait of a character more than of the author herself. As Laurie does in her writing, I conflate the persona of the writer with that of her characters, creating a portrait that is both real and fantasy, and creating a fantasy that is, at its roots, a true story. 

One of my own goals was to work intuitively, and to shoot and edit the piece with as little interference as possible. I wanted to work with blinders on, to not listen to the voices of an imagined audience, and to make the piece for Laurie. This allowed me freedom to go into and out of narratives — the one I was creating about the author, the one we were both creating about the fantasy of the author, and the one that is the story in the quoted text—to foreground impressions an to visualize the strength of the writing in Zipper Mouth.

-- Cecilia Dougherty

This title is only available on The Writers Series.

In the early 1990s, I went to a reading by Leslie Scalapino at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. I could not understand the writing, which can seem difficult and unwieldy to a reader unaccustomed to language poetry, and understood less the more I tried. After a certain point in the reading I stopped trying to figure it out and I let the words seep in. My reward was an effortless understanding of how her poetry works. She may not have been a language poet, after all, but what Fanny Howe calls “a solitary, an original.” Scalapino’s politics, too, were inextricable from the poetics of the text. I became hooked, and one or two lines of her writing could provide weeks of probing thought and invaluable insight to me, the newly initiated. Later, we were teaching together at Bard College and I wanted to portray her writing, to provide a visual counterpart to her own project of “getting inside of the action.”

We shot this video in an afternoon, taking our cues from the text that she was working on at the time, As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen – (Deer Night). This video is about the writing, the rigor of Scalapino’s practice, and the humor and light that she lets in. Leslie Scalapino died in 2010, leaving an unmatched legacy of literature, poetry and ideas.

— Cecilia Dougherty

This title is only available on The Writers Series.

This video is an unabashed fan letter to poet Eileen Myles. As in Laurie, my desire was to romanticize the poet, but not through her writing so much as through her reputation as the natural born child of the New York School and the Beats. I shot the movie as I imagined Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie shooting Pull My Daisy, a film that left an impression on me chiefly of the struggle between form and formlessness, plan and improvisation, sketch and story. I visualized Myles’ life to be something like this, and featured herself as herself in the East Village walkup she shared with Rosie the pit bull terrier, reading, drinking coffee, checking her messages, and making plans for excursions into the lower avenues. She is reading from her semi-autobiographical novel Cool For You, which was published later that year.

-- Cecilia Dougherty

This title is only available on The Writers Series.

I arranged a visit to poet/novelist Kevin Killian’s South of Market apartment in San Francisco to shoot a portrait of him, and when I arrived he had a guest, poet Cedar Sigo. They had corresponded earlier, but were meeting for the first time, and Cedar agreed to participate in our video shoot. This is perhaps the least planned, most verité and documentary of the videos about writers so far. Our immediate plan was for Kevin to read one of Cedar’s poems and for Cedar to read one by Kevin. Kevin read Cedar Sigo’s Theme, but with barely a break, continued to his own Who, a description of life in the circle of AIDS. Also included are excerpts from Sigo’s O Fantasma, and Killian’s The Door Into Darkness from The Argento Series.

-- Cecilia Dougherty

This title is only available on The Writers Series.