ASAP Fiction: Our New Category is Now Live

“A word was a tentative form of control. Grammar was an enactment of how things stood. But nothing was stable, so words and their structures could lift and have resonance, could move out, take in essences as a sponge soaks in water.”

- Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop

Is a story merely the assembly of words, a poem another lark in the sky? Today, as reality is subdivided into not just atoms but data, and lines of numeric can control worlds, where does the pen point? Through the Fiction segment, ASAP Art looks at creative writing as an act of addressal: a bringing into being through the instruments of words and line, the ecstasy of composition, collision and communion. The segment is interested in exploring ‘image’—whether public, private, imagined or remembered—as a catalyst for short stories, poetry, personal essays and translations. Through Fiction, we hope to develop close encounters among sequestered fields of practice—placing art history and culture studies in contact with the earthly dust of storytelling. Every fortnight, the segment will feature original writing that ventures beyond the conventions of ekphrasis to forge new and provisional relationships between voice and witnessing. Watch this space for the first piece which goes up this Saturday.

^{(Featured Image: Katrin Koenning from Four Lakes, 2018.)}