Anti-Particle Women: An Interview with Writer Laurie Sheck 

After years identifying as a poet, Laurie Sheck has fashioned a space outside genre. Her recent work is conjoined not by characters, but by process: writing though other writers, philosophers, and scientists, as well as an equal fascination with Dostoyevsky’s or Shelley’s novels and their stranger than fictional lives. She’s currently at work on the third book of a trilogy that began with A Monster’s Notes and continues in Island of the Mad, newly in paperback.

What follows are pieces from our chat in the lobby of The Marlton, the hotel where Kerouac supposedly wrote The Subterraneans, where Sheck celebrity-sighted Jessica Lange two years ago, across the street from where the first iteration of The Whitney opened in 1907, a chain of connectable dots, not the same, but not too different.

—Patrick Bella Gone

THE BELIEVER: Are you genre-fluid?

LAURIE SHECK: With Gertrude Stein, we say she is a writer. We don’t label her in terms of genre. I love that. Too often, fluidity makes people nervous. If they can’t label one thing or another, they crack. It’s bad enough with people, but with books, it’s the same thing. To me, it’s about liberty of mind. Labeling is the opposite of thinking. As if prose is not poetry as well? And a lot of poetry is not poetry—it’s just lines. The whole thing’s all messed up.

BLVR: We have a similar trajectory, moving from poetry to this space between genre, or I think of it as letting the content dictate the form. How did you veer without cracking?

LS: When A Monster’s Notes started in the early 2000s, I’d been feeling for a long time that I wanted to express something I wasn’t able to express in poetry. My husband got sick with this genetic illness and he was moving funny. He’s fine now, but at the time, he reminded me of the monster in Frankenstein, and I’d never read the book, so I read it. Then I got this fellowship to Radcliffe. I was going to tell them I couldn’t come, but my husband said, “You don’t need to look at me hanging out in a bathrobe all day listening to Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire over and over again on tape.” So I went.

BLVR: That’s a great poetic image though.

LS: And it’s real! Real things lead to other real things. I moved to Cambridge for the fellowship and the poems I was working on drifted into the background because by then I had read Frankenstein and the monster was very...