Bia Lowe

Wordsmitten

"My thesaurus is like my bible," confesses Bia Lowe. "It's always by my side when I'm writing."

Lowe's on the phone from a Boston hotel room, the sort of place where, if she ran the world, you'd find Roget's book—rather than the Gideons'—in every night table drawer.

"Mine is an older edition, really battered," she goes on. "The back cover is worn down to flakes of glue and shreds of string. I like the way its organized, beginning with words about creation and existence, ending with words about faith and belief."

I confess that, as a fellow scribe, I am afraid to lean on thesauri. Afraid that I will add a pretty word like a spangle; flashy, but not well woven into the language of my mind's ingrown loom. I feel safer coining "wordacious" than looking up a legitimate synonym in a book.

But Bia Lowe, as she is wont to do, persuades with deliciously lucid metaphor:

"It's as if I were a painter. The thesaurus is a palette that I work from."

Some of her sentences then, for the Louvre of Lit:

"Voracious gourmands, bears would be at home foraging through the kitchens of prestigious restaurants, bolting pork chops glazed with port, salads of bitter greens and wild mushrooms, whole warm tartlettes of pear and Gorgonzola, their eyes gleaming while berries and drips of chocolate hang from their lips."

"Skunk resonates in the Saxon onomatopoeia, as boldly bull's-eyed as fuck or shit. Something in the nasality relegates skunks to the lumpen class of sense memory. The word is rude and loud. Roll up the window, smooth your lapel."

"Needlefish glimmer against the water's underbelly like the chimes of steel guitars. Meanwhile, parrot fish the size of watermelons sail below us, blowing kisses with full kahuna lips."

Louvre? Or zoo? Lowe makes nature into art by pinning it down for us with words, while at the same time letting the English language loose like a wild animal; you can feel it prowl, creep, flutter and soar through her paragraphs.

Lowe's new book, her first, is Wild Ride: Earthquakes, Sneezes and Other Thrills (HarperCollins, $20, 179pp). It is one of those books I am happy to describe as a collection of short prose things. Not quite essays, not completely memoir, not fiction, but a very personally twisted version of the truth. Not easy to get published. Not at all. But published, in rare cases such as this, because, despite resisting the marketeers' pigeonholes, it is too damn good to be ignored.

The great irony here is that, among those of us who have ever made a serious attempt at writing, these definition resistant prose-a-mabobs are closer to what most of us end up with than any novel or short story collection. We all want to express our personal visions of the world, to play with language, to not be required to go on with our thoughts for hundreds of pages. And yet, this sort of thing is rarely published. Apparently, we want to write it ourselves, but not read it when written by others.

Perhaps we find it threatening. To actually write a novel, or a fully-formed story collection is so far beyond most of our reach that we can curl up and get comfortable with someone else's work. But, superficially, it seems like anyone bright and writerly should be able to pull off fine five to ten page prose-poems about snorkeling or bears or childhood memories.

Superficially, indeed. Head to head, in an arena where we can all compete, Bia Lowe simply kicks ass.

As uncommercial as it may be, Lowe suggests that the genre is picking up steam in queer quarters.

"Creative nonfiction seems very hot in gay and lesbian circles," says Lowe, in Boston for OutWrite, the annual gathering of gay and lesbian scribes and wannabes. "It mixes things up and plays with preconceived notions of genre in the same way that the queer community plays with preconceived notions of genre."

The preeminent homo prose-a-mabobster is Lowe's dear friend and one-time college roommate, Bernard Cooper, author of one of my all-time favorite books, Maps To Anywhere (Penguin, paperback, $9, 139 pp). Bernie describes Bia's work as "The personal and the scientific, kitsch and high culture, memory and scholarship...all spun together."

In Maps, Cooper includes a piece called "Capiche" in which the crowing of a rooster, an Enrico Caruso record and a dog tramping past his bedroom window elicit a sensual fantasy of Venice and wine, pigeons and romance.

A few weeks ago, I read "Capiche" to a classroom of seventh-graders to whom I was giving a writing workshop. When I finished, I asked a student to explain the images that Cooper conjured up in response to that sunny morning.

"It's lies," the 12-year-old responded. "It didn't really happen, so it's lies."

The poetic personal essay, even championed by outcasts, is not a sort of writing we are trained to accept. It's a dizzying, defiant form. It straddles the fence, taking great pleasure as it rubs its crotch against the fenceposts. It is a form on the verge of breaking through, but it needs your support.

So, come out and hear Bia Lowe when she visits next week. You'll be helping a worthy cause, meeting a hell of a writer, and maybe even cracking open the marketplace to the heretofore unpublishable creations you've been shaping in your journal all these years.