Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (2017) is a book we knew about for so long that, by the time it was published, it was known only for that. It could have been called What Took You So Long, New Narrative?, where the distraction that has us wondering why no one is in a hurry to publish it is replaced by another distraction: the writer too busing loving too much to sign off on her proofs.
Edited by Dodie Bellamy & Kevin Killian, the book opens with an "Introduction" aware of 20th century American literary and perhaps interdisciplinary movements (Black Mountain?), with a focus on New York (School), San Francisco (Renaissance) and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as sites of critical interchange and innovation, with infusions of what we once and simply called "gay politics" and its post-Vietnam "Vietnam": HIV/AIDS.
The early angels of New Narrative are San Franciscans Robert Glück and Bruce Boone, with Glück's workshops a seminal force in the development of a local coterie. But it was Dodie and particularly Kevin who went to everything, the latter bringing glamour's bunting to whomever's room he stepped in or out of, to whomever's eyes he met and kissed.
Kevin carried an autograph book, but he was an autograph book. We leave impressions whether we are conscious of them or not, and Kevin is not so much "a part of all that I have met" (Tennyson), but a rememberer of that "all." There was a time when we were curious to know what Kevin thought of us. For about fifteen minutes it was something that all of us who were any of us simply had to know.
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