SUSANNA CROSSMAN

Susanna Crossman is an Anglo-French writer and essayist. Her debut novel, L’île Sombre (Dark Island) is published by La Croisée/Delcourt (trans. Carine Chichereau). Susanna has recent work in Aeon, Paris Review, MAI Journal, Neue Rundschau, S. Fischer Verlag (translated into German), We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books, Trauma, DodoInk, 3:AM Journal, & more. Co-author of the French book, L’Hôpital Le Dessous des Cartes (LEH 2015), she regularly collaborates in international hybrid arts projects. Currently, she’s a guest editor for Lucy Writers (University of Cambridge) with her series ‘The Dinner Party Reloaded’ and working with the organization Awe Curation on a digital arts project. She hosts and conceives arts/literary events online and in person.

When she’s not writing, Susanna works on three continents as a clinical arts-therapist, lecturer and consultant. She’s represented by Jessica Craig, NY.

For more, see: https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com

Note on Poetics

In writing, I attempt to explore both human experience and language, to unearth roots, unfold, undo, expand, and make the familiar unfamiliar, to the reader and to myself. As Duras writes, “The writer is a foreign country”. In this sense my poetics are a kind of journey, and like a Dadaist voyageur, I gather the prosaic and the profound, picking up debris from the gutter’s edges and up in the corners of the firmament: fiction, facts, ancient and urban myths, the delicate intimate and the formal universal. Juxtaposing incongruous elements can lead to astonishment, the unexpected, which, as Baudelaire believes, are “essential characteristics of beauty”. The lyricism of disorder.

Hybrid projects are a core part of my poetics. I collaborate with theatre companies (Immercity), contemporary artists (Anne-Sophie Duca, The Ruins), musicians and others. Current projects include work with the art organization Awe and the animator Thierry Garance. A multidisciplinary practice has led me to incorporate the physicality of writing into my work, the visceral trace, the words’ shape on the page, as well as the spoken voice, the rhythm of speech, how we hear and sense language; its architectural form and its inspirational breath.

The four prose poems that I have included here are reverberations, reflections, texts linked rhizomatically to my new novel. The book tells the story of a recently bereaved mother, the loss of her son, the scission of time; part of the novel takes place in the Channel, the stretch of water between Britain and France. My work often circles around trauma and rupture, such as my recent novel, Dark Island (L’île sombre, Editions La Croisée) and in my film 360° of Morning. I am interested in where the intimate tragedy, the small story connects with the ‘polis’, history, politics, sociology and philosophy, as playwright Sarah Kane wrote evoking a rape scene in her play and the Bosnian war: “One is the tree and the other is the forest.”