Besides being massively late in posting, this dear episode also got struck by the tech gods who were in a super bad mood that day.
Well, to be fair, the first part was me knowing that Andrea and I can really talk and I got so lost in the conversation that I lost track of time so the episode cut off towards the end of the reading but as a listener you really do get the gist. I promise.
The perfectionist in me struggles with posting anyway.
On top of it all, this was one of the last days for the dying mixer in the Catskill studio (now replaced) so it plays super low so this episode might sound better on headphones if you weren’t already.
Andrea is the author of the novels EDEN (HMH/Mariner, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Publishing Triangle Award for LGBTQ fiction; and CALF (Soft Skull Press, 2015), a Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of 2015. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Bomb Magazine, Electric Literature, LitHub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. She has received numerous honors for her work including support from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Ucross, Baryshnikov Arts, Lighthouse Works, multiple MacDowell fellowships, and many others. Her recent evening-length performance works include My Dinner with Andrea: the piece formerly known as Torture Playlist, commissioned by New York Live Arts, and Screening Room, or, The Return of Andrea Kleine (as revealed through a re-enactment of a 1977 television program about a “long and baffling” film by Yvonne Rainer), commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater. Her feature-length nonfiction film, The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be, created in isolation during the pandemic, premiered at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival and is currently streaming. She is working on a new film, We Want to Be Ready, and a new novel, How to Make Friends with Birds. She lives in Upstate New York and she is one of my most favorite people to talk to.
Much of this episode is spent talking about the pre-production stage she was on before shooting her new film project in early July. I was intrigued by the fact that she was working with a cast of women with whom she made some of her earliest works when they were all in their twenties in the Experimental Theatre department at NYU.
Collaboration and how these relationships evolve over time has been on my mind as I find myself re-instigating old collabs, pursuing collabs with people I adore that we always talked about collaborating and then also the new ones with people I think are just interesting to see where things will go. Its definitely made life sweeter in these dark and uncertain times.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode! Andrea is so brilliant and unpredictable and brings up so many great questions.
