Negative Space
May 2021 · Santa Fe Writers Project
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About this ebook
Despite her parents' struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger's father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she'd created about her father—the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father's work to find the truth of who he really was.
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2 reviews
About the author
Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship and Negative Space, and editor of the anthology Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. She lives in New York City and teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College. She received a NYSCA/NYFA fellowship in nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
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