Lonely Christopher

Lonely Christopher (born March 27, 1987) is an American writer of poetry, prose, and theatre.

He shares a birthday with poets Frank O'Hara and Dorothea Lasky.

Lonely Christopher attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He was accepted into the photography program in 2005 but transferred to the undergraduate creative writing program after the first semester of his freshman year. He lived in an apartment of poets and artists, known as the Gates Platform, in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was there he founded and co-organized a semimonthly open reading series, the Gates Salon, which for over three years became an important venue for emerging young poets and writers in New York City. Out of the salon developed The Corresponding Society, a small press that published three issues of a literary journal titled Correspondence and that continues to release poetry and prose chapbooks.

In 2007 Lonely Christopher co-founded the Institutionalized Theater with poet and playwright Robert Snyderman. His first play, Retardo, was staged that year (under his direction) at the Bowery Poetry Club. His first chapbook, a collection of prose poems titled Satan, was published by Small Anchor Press in 2007. Gregory Afinogenov writes of Christopher's early work that he “has always treated the gap between text and reality as a subject for irony rather than despair. His earliest compositions relied on playful authorial dissociation from the subject matter, experimenting freely with rhetorical and narrative postures of various kinds.”^[1]

In 2008 Lonely Christopher wrote the Gay Play trilogy. Gay Play 1 was staged under his direction at the Bowery Poetry Club and Gay Plays 1 and 2 were translated into Mandarin and staged in ChengDu, China under the direction of Jen Hyde, publisher of Small Anchor Press (which also published the first two Gay Plays in both English and bilingual editions). In 2009 The Corresponding Society published his poetry chapbook Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land? It was his most political work to date, using conceptual writing practices to explore gay identity. Novelist James Hannaham commented, “By eloquently rearranging the detritus of our national debate about gay rights, Lonely Christopher’s biting, anti-poetic poetry shows us the heights of pathos and the depths of foolishness around the issue, while delightfully mixing sexuality with textuality.”^[2]

Christopher won the Pratt Institute's creative writing thesis award for fiction in 2009 for his first novel, which remains unpublished. In 2010 he collaborated with the poets Christopher Sweeney and Robert Snyderman on the poetry collection Into, which was published by SevenCircle Press. That year he wrote and directed the play Endymion Dreams the Moon, staged at Brooklyn's Jalopy Theater. His play Pages from a Course in General Linguistics was commissioned by an arts organization and staged at a bar in Alphabet City under the direction of Teddy Nicholas of the Everywhere Theatre Group.^[3]

Dennis Cooper selected Christopher's first collection of short fiction, The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, for his Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books and it was published in 2011 to largely positive reviews. Brian Bauman wrote in Next Magazine, "Christopher’s brutal, beautiful prose marks one of the most promising debuts of queer short fiction in quite some time."^[4] A Publishers Weekly review noted, "With a lot of alternative fiction, one gets the feeling that the writer's rejection of traditional forms isn't earned; not so with this author."^[5] Not all reviewers shared in this praise, though; Lambda Literary's Michael Klein controversially^[6] wrote, "The worlds that Lonely Christopher makes in this, his debut collection, are all cages, at a time of the world when we really need more stories about people who are shamelessly free—helping people be alive, not letting them be dead."^[7] However, The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse was named in several year-end best-of lists including one published by Lambda Literary.^[8]

In 2011, Lonely Christopher announced on Facebook that he would be working with a new production company named Cavazos Films to direct his first feature film, titled MOM, which he also wrote. MOM went into production in November 2011. The film features underground stars Mink Stole, Janet Hubert, Michael Potts, and Paul Lazar. Its world premiere was held in June 2012 at the Distrital Film Festival in Mexico City.^[9]

Lonely Christopher cites Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and William Shakespeare as foundational influences. He has close working relationships and friendships most notably with poets Robert Snyderman, Ben Fama, and Richard Loranger. He considers the novelist Joshua Furst to be his mentor. In an essay on poetics, which was criticized by at least one source,^[10] Lonely Christopher stated: "Poetry is revenge. Poetry is guilty of the double homicide of its ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her new boyfriend, ontology" and "poetry is your dad crying when you tell him you’re gay."^[11]

References

External links

• Lonely Christopher's author page
• The Corresponding Society official website
• The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse at Akashic Books
• Interview with Lonely Christopher at Viceland
• MOM official website