Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller and Love-in-Pieces, Alice Butler

This event marks the publication of Alice Butler’s book Close Writing, which reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared ‘beloved’ , reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.

Alice will give an illustrated reading from the book, followed by discussion, and there will be discounted copies of the book available for purchase.

Organised by Professor Jo Applin FBA, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Centre for the Art of the Americas