that horror, was that love?* a reading of an excerpt of a work-in-progress
"Love stories, after a while, lose their middles, the stuff in between the edges and turns. There is the beginning and there is the end, those remain vivid, as does the damage that lingers right after the end, and there are some pivot points that stick, small breakages and the promises they produce, honesties that sting, blurted cruelties, these can retain their clarity, though they are often distorted, upon reflection they become the dramatic keystone that held the whole thing up, what should have been heeded, a red flag, a symptom, a great metaphor for the trouble, but beyond those, the days that accumulate, the sex that happens and happens and happens, the modest raptures, the small decisions collaboratively made about what to eat, what to watch, where to go—that is a vast, imprecise flatness."
—A passage from the novel, The Twin, currently in progress. The Twin is set in the contemporary art world of Los Angeles, and is an exorcism around twin-ness, its seduction and destruction, and queer-ness, in terms of sexuality, but also outside-ness, other-ness, odd-ness, and its attendant ghosts. This will be the first public reading of the manuscript.
*Quote taken from The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector
Johanna Hedva is an anticapitalist psychonaut sorceress, born and raised in Los Angeles, where she still lives, but is about to move away from. She is currently at work on two books: This Earth, Our Hospital (Sick Woman Theory and Other Writings), a political manifesto that converges with autohagiography; and The Twin, her second novel.