Jessa crispin biography template
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I Am Jessa Crispin’s bekymmer with Publishing
Some years ago, an old friend visited DC. My spouse and I met him for dinner and passed a pleasant evening catching up on mutual acquaintances, news of our children, and current events. It wasn’t until we got in the car after dinner that he slipped the knife between my ribs.
“So I see you’ve been doing a lot of writing online,” he said from the back seat. “You write a lot about books.”
Yes, I remember nodding and responding. At the time, I was actively blogging and hosting an online author-interview series.
“It’s like you’re a cheerleader for books,” he continued. “You don’t actually write anything critical, do you?”
The knife had reached its intended target—but while our friend meant to belittle me, his words shocked me in ways he could not have understood. He was correct. I hadn’t been writing “anything critical.” Why was that?
His words came
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Like much travel writing, Jessa Crispin’s new book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, & Ex-Countries, begins with a departure. Like markedly less travel writing, it ends with one, too. One could say that the cliché it’s not about the destination, but the journey applies to the essay collection, but The Dead Ladies Project is also just as much about destinations as it is about journeys. It’s reflective, extensively researched, and very good.
Jessa and I are friends, which I have to disclose up front. I met her in Berlin after she published what would eventually become the first essay in this collection, “Talking to the Dead: Channeling William James in Berlin.” I contacted her because inom connected very strongly with her depressed vision of the city; because she was integrating anställda writing with smart, researched literary biography/criticism in a way inom hadn’t seen before; and because not one week before discovering the essay I h
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Writing Against Complacency
The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
“COME TO US, and you can finish out your collapse among people who understand,” Jessa Crispin writes at the beginning of The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries (University of Chicago). She’s personifying the city of Berlin, long known as a destination for the wanton and weary, the dreamy and dreary-eyed — but she could also be talking about her debut, a fascinating hybrid of memoir, literary analysis, history, biography, travel reportage, philosophy, and speculation.
The Dead Ladies Project is at once an investigation and a resuscitation, as Crispin sifts through the lives of dead expatriate iconoclasts while traveling through the European cities where they once lived in exile. She’s searching for theimpetus that mobilizescreative expression, the drive to survive in spite of persecution, alienation, hopelessness, and self-doubt. “My first act of free will shall b