Marianne Shaneen
Selected Work
The Mason Jar
Fiction excerpt from Homing, a novel in progress
The Kenyon Review print issue Sept/Oct 2020
AUDIO LINK Kenyon Review Out Loud
Text and voice by Marianne Shaneen for essay film by Peggy Ahwesh
screened at New York Film Festival, Microscope Gallery,
and New Media Artspace at Baruch College
From Wanton Weevils to Amoral Algorithms
Essay commissioned by Henry Gallery for the film and installation Bugs and Beasts Before the Law
by Bambitchell
GODZILLA VS. THE PREHISTORIC BISON:
On Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Creative nonfiction, The Brooklyn Rail
Everywhere Possible, Therefore True
Limited edition book of texts in response to installation works for
solo exhibition by artist Miruna Dragan
Commissioned by Nickle Galleries, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Christine Wertheim's recently released book mUtter-bAbel is gorgeously hyperbolic, a primordial pataphysics of text and drawings that explores relationships between babies, mothers, language, and "ugly archaic feelings and their troubling social effects."
Essay on Christine Wertheim’s book mUtterbAbel,
and Margaret and Christine Wertheim's Institute for Figuring
and the Crochet Coral Reef
Bomb magazine
Ken Jacobs and the Sublime Horrors of Perception
Essay on multimedia artist Ken Jacobs’s Nervous System performances
for the book Monstrous Adaptations
Manchester University Press
Lucent Amnesis
Chapbook by Portable Press/Yo-Yo Labs
Inhabiting the Impossible
Essay on the work of Madeline Gins and Arakawa
Reversible Destiny Foundation and Bioscleave House
in INTERFACES special edition: Architecture Against Death
Shadows Mirror Shadows
Monograph essay for solo show Shadows Mirror Shadows
by artist Miruna Dragan
commissioned by G Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Commissioned text for publication accompanying movement piece
BLOOWST WINDKU by Rebecca Davis
Performed at Here, NYC
Homing
a novel in progress
Homing is a wildly ranging speculative fiction of animal-human-geological entanglement, grounded in an intimate portrait of a woman's unmoored relationship to her family history.
On a red-eye from New York to Los Angeles, unattached to family or place, Isabel engages the perspectives of various nonhuman entities—a house fly, a magpie, a stone, a tree, plastic. Zooming from micro to macro, through fable and hyperbole, she delves into strata of geology and memory, taking imaginative flights through American cultural mythology. As she realizes that everywhere home might be is becoming uninhabitable, personal trauma becomes increasingly entwined with ecological trauma.
The 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher proclaimed: All is bound in secret knots. Amidst eco-destruction and and military and corporate control of technology and our bodies, Isabel asks, Where does self end and other begin? She is characterized by her place in our contemporary moment—where the potential implications of our interconnectedness may be as destructive as they are liberating.
Marianne Shaneen writes fiction, essays, and poetry. She has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Djerassi, and the Tusen Takk Foundation, and is the recipient of a NYSCA Individual Artist grant, and a Whiting Writers’ Aid grant. She received her MFA in Writing from the Bard Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Manchester University Press, Vanitas, and elsewhere. She has been commissioned for numerous pieces for artists and filmmakers. Her chapbook Lucent Amnesis was published by Portable Press/Yo-Yo Labs. She is currently finishing her first novel, Homing.
About
News
August 2021
Residency at Tusen Takk Foundation
Reading, Boston Poetry Marathon
Reading, Shivastan, Woodstock, NY
July 2021
Commissioned text for performance with scenes from PHASE IV, the psychedelic 70s sci-fi insect film by Saul Bass. A Night of Neo-Benshi at Hudson Hall, Hudson, NY. Organized by the Flow Chart Foundation.
https://hudsonhall.org/event/a-night-of-neo-benshi/?fbcli
https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/
Sept/Oct 2020
Kenyon Review (print) "The Mason Jar"
Fall 2020
"From Wanton Weevils to Amoral Algorithms" — essay commissioned for publication to accompany the opening of Bugs and Beasts Before the Law, film and installation by Bambitchell (multimedia artists Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell), at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA
Aug 2020
Reading, Boston Poetry Marathon
April 2020
Residency at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, CA
Fall 2019
Text and voice by Marianne Shaneen for Kansas Atlas, essay film by Peggy Ahwesh: Screened at The New York Film Festival, Projections, Sept 2019; at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn as part of Ahwesh's solo show Cleave, May 2019; and as part of Unsettled States, Ahwesh solo exhibition at the New Media Artspace at Baruch College, New York, NY, Sept 2019
Nov 2019
Reading, St. Rocco’s Reading Series at Urban Aftermath Books, Albany, NY
Sept 2019
Reading, Subterranean Poetry Festival, Rosendale, NY
April 2019
Reading, Volume reading series, Hudson, NY
Dec 2018
Commissioned text for Barbara Ess video installation and photography solo show Lunatic(k),
3A Gallery, New York, NY
Oct 2018
Reading, The Poetry Project, New York, NY
Aug 2018
Reading, Howl Gallery, New York, NY
April/May 2018
Residency at The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH
Recipient of Whiting Writers’ Aid grant
March 2018
Shaneen's story "The Post Card" received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest March/April 2018
http://bit.ly/2018MarAprVSFhonorablemention
Nov 2017
Residency, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY
Oct 2016
Fiction reading, Whitney Museum NYC, as part of Bradley Eros' Black Hole Cinema film screening
Residencies & Grants
