Michael Walker's Blog
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Works by Camille Roy |
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Cold Heaven (1993)
Two plays with an introduction by the author. "Developing the piece in rehearsal was like driving into a hallucination that was clearly mine, and not mine." Sometimes Dead is Better and Bye Bye Brunhilde are plays which have the dissonant, radical beauty of poetry. Eileen Myles called Bye Bye Brunhilde "Not a play but an exploding poem by a bright new writer from the West Coast." Its two women lovers are named Fear and Technique, and are not just morality figures of love but hallucinations of the viewers and listeners. -
The Rosy Medallions: Selected Work (1995) with Lory Poulson, Designer
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cheap speech (2002) with Renee Gladman, designer.
Cheap Speech is a wicked comedy of love and nausea. Sydney, an abstract-novelist-queer is living on Wanda's sex work earnings. Wanda has a bad case of stripper's disgust. They quarrel and hurtle apart, through urban undergrowth, each bolted to a separate flaw in the social texture. There's a multiple personality somewhere, a baby, and a theater--plus a Romanian refugee who has been boiled in history. In this urban jungle, anyone you meet can flash a sentence and reel across the stage, and the sadist is melancholy, the effect of too much sex, power, torture, and poetry. -
Swarm (1998) with Jay Schwarz, Designer
These startling, witty stories take an astringent view of America's sexual paradise. Combining a playwright's keen ear for speech with a poet's vivid eye, the tone throughout is darkly comic as the young narrator stumbles from her tense inner city home through Lesbian Nation, dyke-run massage parlors, the homes of the wealthy, and eccentric sexual lives of all kinds. -
craquer: an essay on class struggle (2002) with Mary Burger, designer. (Order from Small Press Distribution)
CRAQUER is both a pun on 'cracker' and a term dating from the French Revolution meaning 'to tell dubious stories'. The book delivers a comic yet deft investigation into the secrets of class and family history. The family in question, bohemian and communist, has deep roots in a hard scrabble and inventive lower class clan, as well as a slew of terrifying upper class relations. Roy, caught in these cross-currents, delivers not only a hilarious family history, but also an extraordinary investigation into American social class as performance and as desire.
See also:
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Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004 ) by Camille Roy, Gail Scott, Mary Burger, and Robert Gluck, eds. -- Finalist 2004 Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction Anthology