Introducing Michelle Latiolais

Editor's note: At the recent launch of the fall issue of the Santa Monica Review, writer Miles Parnegg introduced novelist, short story writer, UCI professor, and all-around mentor Michelle Latiolais. She is the author of Even Now, A Proper Knowledge, Widow, and She. Citric Acid readers will know that we admire the introduction as a form. We reprint Parnegg's below. He nails it.

Following the publication of her story collection Widow, Michelle Latiolais sat down with the great Michael Silverblatt for an interview on KCRW’s Bookworm. It’s worth revisiting, at the very least to hear an observation Michelle makes about the role of linguistic precision in writing. “I think I became amazed early on that there was a word for almost everything,” she says. “There’s a trope out there that language can’t capture things…that language can never capture pain...I think I constitutionally resist that. Language is consciousness, so why can’t we capture almost anything in language?”

What you get in Michelle’s work is a lexical clarity that is rare, if not outright singular. The sentence is not merely a vessel of information ferried from writer to reader. It is itself an occasion, an occasion to demonstrate how fundamental language is to the construction of our reality. Her sentences embody what the great William Gass calls a “verbal consciousness;” they carry a sonic stamp, a typographical shape. And in Michelle’s writing, there really is a word for everything: a tarp luffs in the wind; a doctor’s stool glides on casters; a diner booth’s covering is not faux leather but Naugahyde; that’s not a tiny spoon, that’s a demitasse spoon. This abiding exactitude is a bit like the nun’s ruler wrapping your knuckles—don’t slouch! The rest of us can only aspire to that kind of perfect posture.

But it’s about more than fastidious word-choosing. To read Michelle is to be confronted by what writing really is, or can be: not merely the telling of a story or the turning of a page. It is to plunge into the inner life, into the spaces of the mind we move too quickly or dismissively to inhabit with any real care or granularity. It is to slow down and reckon with the imagistic nature of memory, with how the quality of light affects one’s mood, to extrude every drop of ambiguity and meaning from a passing glance or half-heard comment.

When I think of Michelle’s writing, it’s impossible not to press play on a highlight reel of indelible images from her four brilliant books: a florist’s loft in Downtown Los Angeles filled with a meticulously woven vine of sweat peas primed for installation; a Lucha Libre fighter using chocolate ganache as prop feces during a show at the Mayan Theater; a bull terrier sitting in sloshing bathwater, an idiot grin across his long snout; a woman ironing linen napkins for a dinner party and thinking how lovely, how fanciful it is for each of her guests to “kiss” her napkins as they wipe their lips.

To write sentences with such care, such fidelity. Michelle is the model.      

Miles Parnegg is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles.