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Keen imagines that the ancient Irish custom of hiring women to mourn at funerals has continued into the modern day, and follows the most famous keener in world, Maeve McNamara, during the height of her career. Told in a plural first-person point of view, this book follows the group of people who adore Maeve. Through watching Maeve perform mourning, this collective voice thinks about grief, fame, community, and what we can know about ourselves and others. When a protégé appears and asks Maeve to train her, ideas about race and gender—and ideas about who belongs to what communities, and the tradition of the art of lamentation—all begin to shift and swerve. A hybrid novel/ars poetica/autobiographical essay, Keen attempts to grapple with lineage and innovation, heritage, and what no longer serves us. 


A piercing look at pop culture through the lens of an Irish myth come to life—this novel, just as its title suggests, keens for the world. A super sharp, compelling read.

—Erika T. Wurth

Erin Stalcup’s Keen arrives like a screaming coming across the sky, at once a warning, a map of mourning, an awakening, and an invitation to revival. Stalcup’s gorgeous supernova of a novel twines a punk sensibility with ancient modes of lyricism, its electric language making ample room for the shutter-speed pulse of our public lives and the slower burn of our daily private struggles. Most of all, it amplifies the voices of the unheard, the vulnerable, the still-grieving, all those silenced too soon, till under its spell our ears recalibrate themselves, newly attuned to endangered frequencies and songs, including perhaps our own.

—Tim Horvath

Available now directly through the author and Gold Wake Books.

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Every Living Species

Every Living Species is available from Gold Wake Press.

“Erin Stalcup’s Every Living Species is exactly the kind of eco-fiction we need today: a generous and heartfelt imagining of future possibilities, exploring not just how we live now but how we might live next, wisely and lovingly making real the hope and invention and shared responsibility it’ll take for us to arrive together at all our best tomorrows.” —Matt Bell

Included in "What to Read When It's Been a Hell of a Year" in The Rumpus: "It’s been a hell of a year. Here are some recent releases that have helped me through that hell. Each of these books, in various ways, wound the crank on my empathy machine, and reminded me that telling a story can be a defiant act. Rebellion courses through each of these [books]. Pick one up — it might set a fountain of radical hope a-burble inside you."Claire Vaye Watkins

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And Yet It Moves

And Yet It Moves is available from Indiana University Press.

“An engaging collection that takes on the love and loneliness lurking in the bright lights and shadowed corners of the everyday.”

Kirkus Reviews

“The ever-present, everyday magic in Stalcup’s debut collection overlays the mundane world like mist…” 

Publishers Weekly

 
 

SHORT STORIES FROM THE COLLECTION

Readings

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Writing

OTHER FICTION

ESSAYS

REVIEWS

 

Interviews

Interviewed by Cam Finch

Heavy Feather Review, June 2022

Guest Blog Posts

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Erin Stalcup

Erin Stalcup is a freelance editor, and online educator for UCLA and Arizona State. She has edited the literary magazines Waxwing, Hunger Mountain, and Defunct. Erin has taught in community colleges, universities, liberal arts schools, prisons, state schools, and MFA programs in Manhattan, Asheville, Denton, Flagstaff, Montpelier, and Brooklyn. She currently lives in central Vermont.

Contact her at erin.editor.freelance@gmail.com