Permanent Flux

Paul Davis and I talked about dismantling my house today. My house. He thought he might number some of the pieces and place them in storage for a time the firm would build another version of it. Then he said, “Maybe we should let it go and just remember it.” I thought my friend Esther, who works for the organization Women for Afghan Women, might need some lumber for their new office in Queens. She said they were set. Most likely my house will become a pile of stuff people can cart away, and some will be donated to Materials for the Arts.

The rubber smell of a library stool I climb up to my bed with triggered an image I used in the comic novel I’m writing about death and sex. When I was feeling doubtful one day, a friend advised, “Oh, just make sure you put sex in the book, and it will be fine.” I did.

Photographers from publications have taken pictures of the house and some with me in it, but I don’t have copies. Paul was going to take some shots, but it turns out he won’t be able to before he goes out of town this week. I said I didn’t mind, and I don’t.

Last Saturday, we gave our third reading, and a trio of regulars showed up again, wanting the next installment. One is a filmmaker who wrote and shot a movie in a month, so he’s particularly amused by our challenge. We had the biggest turn-out yet, and I think the three of us delivered our most relaxed performances.

After the guests left, Grant, Ranbir, and I sat in our loft by the open window. Actually, it’s a missing window pane, but never mind. Grant hung out of it, sucking on one of his last cigarettes, since quitting happens post-box. Ranbir snapped his fingers and talked about a man he used to sit on a bench with not talking. Occasionally one of them would grunt and look up and point to the dive across the street and say, “Looks like they need to fix the masonry.” The other would say, “Yeah, they do.” He said, in his mock-heroic murmuring delivery, “We had connection. We had an experience.”

We hear each other grunting sometimes in our loft. We were strangers, then neighbors, now, to me, collaborators on a book I hadn’t imagined before the installation began and is now a novel-in-progress. I have stolen bits of conversation and mannerisms from my mates for scenes. Talks I’ve had with several regulars who attend Flux Thursdays (weekly dinner/presentations) moved me to deepen one of the plots I’m weaving, involving a character who survives the attacks of 9/11 and decides to go missing, jettisoning a culture that has made him feel passive and enervated.

Before entering, I was asked if I’d feel nervous about reading raw work aloud and whether I felt competitive with the other writers. Were we in a contest? If one of us finished something or found a publisher first, would that matter? Glibly, I said no. But I did feel vulnerable after readings. Was my prose weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable? Grant has already finished a novel draft and is working on another. Ranbir intends to have a completed draft by closing. I’m ahead of schedule in that I’ve composed more than twenty pages and haven’t vomited. I’m spurred by their productivity and inspired by (also larcenously inclined toward) their accomplishments.

Today a journalist asked if I missed anything. I said I didn’t. I am happier here than in the life I left, partly because I’m part of a community rather than alone. I’m not saying I would like to live this way indefinitely. Nothing about the experience will be duplicable. But having a gaggle of people whose minds excite you to bounce ideas off and make work with—as do the Fluxies and the Flux extensions—is enviable.

I told Stefany I was sad my house would be dismantled. She shot me one her dry-eyed, get-real looks and said, “Everything at Flux Factory dies, like us.”

Some things are nowhere near dead, but you have to leave them anyway.

Intellectual Property

This blog will be fast, as I snatch a few minutes from the fiction story I’m concocting. There are multiple mysteries whose solutions I’m not sure about yet, nor if they can hang together. But what fun would an exercise like this be without the suggestion that the novel—well hung or a shreddy embarrassment—is obsolete? Last Sunday a panel assembled here to send the noble-but-dying thing off on an ice floe. Not everyone waved goodbye. The consummately gifted Myla Goldberg did not care if the novel was dead or if it no longer occupied the bull’s eye section of the public conversation. She was writing novels. “There’s alchemy in fiction between the writer and reader. The reader is changed, becomes sad by reading about sad events. The novel gets to draw on anything it wants to. The toolbox is unlimited.” Her next book is due out this fall. Three surpassingly intelligent and talented male writers were also on the panel: Tom Bissell, Josh Tyree, and Morgan Meis. Several expressed concern that writers might be dedicating their time and ambition to literary forms not that many people care about anymore. They go to nonfiction, among other venues, to check out the ways we live now. How many fiction readers are enough? If you throw a party that not everyone tries to crash, can you still get down? Maybe the smartest people around are devising computer programs that learn, and motion sensing technology, and nanobots that swim in blood and detect illnesses before they materialize. But doesn’t someone still have to mop up, giving form to tensions there are no answers or consolations for?

Speaking of mopping, maintenance of the Flux kitchen has improved. The table has been refinished, though the varnish wasn’t entirely dry when it was hauled back inside and two containers placed on top embossed the texts: Support Bottom, advice it is useful to be reminded of. A fair number of penis people have lately been sighted wielding sponges and paper towels at strategic sites. I’m not saying you should come here and eat on the floor or anything.

Napping on the Job

In some places, Flux Factory’s little novel experiment that wouldn’t hurt a fly is being likened to the monster that devoured Cleveland in its brutish, unnatural aim to foster Chia-fiction. Purely by coincidence, one of the resident writers, Grant Bailie, hails from Cleveland. In this week’s New Yorker, Ben McGrath wrote a “Talk of the Town” item alerting readers not of the dangers of laboratory engineered literature but of the laziness of part of its labor force. Me. Being a novice in the production of insta-fiction, I have humble expectations for my efforts. I am, however, proud of my capacity to stay awake. Awake is what I am good at. Ask anyone. If Ben had tried to make contact with me, I would happily have shown him my stash of melatonin, Unisom and Ambien tablets displayed prominently in my cabin to aid sleep. For anyone who cares, I have not met Ben McGrath, nor has he met me. (That I know of. What does he look like?) I was not called by Ben McGrath. I did not hear Ben McGrath knock on the door of my cabin, probably because I wear ear plugs and over them Bose sound reducing headphones most of the time. During the day, I don’t want to be disturbed by just anyone who happens along. At night, I'm protecting my fragile sleep. I do not nap. The blog he quoted was not part of a fiction piece and did not purport to be part of a fiction piece. It was titled "Things Found in the Kitchen of Flux Factory," part of my log of impressions of the residency. Like this one.

Sticky and Tricky

The sticky table is being restored! Waxy varnish has been scraped, and the sanding is in progress. The surface is soft as skin, the grain a lapping wave. Ian says it must be varnished, but this time without wax. Sara says, “Women are doing the carpentry, and men are mopping the kitchen floor.” Stay tuned.

It was a weekend of visitors, creating a tug between the hive and the birds. Those attracted to the project have tended to be accomplished and open, so during visiting hours it was like having a cocktail party delivered. A question arose: “How has being here influenced your writing?”

The best part so far is writing, period. For long stretches. In proximity to two other pods containing silent workers. There’s an inaudible hum, a synergy in this slightly public but not interactive condition. In this way, my work is collaborative with the other writers, as well as with the designers of our habitats and with Flux Factory. More than one visitor likened this to a meditation circle.

I doubt my writing will be influenced by the content of what my companions are composing, but I’m spurred by the containment of my house and the seriousness of purpose the participants share. I felt that as soon as I entered—even before, watching the habitats go up. Being honored by another artist’s effort and excellence is an impetus to ante up, make the project sweeter with what I throw into the pot. No one is goofing off or wants to, though I’m sure I would be if I weren’t here. I’d be pouring myself into too many other containers. My insecurities would get the better of me. I feel them here, but being in my house or re-entering it if I’ve taken a break transforms my mood fast. I don’t think what I’m writing here is better than what I’d produce outside, rather that I’m motivated and able to keep going.

Architects think about the ways that space effects people’s emotional states and performance. I’m thinking about this more than usual in my little house, partly because I want to be a reporter rat for Salazar Davis, whose design creates tensions between exposure and concealment and between security and interruption. Paul visited on Sunday to participate in the artists’ panel and to spiff up the interior of my house. I now have two rubber and stainless steel library stools for stepping up to both ends of my bed, as well as a handle to open my door from inside. (Outside, to throw off visitors, the door is camouflaged as part of an exterior wall.) Paul installed eight double hooks for clothes and towels and built a shelf for an electric fan positioned to cool the bed at night and circulate air the rest of the time. We screwed in five more shelves between exposed two-by-fours, allowing surfaces for toilet stuff and books I’d stacked on my desk and the floor. Oh yeah, he brought a bouquet of peonies that stunk up the place real good. What a change. Moving things off my desk felt like moving things off my chest, the house an extension of my body, like a pilot’s cockpit, everything within arm’s reach or nearly so. The house is a body.

At the artists’ panel, Mitch McEwen, a partner in Tricky Ink with Kwi-Hae Kim (the designers of Ranbir’s house), explained some of the triggers for their fascinating visual conceits. They were interested in “the secret nature of a box” which led them to think about secrets in building structures, like cavity walls, and about espionage and the ways spies exchange messages in “dead letter boxes.” “The secrecy of writing appealed to me,” said Mitch, who wears her hair close-cropped and has an impish smile. She was sitting on her skateboard as she clicked images on her computer screen. The team used boxes in their construction, creating an exterior wall out of materials generally used inside. By building with packaging materials, they wanted to make visible in some ways the nature of building, comparing that to an idea in Flux Factory’s proposal, which was to make writing visible by letting people observe fiction writers.

A young man who attended the panel said afterward that he’d recently read Hebdomeros, the novel by Giorgio de Chirico, in which writing achieved a surreality equal to the paintings. Did that make the writing visible or did sentences produce sensations similar to ones stirred by a visual medium? The young man said that in a different way blogs expand the visibility of writing, by allowing a window into process—people posting work that isn’t finished and isn’t necessarily aiming to be reworked and polished. Through their comments, readers also affect how a writer might evolve a text, interactive technology enabling new forms of collaboration, authorship, and invention.

I said I was wary of publishing fiction excerpts I considered raw. I was discovering the plot of the thing I was writing now as I went along. He said readers of blogs knew how to approach text in this state. I suppose they see it containing cavity systems and dead letter boxes they can leave messages in. I am willing to experiment, though I don’t think writing can be made visible by watching someone compose in a box or anywhere else. For me it’s a solitary conversation between me and words I summon, fiddle with, and coax into meanings I intend and others I didn’t realize were there.

Fiction Excerpt

The working title is Indestructable Beauty. This is the beginning of Chapter Two.

Mom had smoked for sixty-five years. Sixty-five years of dreaming as she looked out windows with a cigarette, white smoke snaking around her beautiful face. Mom’s beauty was tenacious, like her smoking, a contrast to the formlessness of her desires. She said that nothing mattered, and depending on whether the thing she meant was trivial to you or something you cared about—like you, yourself—she could seem world-weary in a romantic, Bogart-movie way or clinically depressed. She watched her organs sputter and leak, a kid strapped to a scary ride. Still, whatever happened, she didn’t want to be cut open. The one time she had been, I was born.

She did not like things pouring in or out of her, not even a bead of blood from a paper cut. Even a small incision reminded her the flood gates could open. That’s why people faint at the sight of their blood. They know where it must lead, and yet they can’t believe it. They can’t believe it, because they know.

I tried on her ring. It fit the fourth finger of my left hand. A sense of peace came over me combined with the feeling of being nibbled by ants. It was as if I was marrying Mom. I read somewhere that people are most reliably who they are when they’re alone and don’t have to pretend for anyone else. With her ring, my fingers looked alien, as if they had more claim on things.

I thought wearing it would attract bad karma, whatever that was. I didn’t believe in karma the same way I couldn’t grasp the big picture, and yet actions had consequences. You didn’t need belief to see that. Who gave Mom the ring? I didn’t ask her, and she didn’t say. She disclosed information about her past with the enthusiasm of a spy in enemy hands. I didn’t even know much about her life with Dad before Becca and I were born, and Mom had no interest in probing herself. She would have been suspicious of her motives. I returned the ring to its plastic bag and secured it with tape, the way, as a kid, I’d masked tampering with the chocolate and chips Mom hid around the house. Somehow, they didn’t make her fat.

Dream Houses

For many years, I’ve had a dream in which my house has no roof and I can see the stars and moon from my bed. There is always an element of anxiety in the exposure, and sometimes it’s really scary, the result of a skirmish or war. Mostly, though, I discover the public nature of my private space by accident. I turn a corner and realize my rooms aren’t enclosed, as I believed, but extend through hallways into a fuzzy area, like the lobby of a hotel. Strangers are floating around, in front of me or without my knowing, right there, outside and yet inside.

In a way, my house at Flux Factory is that dream come to life. My walls are translucent. When the lights are on, it glows. Shapes ghost by, beast or person, unclear. You can see the objects inside my house from outside, the closer the form is to the wall, the more distinct its outlines and colors. A barge of wood floats my bed high off the ground, and set underneath the mattress is a window spectators can look into and through which I can see them crouching along in a tunnel that clefts my domicile into two lobes of a brain. Sweeping up from my bed is a steep, carpeted slope that projects the inside of my house outside, through the kind of gaping, roofless opening I dream about. I sleep well. Granted, I know my neighbors, and the three of us have observed the quiet rule in our space. So far, I’m sleeping in the material form of my anxiety dream with less anxiety than in my apartment, with its solid, impermeable walls, where I have solitude. Maybe that’s how it always is with fear.

Though it’s far more elegant, Ranbir’s house reminds me of the forts I made in abandoned lots in childhood, out of crates and bricks and stuff, and it summons the houses under construction I used to play in when I was older in Lido Beach, where speculators went crazy building alongside the dunes. They were dangerous and irresistible: framed, but floorless in places, and open to the sky. We’d dare each other to leap from the second story into sand and soil mounded near two-by-fours. I jumped, because I was afraid, and the spaces became sexy. I didn’t break anything. There were early kisses in those lawless rooms.

Grant’s house is sprouting, and he reports he’s on a tear, producing “the freest writing I’ve ever done.” On Saturday when we moved in, the seed beds that cover the roof panels and create a garden in the front had the merest stubble. Now they are velvety fields of rye, clover, wheat grass, and vetch, tufting in patterns, like mini hedges in a maze. The lushness of the plantings combines with the rough but exacting carpentry to form a vibrating hub for our space. I once wrote a weird little fairy tale about a man turning into a tree. It wasn’t so nice for the man. I’ve had dreams, too, about floors made of grass—the outside and inside jumbled again but with different architectural elements. These dreams aren’t scary. They’re erotic, bodies plunked into growing aliveness, feeling the house as an extension of the flesh and vice versa, contained and uncontained, protected and unprotected. At the end of the movie Secretary, lovers who devote their lives to their sexual fantasies fling their naked bodies onto a marriage bed made of grass.

Last night was Flux Thursday, a weekly supper cooked by valiant and generous donors, followed by a presentation by a guest . . . a reading, a video, a slide show, a performance of an artwork in progress. This celebration was for Morgan, who successfully defended his philosophy dissertation at New School University and can now be addressed as Dr. outerborough fringe artspace macher terrible. The spread was plentiful and veg-centric. Nothing with a face or lips was served, unless you count an image of the Holy Virgin that appeared on top of one of the shitakes.

In my dream shared space, labor is divided equally between the penis people, the vagina people, and those with alternative genitalia. At Flux Factory, where everyone came of age in the grow light of feminism and other progressive rights movements, on paper chores aren’t parceled out according to gender. Everyone does a share of what’s required and also tolerates mess. Eighteen bodies plus their mates and friends and visitors carpet bathrooms with hair, track puddles from showers, fill garbage bags to overflowing, pile dishes with stuck food in sinks. Still, attempts are made, kudzu is hacked with machetes.

Sort of. There was all this food, platter after platter of sliced, oily veg dishes, cheese, fruit, pasta and mushrooms, bruschettas, a strawberry shortcake warship, I mean counters and tables covered with food, plus a zillion mismatched plates and pieces of flatware, glasses, and bottles of beer and wine. There were maybe thirty-five people max in and out, and after a couple of hours around fifteen were in the kitchen. The scene was a cyclone, a zoo. It was time to get in there scraping plates, covering leftovers, finding fridge space for them, emptying beer bottles, carrying stuff to the sink, setting up stations for washing, drying, and restocking. The women started to work. The men did not. The men needed to be asked to help, and then they did, some with more initiative and sense of purpose, others needing remedial instruction in the technologies of the sponge and paper towel. What the hell?

Conceptual Art Dinner

A fat perk here is that chefs and chef-like friends of Flux Factory cook dinner for the writers. I am the only meat-eater of the three, so I’m not being served anything with fur or feathers (unless you count tofu), though we have been getting fish. So far the meals have been inventive and delicious. We leave clean plates. Last night artist Miwa Koizumi prepared a meal that was also a performance and a witty commentary on packaging and transformations. Miwa likes unexpected combinations and throwaway containers for elegant contents. We had newspaper placemats. Our menus were written on paper towels that also served as napkins, and our four courses were presented in milk cartons, juice containers, plastic bottles, and jelly glasses. Normally solid foods were liquefied in surprising (and appealing) combinations. A corpse of white fish rested on a bed of ramps—a wild leek with small onion-like bulbs and green shoots that taste like scallions—under a blanket of béchamel sauce, all snugged into a milk-carton coffin.

Dan, one of the Fluxies, is writing a dissertation on the Federalist period in American history and is interested in the ways people respond to and assert authority. I cut a grapefruit for breakfast, slicing off the rind and pith and plucking out the seeds. (The day before, Sarah, another Fluxie, watched and said, “That’s so Food Channel.”) Dan ate Quaker Oats, as we talked about the authority of the project rules. I said I was pleased that some were working for me, although among them was not signing in and out on cards to keep track of the time we spent out of our houses. I’m complying out of respect for the plan, but the rule feels nagging and suggests that self-regulation is an anemic impulse. It is, Dan said, for some people. “If I were doing this, I’d play solitaire in my house all day. I have a conflictual relationship with work.” So do I, though it’s not about putting my shoulder to the wheel. I worry the work is no good. What has so far been useful is having nothing to do but work, gorging on it. Distraction is still possible, but it’s limited, and the limits are, as the Flux Factory designers imagined they could be, bliss. I also like the rule the writers have established that no one can speak in our domain, including us, except during visiting hours. Most of the time it’s pin-drop quiet, and Fluxies generally sleep late, which means we can, too.

Though perhaps the experience was meant to be something of an ordeal-—sadism-wise or body-art-wise—-it doesn’t feel like a proper dungeon. To blow-dry my hair, I have to haul an orange extension cable from the kitchen into the bathroom, but that’s what the Fluxies would have to do if they cared about fluffing. I don’t myself when it’s just us and visitors aren’t coming. It’s like living in your pajamas for a month without the ice cream and the depression. For exercise so far I am running or walking around the perimeter of the roof, sometimes with an umbrella if it’s sunny, looking demented.

Things Found in the Kitchen at Flux Factory

A 15-roll sack of Bounty paper towels. A five-pound plastic jug of honey with sticky cap. A 32-ounce bottle of red hot sauce. A two-quart vat of Kikkoman soy sauce. A crate of oranges, a crate of grape fruits, a crate of tomatoes. Two 20-pound bags of apples, Granny Smith and yellow delicious. A tin of Twinings English Breakfast tea containing 200 bags and measuring 10” by 10” by 18”. An eight-pound bag of red onions. A 65-ounce jar of artichoke hearts in olive oil. Two four-dozen cartons of eggs. Three 60-bag boxes of Hefty 33-gallon garbage bags. A box of Honey Bunches of Oats containing three pounds, four ounces of cereal, measuring 6 1/2” by 9 ½” by 13 ½”. A similar sized box of Quaker Oats containing nine pounds of cereal. A bag of 20 7” pitas weighing 1588 grams. A five-liter can of Berio olive oil. A bottle of Ultra Dish Liquid containing one gallon and 3.781 ounces.

Ian Montgomery was heating a bagel in the microwave at 2 AM. He is 24, tall, strapping, with a tumble of red curls tickling a neck embossed with a smudgy black tattoo that is supposed to be temporary but is enduring. He designed the habitat for Grant Bailie using wood dowels, clay-caked muslin, and panels filled with soil and sprouting seeds, a graceful, rustic dreamscape offered to one artist by another. He worked on the installation/domicile for weeks leading to the opening, allowing for improvisation on core ideas. Now it was time to clean his room and fertilize his own life. How had he learned to live in a commune? By growing up with parents in Iowa who practiced transcendental meditation and sent him to a school where he practiced meditation twice a day. What did he do with the irritations that built up, as inevitably do when you share bathrooms, a kitchen, and a library space with 20 people? “I let go of them.” He made a gesture like balling paper and tossing it away. “They don’t serve any purpose. . . . Though maybe not right away.”

The next morning, on the table, sat a NY Times editorial denouncing The Novel project: “The more seriously the writers take the proper business of making their own work, the more the installation trivializes the nature of writing.” I don’t know about you, but first thing in the morning (it was actually 11), before composing text, there’s nothing I like better than being termed a barbarian tearing down the gates of civilization. I felt a twinge. I have barbarian issues left over from childhood when my father referred to cousin Terri as “a perfect young lady who knows how to conduct herself” and I was anything but. I don’t refer to myself as a novelist, but yesterday and today a bit of fiction seeped out, enabled by the caretakers of Flux Factory. Contrary to what’s been suggested in some articles, we’re not being exhibited like zoo animals, nor are we incarcerated in cramped hovels or starved for food and companionship. The meals are healthful and delicious. We take breaks when we see fit, but mostly the three of us are so far enjoying the chance to play with words without distraction and stay put for many hours. The Times states: “Each [writer] has promised to finish a novel by June 4. That is 25 days away. Odds are that these will either be teeny-tiny novels or very bad ones.” For the record, I will feel accomplished if by the end of this thing I’ve written 20 pages that don’t make me vomit. A teeny-tiny novel? What a good idea. A very bad one? There’s always that risk, even for people far more practiced than me, but if I thought about that while I was here I’d be squandering the sweetness of this lark.

First Night

Emily, a beautiful Brit with wavy, blond hair, came to the opening party. We sat on the floor of my little house, and when she bent her head, I noticed auburn and copper strands mixed with the blond. She was teaching 17th Century literature at a college and was surprised that Milton sold so well to undergraduates—especially Paradise Lost and Areopagitica, where the brutish patriarch argues for freedom of the press.

The night before, this house was a jangle of roofless angles. Eight architects and builders with tool belts strapped sexily around their hips, sawed and hammered and nailed. I was amazed by their ability to transform ideas into solid forms, even though I knew that’s what architects and builders do. I collected fallen screws and slivers of wood, swept saw dust into billowy piles that looked like cottage cheese. The workers stayed up all night, catching naps, picking at chicken, hummus, salad, and cheese. Amy and Joo, the two women in the crew, were slender, watchful, young. Another night, I shared a taxi with them to Manhattan. They said they had more opportunity to experiment in their small firm than they would at a larger place. “We’d have to sit all day in a cubicle designing recessed lighting for bathrooms,” Amy said.

I had not written during the past seven weeks, because my mother had become seriously ill and needed my care. The thing about writing (as with sex) is that when I’m not doing it I forget how I exist in it. So I was getting to know the architects, who mostly worked with wealthy clients. Building this house, they were taking a walkabout of sorts—playing with concepts of privacy, proximity, voyeurism, and visibility they would ordinarily not be able to implement.
In the thing we were creating, I saw three experiments tucked into each other like Russian nesting dolls. There was the arching scheme cooked up by Morgan Meis, president of Flux Factory, who wanted to see what would happen when writers focused on writing alone. He liked rules, imagining that limits would help him finish a piece of work. The project curtailed the time we could spend away from our desks and our access to email and phones. The next experiment was the houses we would live in, and then there were the fiction pieces we would produce. Morgan wondered if the novel had run out of things to say and ways of speaking or if it was still breathing. The month, well, it was a chunk of time. Who would be willing to do this for more than that and where would the money come to feed them?

I told Paul Davis and Mauricio Salazar, the architechts designing my space, that I would be their lab rat. Maurizio has a sensual mouth and wears his emotions on his skin. Tall, sinewy Paul appears to have been drilled in the fine points of tact. They asked what I wanted. I said a cool, dark, quiet place to sleep and for working no sound or movement. This in a side show/dormitory? I could see them thinking.

The Salazar Davis office is in a high-rise in the garment district, half a block from the coat manufacturing business my father owned when I was young. The partners and their three associates work in a large, open space. They see each other, hear each others’ conversations. The office is surrounded by tall, unshaded windows, and across is another building, 50 yards away, where people stare at computer screens, talk on phones, and wander around desultorily. One snowy day in March, Mauricio pointed across the way and said, “They don’t know us and we don’t know them but in a sense we share our lives. We’d like to build a house that would allow people to see you and interact with you in ways you wouldn’t necessarily know were going on. They would watch your silhouette through the walls, and you would see bodies passing like ghosts. We’d like to design spaces for visitors to slither into, where they might glimpse a part of you at work. We’re wondering how that would feel to you and the visitors and what a house like that would look like.”

When I told my friends I was going to live in a box for a month with two other writers who were also living in boxes and that we would share premises with 15 or 20 young artists and graduate students who lived communally in Queens, they stared at me with confusion. I discovered Morgan’s ad (it ended with “no kidding) on Craig’s List. The thought of escaping from my life slid into me like a splinter. A few days later, I emailed Morgan, and he called. He said he was finishing a dissertation about Walter Benjamin and that he also wrote fiction. He was wry and speculative. I thought he could help me learn to bend.

I watched snow fall past the windows at Salazar Davis and spied on the unknowing figures across the way. My mother was in the hospital recovering from open-heart surgery and a stroke. Would she recover? What state would she be in when I entered the box? When I thought she might die, I was surprised that I cried. I did not think we loved each other, but life was full of surprises. I told Maurizio and Paul, “Have fun with your design. I will adapt.”

After my friends left the opening, I felt adrift. My house was beautiful, with its vaulting wall that looked like the prow of a ship, its tunnel passageway for visitors, its roof-top aerie where I could survey the gallery below. “We turned the visitors into rats,” Mauricio reassured me about the finished design. I was honored by the effort spent in getting it up, but the work had gone down to the wire, with people sweeping floors as reporters arrived, and there hadn’t been time to do much on the interior. Missing were steps leading to my bed and to a space beyond it, where I placed my yoga mat. There was no place yet for clothes, books, and bathroom things. I stuck pushpins into the wood studs lining the walls, hung clothes on them, and arranged books on the baseboards.

Officially, the experiment had begun. What would I write? My mother’s health wasn’t critical at present, though it was still rickety and she was on my mind. Maybe a comedy about a daughter’s envy of her mother’s beauty and what happens when she steals her mother’s ring. The writers were supposed to sign in and out on cards when we left our houses. I thought the rules were silly, but I wanted to bend.

Hunting for food, I found Fluxies in the kitchen milling around the sticky table, cracking open peanut shells, and swigging Rhinegold from bottles. These hive members were young enough to be my children, but I felt like their new kid. I scrounged up a hunk of iceberg, a pear, and tuna in a bowl.

On a couch, I cut the pear. Emily wandered by, and I invited her to my house. We plunked on the floor. She circled her knees, clad in plaid pants, with her arms. She’d nearly finished her first novel which had been a thrill to write. It was about the photographer Edward Steicken and the surveillance photos he’d taken during World War I, also about the arrogance and heedlessness she felt fed that war. She looked out at the world, not herself, qualities that struck me as useful for a novelist. That wasn’t the way I described myself. Phillip Roth and Martin Amis were novelists. I was a prose writer with a portable voice.

Emily asked what I’d been writing, and I said that before my mother got sick I’d started a comic collage about loving men and hating the sexual double standard. She sighed, saying there were times she wished she didn’t love men, imagining life would be simpler for her in the unfair world. “Here are men, getting a better deal, surrounding you, reminding you of what’s been placed beyond your reach.” I offered that the advantage of disadvantage was that it heightened awareness of privilege, although I admitted I’d never gotten over the shock of two judgments. “Every time I encounter sexism, it’s as if I’ve never heard of it.” We kept talking. People drifted into the night.

Welcome to Novel: A Living Installation

Dear Reader - This is an initial post to let you know what you'll find here. The writers working on Novel: A Living Installation at Flux Factory, Inc., have agreed to share some excerpts from their project on this site throughout the month. We've given the writers the widest possible latitude to post whatever they wish. Ideally there will be at least one new post per week from each writer, if not more.