"You can make anything a form of self-immolation, that’s the funny thing
about being alive. Writing is a form of burning away things. It can be a
terrifyingly martyring process or a purifying process. Somebody famous
said this; I heard it through somebody else. I have no idea who said it
but it’s brilliant—Tolstoy, who knows—“A novel is a question that it
takes the whole book to answer.” That’s how I relate to novels. There
was a question in Zazen that I could not answer for the life of me and I think that I did almost answer it."
-- Vanessa Veselka, speaking in an interview for Guernica
Vanessa Veselka won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for her debut novel, a dystopian book called Zazen that was published through Red Lemonade, a membership-based alternative press. Community members of Red Lemonade vet and vote on manuscripts each year, determining those that make it to print. Zazen was also one of the five finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. Veselka grew up in Manhattan, where she was expelled from high school for truancy. She lived a peripatetic life that included playing music in bands and on street corners, marrying, divorcing, and having a daughter. Without a diploma, she went back to school at age 36 -- Reed College, with a full scholarship -- to study science and English. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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