146. Heather Bartel | Exit the Body, mud, and the essay as an offering

Arts Calling

Weekly Shoutout: Fragile: An Anthology featuring David Scott Hay (AC114)!

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Hi there,

Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Heather Bartel! (heatherelizabethbartel.com)

About our guest:

Heather Bartel is the author of the essay collection Exit the Body (Split/Lip Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared recently in FENCE, Birdcoat Quarterly, Leavings, Grimoire, and Heavy Feather Review. She is founder and co-editor of the literary journal and community The Champagne Room.

Heather lives, writes, and dances in Columbia, Missouri

https://www.heatherelizabethbartel.com/

Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Heather! All the best!

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EXIT THE BODY, now available from Split/Lip Press!

https://www.splitlippress.com/exit-the-body

In Exit the Body, Heather Bartel makes an offering-as-essay-collection, if a collection of essays can include a tarot reading, a one-act starring dead and dreamed women, conversations with Sylvia Plath through a mirror, and letters to a living ghost.

Like journeying through the hallways of a haunted house, Bartel moves through a narrative landscape that shape-shifts, engaging in conversation with the women who haunt her to ask the question at the core of Exit the Body: what to do with an obsession with the mirror when the person in the mirror is either the only person you can trust or the one who is trying to kill you.

A dance with illusion and choice, Exit the Body is a meditation on the mind and its place within the body: what escapes, what ruptures, what is created, what echoes, and where we find ourselves on the other side.

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Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com).

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Much love,

j