Aug 9—Fog
Aug 9—Fog
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Kathryn Scanlan
Twenty years ago Kathryn Scanlan acquired a diary at a public estate auction. It was kept by Cora E. Lacy, an eighty-six-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town, from 1968 to 1972. Scanlan began to compulsively read and reread the stranger’s diary. In the years following she edited, arranged, and rearranged the diarists’ words into the composition that is Aug 9 – Fog.
In Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9 – Fog, a notebook deteriorates beneath a ‘big red sun’, emanating a succession of moments and scenes that ‘tingle’, ‘glimmer’, and fail. This is the drenched Diary, crumbling when opened, a collection of ‘loose scrap notes’. ‘To read the diary is to be dropped into a life’, writes Scanlan, magnetising sentences into loose, strangely tender shapes. Is a paragraph a kind of chrysalis? The fog is burning off. We read towards that. – Bhanu Kapil, author of How To Wash A Heart
…in this unusual, finely judged and wrought work, [Kathryn Scanlan] has created beautifully resonant lines of what amounts to prose poetry out of the found diaries of an elderly stranger and in doing so has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech. – Lydia Davis, author of Essays: One
