Attempts at a Life

Listed #2 of "Ten Great Titles from Underground Presses" in Time Out New York. "Danielle Dutton%u2019s stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton%u2019s answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy, and she recalculates the lives of her numerous heroines to assert the busy and the broken."--Robert Gl? "Danielle Dutton writes with a deft explosiveness that craters the page with stunning, unsettling precision. Here "car lights like licorice whips slick the road outside the window," there "the puffed-thumb Emma person" sways and falls, and everywhere "the firelight is orange against the midnight of the ocean." Her marvelous, generous Attempts at a Life proves that, like Gertrude Stein, she knows how to be "at once talking and listening." --Laird Hunt. Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the pieces in Attempts at a Life, though nominally stories, might indeed be thought of as "attempts." They do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises, but rather than bring these worlds to some sort of neat conclusion, they constantly push out towards something new. In "S&M," a marriage suffers from "the words you were always missing: sky, loft, music, dogs, pipes, puppets, war." In "Mary Carmichael," a woman with a pair of scissors and the need to "cut out her insatiable desire" slices "a veiled hat from a fern in a pot" and "a river out of a postbox." Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, in every phrase and cadence, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird.

Danielle Dutton was born in Visalia, California in 1975. She is the author of a novel, S P R A W L (forthcoming from Clear Cut Press), and her work has appeared in many journals including NOON, 3rd bed, Denver Quarterly, and Fence. She lives with her husband in Colorado, where she is completing a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.