Healing Fictions

About the Book

The virtual realities that works of literary and visual art provide us are loosely the concern of these essays. Working methods are touched upon in some, as in my interviews with William Anastasi and Robert Kipniss. The intentionality of the artist, however, is never my concern, nor should it be of interest to the reader; the intentions cannot necessarily be derived from the work (as the New Critics reminded us long ago). Rather, to see and feel how the text or work of visual functions is our pleasant task. So we do not ask why, a dead-end question. How is the question that can lead to infinitely more rewarding discoveries.

About the Author

Alison Armstrong’s publications include four books, The Joyce of Cooking (1986); “The Herne’s Egg” by W.B. Yeats: The Cornell Univ. Manuscript Materials (1993); Gazelle: Nine Monologues (2017) and Pentimenti: Selected Memoirs (2018). She co-founded James Joyce Broadsheet (1980), and is on the Board of the W.B. Yeats Society of NY. She holds degrees from Ohio State, Oxford, and New York University. A resident of Westbeth Artist Housing in Greenwich Village, she exhibits her paintings with Japanese Artists Assoc., and teaches at School of Visual Arts.