Artist Profile
Kelly Puig
In my experience, the process of creating an integrated literary work of art within and across numerous prismatic dimensions is a growing within the unconscious to allow yourself to unfurl where you lead, come what may.
Kelly Puig is a Cuban-American writer and interdisciplinary artist. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown University where she was the recipient of the Weston Prize for best graduate work in addition to the Frances Mason Harris Prize for best manuscript of poetry or prose fiction written by a woman. Her forthcoming cross-genre debut, The Book of Embers, was selected by Amaranth Borsuk for the 2022 Essay Press Book Prize and will be published as both a traditional book object as well as an embodied artist book in 2025. A stand-alone photo-documentary project based on an excerpt from the book recently appeared in Tupelo Quarterly; another excerpt is forthcoming in Hyena by HEXENTEXTE to mark the centennial of Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism through a feminist lens. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Witness, The Columbia Review, and elsewhere.
from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:
The Book of Embers [excerpt]
Is the text chicken or egg?
In an essay on Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous probes the metaphysical architecture of literature. She begins to dissect the question of origin by lining the philosophical plane of her investigation with a series of propositions. First, the text is a chicken incessant upon laying golden eggs. Second, the text is incapable of stopping the process by which it lays eggs unless there is an effort to go inside and inspect what's in its belly. Third, the meanings of text and egg alike are to come—they are in preparation of becoming. "For an egg to be," she writes, "one has to give the chicken a chance to live. It has to be given time to eat. All this is to say that if there is interpretation, it is not through the theft of the egg but out of love for the chicken.”
Fourth is mystery. Hélène believes that a text must be treated like a person, with its mystery intact. It requires listening "to something that is not simply contained like a bird in a cage, or in a phrase." Listening for what is beyond, behind, above, within, without allows for a mode of perceiving "a different kind of text in the text itself, made up of all the combinations of audible and visible forms," in the locus of which lives the textual unconscious, where "[a] text says something very different from what it is supposed to say or thinks that it says."
In my estimation, this brings us to ground zero. A place where the text requires a mode of seeing that straddles both chicken and egg. A place where the reader inhabits the overlap. A place where the text then becomes the organism by which the reader learns to hatch.
There is no denying this act of hatching demands prodigious stamina given the uncertainty and vulnerability inherent to such dynamism—processes, it should be noted, that are underway in both text and reader. Hence, a reader who in reading co-authors a text must therefore become acquainted with the treachery that is egg writing.
Find this work and more in A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection, a joint publication of De-Canon & Fonograf Editions.
Artist Reflection
The Book of Embers grew out of madness and its dissection—within myself, on the page, and of the book object. I had been writing about the unconscious in another book and come too close to it. My experience of psychic collapse left me unable to write during my MFA-as-labyrinth. I could, however, make a small ball strewn with a few sentences as I tried to find a way out. This attempt to unfurl and untangle myself would not have been possible without the space my mentor, Renee Gladman, held for me as I slowly came back from the edge which was a portal.
Over the years I worked on this project, the enactment and embodiment of Ariadne in my process became more and more imperative as well as more and more potent. Never before had I considered myself an art history buff and yet, one by one, a whole host of female visionaries would begin to appear—as if Ariadne’s archetypal energy was summoning us to collectively reclaim a mythical ball of thread from the jaws of empire, history, and Greek myth for a winding experience of oracular awakening.
While the hybrid nature of this book manifested many times over, the original source of hybridity was the text itself. The syncretic hodge-podge of narrative, essay, literary criticism, art history, biography, and autobiography felt most honest as a means of piecing together multiple narrative thresholds in part because the process of the text teaching you how to read it is exactly what life-as-labyrinth does... it generates a form of consciousness. The book as an enactment of a synthesizing consciousness that could in theory go on forever further propelled my grappling with and understanding of art as utterly atomic when embodiment—in this case, embodiment as unabridged disembodiment—constellates and compounds. In my experience, the process of creating an integrated literary work of art within and across numerous prismatic dimensions is a growing within the unconscious to allow yourself to unfurl where you lead, come what may.