Floyd Skloot
Floyd Skloot
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist who has often written about the search for meaning through personal loss and the struggle for coherence in a fragmented world. Some of his work has dealt with his battle with neurological damage caused by a virushe contracted in 1988...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
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My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole.
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In question-and-answer sessions after a reading or during an interview, I forget the question if I'm giving too long an answer. And at the end, I can't remember any of the questions. The more anxious I am about remembering, the more likely I am to forget.
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Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.
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When memories fade, can one ever really return home?
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At 93, so deep in dementia that she didn't remember any details of her life, my mother somehow still knew songs.
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I used to be able to think. My brain's circuits were all connected, and I had spark, a quickness of mind that let me function well in the world.
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Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds.
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Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.
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Eliza Factor's first novel, 'The Mercury Fountain,' explores what happens when a life driven by ideology confronts implacable truths of science and human nature. It also shows how leaders can inflict damage by neglecting the real needs of real people.
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Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.
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I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves.
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I've forgotten what it's like to remember. I've lost the mindless confidence that a moment, an idea, a thought will be there for me later, the bravado of breezing through experience in the certainty that it will become part of my self, part of my story.
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In 'A Poetics of Optics,' Equi writes that 'all images bank on alchemy.' This idea captures her fundamental sense of poetry as turning common material into something rare and valuable.