Articles Available Online

The summer of 2016 was for me the Summer of Dodie Bellamy I am a New York resident, but by strange coincidence, when this interview was proposed to me by a White Review editor I happened to be living temporarily just outside San Francisco, Bellamy’s longtime purlieu I also happened to be headed over to her house for a party later on that week Thus I was able to secure a verbal ‘yes’ to the interview plan Bellamy and I subsequently sat down mid-August in her SOMA apartment to discuss her work, particularly her recent essay collection, When the Sick Rule the World (2015)   For those less familiar with San Francisco, SOMA stands for ‘South of Market’ The area contains industrial structures and a few modest wood-clad apartment buildings, but has recently received liberal architectural additions in the form of luxury condominiums and corporate monoliths Bellamy describes the ongoing gentrification of the neighbourhood where she has lived since 1990 with her partner, the poet Kevin Killian, in her essay ‘In the Shadow of the Twitter Towers’ The essay’s treatment of the present as a confluence of economic and cultural pressures, personal desire, paranoia, ambition, and, oh yes, real estate, is heady and affecting It exemplifies Bellamy’s skilful attention to the welter of forces and dynamics shaping contemporary life and carries a trace of her schooling in the New Narrative literary movement of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s New Narrative writing, often associated with the writer Robert Glück, usually includes the author’s forthright acknowledgement of her or his own body and sexuality, as well as that of the reader, along with the actual time and place of writing The author of at least eleven books of prose and poetry, including Cunt-ups (2001) and The TV Sutras (2014), Bellamy is additionally concerned with affect and precarity, and where desire can lead us once we forgive false notions of what humans need and deserve Whether or not you find Bellamy’s work ‘experimental’ – in the interview she herself takes issue with this term – it seems clear that her work is engaged with questions about