The elevator pitch.
It’s Joanna Russ meets Ellen Kushner for a Babe the Blue Ox show at Satyricon.
No? Well, Chris said it was like Bruno the Vampire Slayer.
Okay: Violence; violence, and power, in the context of yet somebody else walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear the noise all that crockery will make. —But! Also: genderfuck, hearts broken cleanly and otherwise, the City of Portland, Spenser, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional bit of swordplay.
Start here. —I never did like elevators.
About your author.
“Kip,” of course, means “dweller at the pointy top of the hill” in Old English. It’s also the Dutch word for duck; the smallest unit of Thai currency; a gymanstics maneuver; a tanned cowhide, or bundle of same, as well as a method of drying and preserving fish; shorthand notation for one thousand pounds of pressure; and a place to crash, as well as the act of crashing, for the night.
“Manley” is of either Irish or English extraction. In either case, it means “the lee of Man”—though, on the one hand, it’s the lee, or side protected from wind and weather, of the Isle of Man, and, on the other, it’s a lea, or meadow, somewhere not far from Manchester.
But Kip Manley—far from dwelling on a pointy hill somewhere near a Mancunian meadow—was born in Sheffield, Alabama, in the ninth month of 1968. Currently residing in Portland, Oregon (after stints in Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, both Carolinas, Illinois, Arak [Iran], Puerto Ordaz [Venezuela], Boston, and the Pioneer Valley), he ekes out a meagre living as a writer, designer, and cognoscente of marginalized eclectica, with the invaluable companionship of Jenn Manley Lee, Taran Jack, and the best three cats in all the world. His general-purpose website is available here; this site offers the opportunity to audit his taste in music; over here, you have a chance to rifle through selected volumes from his library. Enjoy.
Two things to keep in mind.
I saw a lot of strange things happen in the woods, and it just seemed to me that people only told you ten percent of what they knew and it was up to you to discover the other ninety percent.
David Lynch said that about his childhood in the (rainy, green) Pacific Northwest, but this, this has also been said, more than once:
Well, this is the forest of Arden.
