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Articles by Laurie Sheck
Of Monsters and AI
1. A monster disrupts accepted systems of meaning. Unsettles certainties. Dismantles familiar definitions. Wounds and scars them. Brings into the world a sense of dread, excitement, crisis. It appears at the seams and boundaries of existing things: human/animal; sentient/machine; natural/artificial, and reveals those seams as fragile, provisional, ambiguous, porous. A monster lives at the tenuous border between chaos and order. Fractures and upsets coherence.
Walking in the City
1. In his 1980 essay Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes looking out at Manhattan from the 110 th floor of the World Trade Center. Viewed from above, the city is "a wave of verticals. Its agitation momentarily arrested...The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes." From that vantage point, the city lies still, unimpeded, its extremes of wealth and poverty coinciding in the vast landscape below.
Bakhtin's Freedom - 3 Quarks Daily
1. Always when I think of him, I picture him alone in a room, bedridden for months at a time. How from late childhood on, he suffered from osteomyelitis, an incurable infection of the bone that set flame to raw nerve fibers, induced recurring fevers, skin lesions, intense, crippling pain. And how in that enforced solitude he wrote about the ways the self is not isolate but comes into being through contact with others. How this is its beauty and its freedom.
Some Notes on the Earth Seen From Space
Tilt of the Earth (1905) | Clement Lindley Wragge / Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira / No known copyright restrictions 1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful it looked, how vulnerable and unprotected.
This Monster, This Miracle: Some Notes on Illness
1. In her 1925 essay, On Being Ill, written when she was 42 years old, Virginia Woolf speaks of the spiritual change that illness often brings, how it can lead one into areas of extremity, wonder, isolation. "How astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undisclosed countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul...." The body is no longer a site of comfort and familiarity but "this monster...this miracle." Overwhelming, weird, intense, mysterious.
3 Quarks Daily
1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful it looked, how vulnerable and unprotected. As if emptied of political borders and human strife. As if we had never touched it after all. Unbuilt, unpolluted. Familiar and strange at the same time.
Eight Voices - 3 Quarks Daily
For the past couple of decades, I have been a member of the MFA Creative Writing faculty at the New School in New York City. Before that I taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia and CUNY. I have had many remarkable students, among them the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Junot Diaz who I met in my mid-20's when he walked into the undergrad creative writing class I was teaching at Rutgers and handed in, for his first assignment, an extraordinary short story which I remember to this day.
Remembering the South Bronx
1. In the summer of 1977 in New York City-summer of the famous city-wide blackout, its fires and looting-my parents stole a street sign. The sign marked the location of my father's housewares store which overnight had been turned into a hollow shell of blackened ash and charred brick. Looted and burned. The sign was a remembrance of a place they had loved. The store was in the South Bronx, which at that time was the highest crime district of NYC. 149 St. and Prospect Ave.
Revisiting The Monster - 3 Quarks Daily
1. It has been over 200 years since Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in the stormy summer of 1816. Although she was only eighteen, she had already lost one child just days after giving birth; her second child, William, was a few months old. By the time Frankenstein was published, in 1818, Mary had given birth to a third child, Clara Everina, who would live for a little more than a year.
The Ecosystems of W.S. Merwin
1. In the garden of the Maui home where the poet W.S. Merwin lived for the last forty years of his life, writing and translating poems, and restoring deforested land into a flourishing palm forest, there is a black stone marker engraved with his name and that of his wife, along with the four simple words "Here we were happy." It is a remarkable story. Merwin first came to the island in 1975 to study with the Buddhist teacher Robert Aitken.
Laika, the First Dog Sent Into Outer Space
1. Years ago, when my daughter was five, we spent a day at the Barcelona Zoo. As I held her small hand in mine, we stood before a cage in which a large albino gorilla resolutely turned his face from us. If we moved to the right, he turned his face to the left, if we edged toward the left, he shifted to the right. He was determined to have no eye contact with us, and at that moment I felt ashamed. My very presence, my gaze, was a kind of violation.
Diethylstilbestrol, A Particular Silence
1. In March 2023, Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish government, officially apologized for Scotland's policy from the 1940's to the 1970's of forcing tens of thousands of unmarried women to give up their newborns for adoption.
On the Dehumanizing Impact of Deportation and Our Obligations to Each Other
Worldlessness, wrote Hannah Arendt, is a “condition of one who shares no things, institutions, or systems of meaning with others.” It is the pained loss of a shared, common world, of mutual care and understanding; an outcome of political exclusion, statelessness, and the experience of being rendered superfluous. It is a state of radical isolation, of being shunned, despised, misunderstood, unseen.
The Monster Became My Companion
From Belli Corum Instrumentorum Liber Cum Figuris (ca. 1420–30) | Johannes de Fontana / Bavarian State Library / Public Domain Any book worth reading will refuse to be paraphrased. So it goes with Laurie Sheck’s new hybrid novel, Cyborg Fever (Tupelo Press, 2025).
Juggler
Translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim Swapping seven balls with his palm, and with air. Precision inhabits the gap between the ball’s trajectory and its anticipated pace at the brink of hesitation— the arc of descent. How does one grasp making sense of timing when to hurl and when to catch? Is it when one rehearses alone or when one rehearses being alone? Which one holds when there is no break from motion, and from emotion? They thought, he makes gravity.
White professor: My university investigated me for quoting James Baldwin's use of 'N-word'
Laurie Sheck , Opinion contributor Published 5:00 a.m. ET Aug. 21, 2019 Universities must be preserved as places of active, even volatile, thinking — where ideas about which there is no consensus are welcomed and protected. Since the spring of 2016, I have taught a seminar in the New School’s MFA program on writing and literature as radical questioning.
Dostoyevsky’s Empathy
We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2016. Enjoy your holiday! A woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg for The Idiot, ca. 1940s. I A Few Facts He wore five-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press.
Reading Dostoyevsky For Thanksgiving - BillMoyers.com
This post first appeared at the Paris Review. I 1. He wore 5-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. 2. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press. 3.
Dostoyevsky's Empathy
A woodcut by Fritz Eichenberg for The Idiot, ca. 1940s. I A Few Facts He wore five-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press.
ISLAND OF THE MAD
A poetic meditation on Russian literature, bubonic plague, Venice, and the multiverse. And how might all that hang together, you ask? In Sheck’s second novel (A Monster’s Notes, 2009), tenuously, though its lyricism softens its digressive style.
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