Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance
ISBN: 9781613766729
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Massachusetts Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Women authors American -- Biography; Authors American -- 21st Century -- Biography; Creation (Literary Artistic etc.);

Has a stunning surprise or lucky encounter ever propelled you in an unanticipated direction? Are you doing what you always thought you would be doing with your life or has some unseen magnetism changed your course? And has that redirection come to seem inevitable? Edie Meidav and Emmalie Dropkin asked leading contemporary writers to consider these questions, which they characterize through the metaphor of "the strange attractor," a scientific theory describing an inevitable occurrence that arises out of chaos. Meidav's introduction and the thirty-five pieces collected here offer imaginative, arresting, and memorable replies to this query, including guidance from a yellow fish, a typewriter repairman, a cat, a moose, a bicycle, and a stranger on a train. Absorbing and provocative, this is nonfiction to be read in batches and bursts and returned to again and again.

EDIE MEIDAV is the author of Lola, California , Kingdom of the Young , Crawl Space , and other work, and believes in the luck that brought this book to your attention. She teaches in the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more information, visit www.ediemeidav.com. EMMALIE DROPKIN's short story, "A Lamentation of Swans," was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

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