Bear Stories

J'Lyn Chapman

36 pages

ISBN 978-0-9798080-3-6

[out of print]

[folded into Beastlife]

Additional imagery from, and the "making of Bear Stories" video can be found here.

J'Lyn Chapman grew up and currently lives in Colorado. She attends the graduate program at the University of Denver, studying text and image in the work of W.G. Sebald. Likewise, she is also writing a series of lyrical essays that include images of birds. Her work can be found in Sleepingfish, Fence, Thuggery & Grace, and Conjunctions.

Bear Stories is a series of investigations into the violences of erotic love, where violence is figured as a natural consequence of the body's vulnerability. These "stories" seek to describe, implore, and seduce their audience. But they are also the mind trying to come to terms with the paradoxes of desire, wherein the "domestic" habits of care of oneself and care of the other take on an unreal quality, constantly under threat from the natural world, just as the body is under threat, the mind is under threat, language is under threat. While the speaker enters the uncanny and haunted wilderness with the distance of a visitor, her desire and language swell into an embodiment of the "grid and viscera."

Introductory Excerpt:

We had not been here long before we realized that we enjoyed the stories of those who had been attacked by bears and lived to tell about it. One man molds a set of teeth from the bear he kills. A woman beats a rug out of a bear’s hide. There are weeds burning in a barrel and gun cracks caught in low clouds. These are the stories they built immunity to. The way things used to be: irretrievable. I buy a tinted postcard and write: Wild deer are not fenced here, living on the greenery of the forest.

Other pieces from Bear Stories have appeared in Fence, Sleepingfish and Thuggery & Grace.

Chapbook trailer of Bear Stories:

J'Lyn Chapman reading two excerpts from Bear Stories: