A note on : MUEUM launch at Brick Lane Bookshop : October 5th

October 5th, 7pm, at Brick Lane Bookshop, my debut novella - mueum - will be launched alongside readings from Iain Sinclair, Chris McCabe and Chloe Aridjis. More on the event bricklanebookshop.org/events/#mueum and tickets at £5

The novella is available here tenementpress.com/M-U-E-U-M

As part of the book's launch, here is a long-form interview with Gareth Evans, shot at Resonance Extra studios in London, discussing the origins of MUEUM.

A note on announcing my first novella M U E U M

tenementpress.com/M-U-E-U-M

(Summer, MMXXII) COMING SOON

From the publisher : A novella of ludic menace, SJ Fowler’s M U E U M is a puzzle without pieces. Following the grand tradition of the Nestbeschmutzerauthors (one who dirties their own nest, vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz,et al), M U E U M pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.

Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion. Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety.

Pacing the halls, the atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit? In Fowler’s curt, spiralling and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer...

A SONIC ITERATION OF THIS NOVELLA IS ALSO FORTHCOMING, & WILL BROADCAST SPRING MXXII WITH RESONANCE EXTRA PRIOR TO THE BOOK’S RELEASE

Modes of Aberrant Research - next week at the Whitechapel Gallery

Very excited to be part of this event with brilliant artists, and I'll be reading my experimental story MueuM for the first time in public after it was White Review prize nominated this year.
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Performances coming up this August at the Whitechapel Gallery

Performance: Modes of Aberrant Research
Thursday 7 August, 7pm 
An evening of deviant anecdotes, radical storytelling and narrative segues through archives, collections and institutions. Through experimental fiction, multi-media performance and voice-driven texts, five artists and writers, including SJ Fowler, Patrick Coyle, Holly Pester and Kreider + O’Leary,  examine the subject’s status as agitator, witness and unwitting member of memory institutes.  

£8.50 full price (£4.25 members price).

Book now

The White Review Prize - MueuM nominated

http://www.thewhitereview.org/the-white-review-prize/
Really nice to be nominated for a prize I respect, that I entered in fact, so of course I respect, but specifically because it is doing the work that needs doing for the recognition of experimental short fiction. It's the only prize doing this really. The shortlist is really strong, Eley Williams and some really talented others on it, but its nice for me, if this is all it is, to have some recognition for my non-poetry. My work nominated, MueuM, is available to read in full online, link below
[ONLINE ONLY]

MUEUM

Since I have worked at the mueum I have published, and I have written 486 pems. I have seen people drawing freehand maps of accuracy been talked to like they are pieces of dogshit. I have seen shutters shuttered like windows in the face of so many wokers that all blinds have drawn into a darkness like an eclipse. I have witnessed rosetta stone backpacks, launchboxes of the great wave. I have seen prayer rug mousemats. I have been a witness of Commerce. I have been bystander to a five pound coffee. M is Muster, the passing od. You can get a sudden attack of nausea by staying too long in an art gallery as well. It must be some kind of illness – museumitis – unknown to medical science. Or could it be the air of death surrounding all things man-made, whether beautiful or ugly? (Gustav Heyrink) I have lists of people who were colleagues. The rise of the Temporary work in our century, and I have one avowed to those who are trapped in the hotbed of sexual discrimination and harassment because if they complain, to those inculcated with the ones making the advances, they can lose their work immediately, and without reason. Sweeps of the young like pograms, I remember them and make an effort to stay in touch. To have Grigor in shadow of men, a lunaticuntil moonlit then, a dwarf of melody, a celestial harmony, some tiny child model perfection below, a debut in the untertow. For not much. How young fashion students? Seen too robed; roof of the Nile, ark of the covenant, baby hercule as asp, a thesp, a guided tour of softcore smeared all over faces to make the time pass, for it is boring work.. In the endless dead hours of a dead work the sevens go to the tens, the fives to sevens, and you find yourself chasing them physically to express to them against yourself a desire to not only be bored but to be with them, when you are aloud to be so. And more shame for that because for the ones in charge, the honest, are the ones who will sack the girls if they don’t at least smile back. But am I was I a refuge or just blind that I was another of those unwelcome men when some person is trying to just pay their rent anymore? A witness of my record, 3 in a day. But which of those 3 is a life tired, to temper hard to soft, mean to kind? But always open pursed to me? Friends, there are shadows in any case. Even if the morass of the faceless are not looking into that case for an objett they’ve never heard of and will never remember. One cannot hide beneath head’s hair. I awoke from my nightmares with an erection, penetrated the sleeping Claire, went limp, and fell asleep again. (Peter Handke) ...............................
http://www.thewhitereview.org/fiction/mueum/