I first met Lucy Harrison at an artist residency fifteen years ago, when I still fashioned myself a poet, and, suffering from a newly broken heart, spent most of my month there memorizing the saddest poems I could bring myself to find in the residency’s extensive collection of very sad poems. Ultimately, this had the effect of convincing me I would never be quite a great poet, and by the time I left behind the New England mansion, I had also left behind poetry, or writing it, anyway. Lucy Harrison arrived at the mansion halfway through my own stay and immediately set herself apart, first, by bringing with her a full-sized suitcase entirely full of liquor bottles—gin, tequila, bourbon and rye, mostly—and second, by acting squirrelly and suspicious about the art she was there to engage in, offering a different answer each time she was asked. She told me she was there as a sculptor, then a few days later, a writer, and finally a performance artist. Another resident had been told she was an acrobat, another a clown who specialized in fire-eating, and someone else thought Lucy was a filmmaker. No one knew what to make of her, but ultimately we didn’t really care because she was a laugh, she liberally shared her booze, and she liked to dance. [ . . . ]
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