{"id":1402,"date":"2010-09-10T12:24:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T19:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=1402"},"modified":"2025-02-27T10:56:04","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T18:56:04","slug":"kerry-muir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/kerry-muir\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 66: Kerry Muir"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About Kerry Muir<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Kerry Muir holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Her creative nonfiction currently appears in Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Her play for children, Befriending Bertha won first prize at the Nantucket Short Play Festival & Competition and was published in the anthology Three New Plays for Young Actors: From The Young Actor\u2019s Studio (Limelight Editions\/Amadeus Press, 2000). She lives in California.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on \u201cThe Bridge\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Bridge\u201d was one of the first things I ever wrote, long before I had any formal
training, or even entered the MFA program at Vermont College. It began because I just
felt weirdly haunted by the image of a long, dangerously rickety bridge with potholes in
it. I started there, and just moved in a stream of association: breaking the rules in order
to cross the bridge, the non-stop Watergate trials on the TV, my dad watching them, my
dad\u2019s polio, the fact that another kid\u2019s dad, who also had polio, had committed suicide
that year. I just let myself wander, without any preconceived notion of a structure, to be
honest, because I didn\u2019t know what else to do! Because of that, probably, the piece was
over-written in its original version, and Willow Springs editor Sam Ligon helped me
cut to the chase, figure out what was necessary in the piece, and cut what was excessive.
I needed an outside eye. I\u2019m not my own best editor, most of the time, and I\u2019m very
grateful for his help and guidance!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes on Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Books I\u2019ve loved long-term: Robin Hemley\u2019s Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art and
Madness, Junot Diaz\u2019 collection Drown, Sam Shepard\u2019s Motel Chronicles, Sandra
Cisneros\u2019s Woman Hollering Creek. Also, all of Sam Shepard\u2019s plays, even the ones that
failed. Especially the ones that failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative nonfiction books I\u2019ve recently loved: Notes from No-Man\u2019s Land<\/em> by Eula Biss, Sam Shepard\u2019s Day Out Of Days, Sam
Shepard\u2019s Cruising Paradise, Philip Graham\u2019s The Moon, Come to Earth, about Portugal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most recent book discovery: I just bumbled into a book of essays that blew me away,
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, by Jeanette Winterson, a writer I\u2019d never
heard of up until two weeks ago. She\u2019s an expert on the Modernists: Woolf, Stein,
Pound, Yeats\u2026 She had some wonderful things to say about the randomness of ironclad
notions of genre, in an essay called \u201cTestimony Against Gertrude Stein,\u201d and she wrote it
long before all the James Frey sh** hit the fan\u2014really interesting, prickly, timely stuff.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n

“The Bridge” by Kerry Muir<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

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