Alyssa Quinn, Habilis. Dzanc Books, 2022
https://alyssaquinn.net/
A hallucinatory exploration into the origins of humans and human
language perfect for fans of Brian Evenson and Eimear McBride.
Lucy, a young woman
with an uncertain past, finds herself thrust into a mysterious
anthropology museum that converts into a disco club each night.
Moving through its labyrinthine galleries, she tries to construct an
origin story for herself and for her species. But as the night
progresses, her grip on language and identity slips away until the
exhibit captions rupture the text, transporting us to East Africa,
where the lives of three people—British anthropologist Mary Leakey,
an Indian indentured laborer building the Uganda Railway, and a
curator with too many secrets—interweave to reveal the darker side
of the search for origins.
Surreal, spiraling,
and daringly innovative, Habilis is all at once a historical
reconstruction, a psychological horror, a mystery, a ghost story, and
a creation myth. But above all, it is a meditation on language,
desire, and the stories we tell about ourselves—especially those
that might unravel us.
“Habilis is a brilliant literary kaleidoscope, in which fragments
of human framing of our ‘natural history’ leap, jostle, abut,
overlap, and all with a keen sense of entertaining and colorful
storytelling! Maybe I’m exactly the perfect reader for this book,
but I smiled, nodded, gasped, laughed, and felt the poignant sting of
pathos the whole way. What’s one more Lucy to stand in for all that
we don’t understand? What’s one more attempt to make sense of
eons of evolution, or one evening’s adventures? The collapse of
scale and time here is impressive and unwaveringly illuminating, even
if only of shadows. Huzzah!” —Thalia Field, author of
Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) and Personhood
“Flickering
between taxa, Alyssa Quinn's unclassifiable book maps the shadows
cast by the museum and the archive, pointing again and again "to
that which isn't there." It imagines the tenseless ghosts who
haunt the straight steel line of colonial logic and enacts a
multi-directional movement that pleats time, the sentence, and
meaning itself. Habilis is a record of bright fractures and
irresolvable symbols, an anti-history, a poem that's a mirror, a
stratigraphy of gaps.” —Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan and Field
Glass
“‘In the
archive, I forget my name.’ Alyssa Quinn's artful, nimbly-made
novel is studded with vital archaisms, from the DNA-ribbon of
Mitochondrial Eve, blurry in its vitrine, to the Poughkeepsie train
station, a remnant of Victorian red-brick optimism plunked on the
Empire line. The contemporary protagonist, orphaned as a toddler, has
come unstuck from time, drifting between incidents in her own life
and historical and pre-historical narratives unspooling from
specimens and artefacts from the unsavory history of anthropology. As
insight, connection, shame and regret trade places across axes of
colonialism, sexism, racist exploitation and personal loss, Habilis
considers what it means to have a human hand, and to use it to
comfort or to harm, to point to what is and isn't there.” —Joyelle
McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
“An ambitious and
dynamic novel that collapses time and space, author and character,
imagination and historical record, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis is a book
about the affordances and limitations of language, museums,
relationships, science, systems of classification, and—above
all—storytelling. Here Quinn vacillates between fiction and fact
with grace and nuance. Cerebral and sophisticated yet also full of
pathos, Habilis is prismatic and shimmering with linguistic fervor,
as much about Mary Leakey as it is about the ethics and aesthetics of
what it means to compose a story -- and what remains in the wake of
that act. A haunting and heartfelt debut.” —Lindsey Drager,
author of The Archive of Alternate Endings
“With great
intelligence, compassion, and confidence, Alyssa Quinn's Habilis
dazzingly remixes the fossil record of sometimes anxious, frequently
pernicious fictions we tell ourselves about our place in the world,
about who is genetically suited to hold positions of power and
privilege, and about how, under a patriarchal, imperial rubric, the
body's evolving morphologies equate to social destiny. Quinn's
ingenious concept and challenging imagination engagingly transform
the museum of so-called natural history into a surreal and unsettling
house of mirrors, its glass eyes and vitrines no longer capable of
distorting the human subject they seek to define, but rather making
newly visible generations of suppressed narratives of ambition, care,
and desire that provide a fresh perspective on our species' pasts and
possible futures.” —Michael Mejia
Disorientation is
the rule in Alyssa Quinn’s Habilis, right from the first sentence:
“The museum is a discotheque.” That strange business gets sorted
out quickly, when a woman with the museum explains to her guest,
“it’s radical I know, but we were facing bankruptcy.” Yet at
the same time, the developing narrative has already started to
fracture. If there’s a primary action, it’s getting to know the
visitor, Lucy. As she drinks and drifts around the fundraiser, a
sketch of her troubled past emerges; abandoned as a baby, raised a
foster child, her lone sustaining connection seems to be this museum
staffer, Dina. But how does Lucy’s childhood matter tonight, and
what does Dina mean to her? A line or two suggests a romance, but
then another passage maintains that Dina’s dead, and her name was
“Danielle” anyway, and overall the dance floor offers few fixed
points: “display cases slosh violet with light and the wall text
bulges and strobes.”
The glimpses of
Lucy’s past are only more strobe-flashes, and never allow the
narrative to settle into some well-worn groove, like overcoming
childhood trauma or repairing a broken relationship. Rather, this
“radical” night at the museum⎯ a museum of natural history, as
in Ben Stiller’s movie⎯ either puts Lucy through some violent
change, at one point robbing her of speech, or ignores the woman
altogether. Can she be considered the protagonist, at all? When the
novel leaves so much about her unresolved? Rather, Quinn devotes many
brief chapters, typically a page of unbroken prose in a sophisticated
authorial voice, to some diorama or skeleton.
A lot of these show
the development of the human hand, its defining thumb and index
finger. The text also examines its evolutionary forebear, the
antelope’s ankle (“metapodial”). Over an irregular series of
paragraph-chapters, the antelope material continues roughly to
mid-novel, reaching a kind of climax in a nightmare of taxidermy:
Dina cross-legged on
the floor, a bloody mass of animal in her lap. Has a blade and is
scissoring away its skin, lifting it from muscle like a pale glossy
peel. Connective tissues stretch like cellophane. Blood vessels
bulge. Around her are skeletons of wire and wool.
Quinn’s style can
bedazzle us with its effects, her skillful verb usage vivifying
what’s surreal, but her narrative imagination offers nothing
Hollywood-friendly. Rather than story, she has her stops around the
museum. The displays featuring a hand or wrist raise issues of
wordless communication, while other exhibits present bones of the
throat and jaw, the development of language, and these linked notions
make Habilis a novel of ideas, if dreamlike and intense. It’s an
investigation of how people communicate, and this also reaches a kind
of climax at about center-point: “The sign repeated, pointing to
objects of desire in order to speak about them, and in speaking,
survive.”
But as I say, that’s
just half the text, all particolored philosophy and inconclusive
tragedy. Throughout, there have also loomed certain wholes, dioramas
with fully assembled figures. These include of course the original
“Lucy,” our human prototype, brought to light by the
anthropologist Donald Johanson. Just ten years earlier,
anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey discovered “Olduvai Hominid
7,” known as “handy man,” Homo Habilis. A toolmaker who must’ve
had the rudiments of language, he combines the major elements of the
novel that bears his name⎯ until, roughly a hundred pages in, the
book undergoes a wild metamorphosis.
Talk about
disorientation: at the turn of a page, with the reiteration of a few
lines from beginning, Habilis becomes a biographical novel. Quinn
turns her hand to a fictionalized life of Mary Leakey, rich with
historical detail. Of course, details out of the distant past
surrounded Lucy and Dina too, as they tumbled around the funhouse,
and the text’s second half has other points in common with its
first. The authorial voice doesn’t change, allowing earlier
insights to turn up again, sometimes in the same phrasing, and this
omniscient observer also shows the anthropologist tumbling and
fumbling. Born to the manor in England, Leakey found her life’s
purpose in the dust of Olduvai Gorge, and amid a whirl of lights and
noise far worse than any disco.
The Second World War
didn’t spare Kenya or Ethiopia, the Leakeys’ territory, and among
Quinn’s more eye-opening tidbits is the story of Louis’s
gun-running. The couple needed the money, and more disturbingly, the
guns went to hapless natives who served the Allies as cannon fodder.
So the incident links up Mary’s biography with the other plotline
of the novel’s second half: the history of the first rail line
across British Africa. White men didn’t do that work, of course.
Rather the colonials brought in “coolies”, and their hardscrabble
sets up a counterpoint with the Leakeys’ comforts, starkly
illuminating the racist structures within which turned up proof that
all humankind has the same⎯African⎯origin.
This irony also
informs the questions that nag at Lucy and Dina, the roots of human
communication, since those roots burrow far beneath anyone’s
skin-color. In other words, Habilis has a conceptual framework rather
than a plot, one reasserted at novel’s close, when it returns to
its museum wonderland. With that, the whole proves prettily
interwoven, as well as threaded throughout with pretty prose, a
complex thought experiment that achieves rare integrity. But is it
literature? Does it engage the passions and create catharsis?
Aristotle wouldn’t say so, and I too have reservations, mostly
concerning the first half. I grew weary of the two women forever
teasing out some drama and then losing it among the bones and stones.
But then again, any vibrant artform must from time to time wow us
with just such improbable, not to say miraculous, bricolage. - John Domini
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/books/Alyssa-Quinns-Habilis
In her insightful and ambitious debut novel, Habilis, Alyssa Quinn takes us on a destabilizing journey through the experiences of several beings by means of a single, muddled existence, illustrating the connectedness of all life and challenging the notion of a discoverable, and inherently meaningful, point of human origin. Through techniques and analyses both erudite and playful, Quinn forces us to separate the strands of our most mundane practices, and bring each up close to our faces. Not because one strand alone will hold the key to a more profound understanding of ourselves as individuals, but because each must be properly understood before we can even attempt to understand the whole. Spoiler alert: we will never fully understand the whole, and that’s okay.
The story begins with Lucy, one of many revelers in a museum of anthropology that converts into a discotheque at night. “It’s radical I know, but we were facing bankruptcy” is the explanation given by Lucy’s friend, and museum curator, Dina. Lucy and Dina dance, drink, and scream over the music to be heard by one another and whomever else they try to talk to—including an evolutionary psychologist named Nathan, and a floating assortment of bones referred to as OH 7. As the night wears on, Lucy notices a female Homo habilis hovering at the edge of things, and recognizes her humanity. Lucy later peels away from the crowd, mentally and physically, to study the museum’s exhibits in conjunction with her own imprecise history.
Though the elements mentioned in the above summary might seem disparate, connectedness is explicitly referenced and also adhered to at every level of the novel. One of the most intriguing examples of this is the threading together of dialogue from multiple speakers. When Lucy is introduced to Nathan, he remarks on the expression she wears upon finishing her drink. Their exchange is presented as follows: “Disgust, says Nathan. Excuse me? Your expression, he says.” All dialogue is italicized rather than bookended by quotation marks, and embedded within a single block of text as opposed to separating each speaker’s words into new paragraphs. The conversation continues, “I don’t like the green things, she says. You mean olives? Yes. Olives. Disgust is fascinating, says Nathan.” Despite the flow of one character’s dialogue into another’s, the thread of who is speaking at any given moment is never lost. It would be easy at this point in the story (which is quite early on) to dismiss this narrative choice as a quirk of the author. However, reading further reveals how central the theme of connectedness is to this novel. If the dialogue runs together, a reader might mistakenly attribute all of it to a single character, which would serve this story perfectly.
The bulk of the narrative alternates between the descriptions accompanying each museum exhibit, which often include scenes snipped from history and mined as much for what is considered known fact as for what is ultimately unknown (such as the possible moment when discovering a large animal carcass instigated protohuman evolution), and Lucy’s private ruminations of her past and present. The museum utilizes dioramas, casts of objects and long-gone presences (i.e. footprints), and of course actual historical objects: fossils, bones, minerals, ancient tools, etc.
There are comparisons throughout the novel between the behavior of humans and that of other animals. A museum exhibit on “signaling theory” states that every communication sent by a non-human animal has an exact purpose (e.g. deterring an enemy, or attracting a mate). The human concept of “language” is not only unnecessary to other creatures, but is too convoluted for their purposes. The difference between life and death is often a single, instinctual gesture. With only language at our disposal, humans must depend on an ability to persuade that they may or may not have. Whereas “the young springbok” only needs to “[leap] into the air, back arched, legs stiff, head pointing down” to indicate to predators that they are “not worth chasing.”
Another exhibit notes the referential nature of animal signals. Because certain actions or cries can only take place under particular circumstances, they can clearly be trusted. However, humans have the unique ability to “point at what is not there”—a phrase that appears throughout the novel—as in the ability to refer to objects or situations that are not present, and perhaps never were.
Later, Dina mentions a study that reveals how little time people spend looking at museum exhibits. “Two seconds” to look at the exhibit, and “ten seconds [to read] the label, look briefly back at the exhibit, then move on.” Humans, Dina claims, only ever “point at what isn’t there,” whether in a museum, or within our own minds, dwelling on what is behind and before us as individuals, or as a species, which speaks to the human practice of living anywhere but in the present moment. All moments, all occurrences, like the dialogue, bleed into one. The position of the tongue at every possible instant of movement as we form a single word; the broken down metamorphosis of sounds an infant makes as they become words; the exact depth at which the surface of a lake becomes the body of a lake—where “outside become[s] inside.” Each is cataloged and explored in one of the museum’s exhibits, the seconds-long viewing of which would of course, ironically, be lost to the flow of time and referenced only when it is no longer present.
Over the course of the novel, Lucy recalls fragments of her time in foster care while at the same time gradually losing her command of language. Eventually, she tries to express certain thoughts, but utters completely unrelated phrases instead. This inability to communicate is connected to her inability to know herself completely, as aspects of her past remain lost to her. What she does remember is the troubling non-presence of a former foster sister, and the effect of lying about her presence to her foster mother, who explicitly asks her to point at her lost daughter’s ghost, which is not actually there.
At the center of the museum, Lucy encounters an exhibit that recounts moments in the lives of a British anthropologist, an Indian indentured worker building the Uganda Railway, and a curator who speaks directly to the reader (of the exhibit plaque, and the novel). This exhibit is where the ideas we have been introduced to throughout the novel culminate, as characters confront and embody absence, and are then forced to refer to people, things, and circumstances that no longer exist, or never did.
Habilis explores an impressive array of ideas despite its brevity. Quinn holds open a doorway to everything known and unknown about the lives and times of Earth’s inhabitants. Crossing its threshold, you will immediately find yourself back where you began, somehow at peace with the answers you were never given. - GIANNI WASHINGTON
George Salis: Aside from your creative efforts, what part of you or
your life would you want to resurface in the future as a perfect
fossil?
Alyssa Quinn: I
recently learned that it is—astonishingly—possible for bacteria
to fossilize. Some bacteria do this by coating themselves in a fine
layer of clay, which helps their decomposition slow. So I guess I
like the idea of my bacteria—my gut flora, and so on—being
preserved. Another fun fact I learned recently is that our bodies
contain approximately 30 trillion human cells and approximately 39
trillion microbial cells. We are less ourselves than we are other,
which is something I’ve been writing about lately.
GS: Speaking of your
creative efforts, what is the one sentence from Habilis you’d want
to survive eons into the future?
AQ: “What is lost
always forms the boundary of what is.”
GS: The copy on the
back of Habilis (Dzanc, 2022) invokes the likes of Brian Evenson and
Eimear McBride. Did these writers provide you with inspirational fuel
for this novel? If not, what writers or specific books did?
AQ: Actually, I
hadn’t read any Brian Evenson until after Habilis was completed,
and I still haven’t read any Eimear McBride—that was my editor’s
comparison. The texts I drew on for this book were largely books of
nonfiction (biography, history) and books of theory (semiotic,
linguistic). As for my biggest aesthetic inspiration, that was
actually not a book but an album—Calling Out of Context by Arthur
Russell. I listened to that album on obsessive repeat while writing
the book. It’s strange, ethereal music that provided the perfect
atmosphere for this surreal book.
GS: What is a novel
you’ve read and think deserves more readers?
AQ: This is an easy
one for me—Triptych by Claude Simon. I read Triptych well over a
year ago and still have not managed to pick my jaw back up off the
floor. It’s a book I want to say nothing about, other than that
everyone should read it. What I will say: Triptych’s prose
exemplifies the style of the Nouveau Roman, a certain kind of novel
experimented with in 1950s France. In his essay “A Future for the
Novel,” fellow Nouveau Roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet criticizes
the idea that the job of the novel is to get to the depths of things,
that its goal is a “sacred vertigo” or transcendence. He argues
instead for an attention to surfaces, to the careful description of
objects. A recurring theme for him is that “things are there,”
and the simple fact of their presence ought to be astonishing. He
wants to reawaken us to “the shock of this stubborn reality we were
pretending to have mastered.” To that end, the Nouveau Roman
authors attempt to describe objects without insisting on their
significations—attending to their sensual qualities rather than
collapsing them into symbols. The result, in Triptych, is some of the
most exquisitely attentive prose I’ve ever encountered. Pair that
with an ingenious novelistic structure, in which three narratives
unfold, not consecutively, but simultaneously, the connections
between them gradually forming twisty, wormhole-esque tunnels, and
you’ve got a truly breathtaking book that deserves far more
attention than it gets.
GS: Where do you
draw the line between “true” history and imagination?
AQ: I don’t. At
most there’s a highly permeable membrane between the two. Of
course, some things are true and others are not—and in an era where
so many important truths are doubted, it becomes increasingly
important to affirm that fact. But even true things come to us
filtered through imagination. We can’t access history any other
way. And so my work is interested not in drawing a line between truth
and imagination, but in playing within the space of their overlap and
mutual exchange.
GS: What about the
line between exposition and narrative, especially considering the
scientific themes within your debut novel, Habilis?
AQ: All of my work
is interested in blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction.
While I am primarily a fiction writer, all of my fiction is heavily
researched, and the research does not simply form the backdrop
against which my stories take place—the research is itself the
story. So I hope to undo the binary between exposition and narrative.
Exposition is interested in background—establishing information
that is taken as a given, the static landscape where narrative
unfolds. I am interested in work that abolishes the idea of a
“background,” abolishes the idea of “landscape,” abolishes
the idea of “setting.” When history and science don’t just
supply context or metaphorical resonance to a story, but are in fact
elevated to the status of characters, then it becomes possible to
truly explore their limits and affordances. When plants and animals
and minerals and weather and buildings and furniture and cities don’t
just form the setting where human events take place, but are instead
viewed as vibrant actors in their own right, then it becomes possible
to cultivate a truly ecological imagination. This is the kind of
literature that is most compelling to me right now—literature which
places everything in the foreground, and so erodes hierarchies
between the human and the nonhuman, the text and the world, the part
and the whole.
I’m reminded here
of the essay “Odysseus’s Scar” by the German critic Erich
Auerbach. In this essay, Auerbach argues that Homer “knows no
background.” In The Odyssey, writes Auerbach, nothing enters the
story without its nature and origin being described. These
digressions, which you might call exposition, in fact swell to take
up the foreground. They “represent phenomena in a fully
externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and
completely fixed in their spatial relations.” I’m interested in a
21st-century version of this Homeric style, one that explicates all
the tangled webs of which our interconnected globe is composed. Of
course, to actually explicate all of them is impossible—there are
far too many, and so white space, absence, and ellipsis will always
be features of my work. But I hope to create the impression that
anything that seems like background could at any moment come rushing
to the fore.
GS: About halfway
through Habilis or so, there’s a shift in tone, perspective, and
structure. It’s by no means the only shift either. What informed
the unique structure of this novel?
AQ: The reason for
this shift has a lot to do with what I said about exposition above.
Habilis takes place in an anthropology museum, and interwoven with
scenes of the characters moving through the museum are a series of
exhibit captions describing the museum’s artifacts. The shift you
mention occurs with the caption for the Laetoli Footprints, a
fossilized set of protohuman footprints found in Tanzania. This
exhibit ruptures the main text, taking over with a 68-page caption
that interweaves the stories of British anthropologist Mary Leakey
(who discovered the Laetoli Footprints), an indentured laborer
building the Uganda Railroad, and a museum curator trapped in the
basement of the UK’s National Archives. The sheer length of this
unruly exhibit is meant to demonstrate that “nothing that is is
unconnected.” Every object finds itself at the nexus of innumerable
historical threads, and to truly see an object means to trace these
threads—a process that can never approach completion. The structure
of the book was meant to evoke that fact. In this case, the exhibit
explores the connections between the field of paleoanthropology and
histories of racism and imperialism, especially in East Africa.
Also, small spoiler
alert here, but although there is a shift in structure, there isn’t
actually a shift in perspective—the whole book has one narrator,
though it might take a tiny bit of sleuthing to discover how that is
the case….
GS: Like babies and
their first word, what do you imagine the first word was for the
human race, or what would you wish it to be?
AQ: In Habilis, I
imagine that the first instance of human language was in fact a
gesture—the gesture of pointing. To point is essentially to say
“this.” So I imagine that “this” was the first word. Although
it may seem like a simple, throwaway word, it is in fact very
important to me, and to my writing. Ludwig Wittgenstein has this
great line in Philosophical Investigations: “Yet, strange to say,
the word ‘this’ has been called the only genuine name; so that
anything else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate
sense.” Habilis was in large part an exploration of that idea.
The word “this,”
linguistically, is an example of what’s called deixis. Deictic
words are those that have fixed semantic meanings, but whose denoted
meanings depend on their context—words like you, me, there, that,
this, tomorrow, today, etc. You when I say it means you but when you
say it means me. Roland Barthes: “That’s it! This cry is not to
be understood as an illumination of intelligence, but as the very
limit of nomination, of the imagination.” I love the word “this”
for that reason—it runs right up against the inexpressible. It
refuses all reductionism, and simply affirms—this! All this! Some
of my favorite books employ deictic phrases to convey this sense of
ecstasy. Mrs. Dalloway is a great example. It is chock-full of
deixis: “There she was,” “That is all,” “He was right
there,” “Happiness is this,” “It is this,”—and of course,
the famous last line: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”
And this is probably another reason why I so love Simon’s
Triptych—in a way, it’s simply an utterance of the word “this,”
extended to the length of 170 pages.
GS: What is one
recent evolution in our language that you can’t stand?
AQ: Honestly, I
can’t think of one. I used to be more militaristic about language,
but thankfully I’ve left that tendency behind. Language’s
diversity and malleability are its strength and its beauty. I have no
interest in condemning people’s usage.
GS: Are you familiar
with any literary attempts at making an evolved language for the
future or the post-apocalypse more specifically, such as Riddley
Walker by Russell Hoban, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, or
the “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Evrythin’ After” chapter in
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas? If so, what are your thoughts on
them?
AQ: Slightly
familiar, yes. Though I can’t say I’m necessarily a fan of any of
those particular works, I am compelled by the idea of imagining a new
language. My favorite author who speculates about invented languages
would definitely be Borges. He imagines alternative languages in many
of his short stories. Often, he’s theorizing the possibility of a
perfect, totalizing language. For example, in the story “Funes, His
Memory,” the protagonist, Ireneo Funes, has sustained a head injury
that has left him with the unique ability to perceive and remember
all things perfectly. “He knew the forms of the clouds in the
southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare
them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he
had seen only once,” the narrator tells us. Funes is naturally
overwhelmed by this onslaught of information, comparing his memory to
a garbage heap. In an attempt to deal with this heap, he contemplates
a system much like one postulated by John Locke in the 17th century:
“an impossible language in which each individual thing—every
stone, every bird, every branch—would have its own name.” Funes,
however, “discarded the idea as too general,” for he remembered
“not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but
every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf.” He considers
other language systems that might be able to reduce this welter of
memory but ultimately gives up. Perfect languages don’t exist, and
the word this can only get you so far—at some point, you’ve got
to accept the imperfect names of which our language is made.
GS: Whether as a
human being or another animal, what is an age you’d like to have
lived in? Why?
AQ: I think I would
like to have been a cyanobacterium about 2.4 billion years ago, back
when they were in the process of oxygenating the earth. The air would
have been so fresh.
GS: What do you
imagine the last word will be for the human race, or what would you
wish it to be?
AQ: I would wish it
not to be one word, but many words uttered simultaneously. One
word—even a word as multiple as “this”—is never enough. -
George Salis
https://thecollidescope.com/2022/12/08/the-imperfect-names-an-interview-with-alyssa-quinn/
Alyssa Quinn is the author of Habilis (Dzanc, 2022) and the prose
chapbook Dante’s Cartography (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2019). She
holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Washington University,
and is currently at work on a PhD at the University of Utah, where
she is also the senior prose editor for Quarterly West.
